Challenge:
GMS is a health and travel insurance company based in Saskatchewan that provides coverage for medical services that are not covered by public healthcare. In 2016, GMS approached us to help them move to a digital-first strategy to grow direct-to-consumer (non-broker) sales. They were also looking to expand their customer base beyond Saskatchewan and into other provinces across Canada.
Strategy:
Over the four years to date, Vovia have helped evolve GMS’ overall marketing strategy to identify and translate demand into sales. Prior to 2016, GMS’ media mix was heavily weighted towards offline channels in its home province, Saskatchewan. The first step was to shift more investment to higher converting online channels and developing more niche online creative customized by product and audience type. Shifting to online channels also provided the opportunity to efficiently expand to other geographies.
We also set up full-funnel tracking on the website so to understand online purchase behaviour. Unfortunately, e-commerce tracking was not available, but we were able to develop a weighted revenue model that differentiates the value of leads for each product. This new tracking and measurement system allowed us to identify opportunities in geographies that were previously avoided due to the perceived cost; when in reality, they drove more weighted revenue per dollar spent. It also allowed us to test and gain insight on which creative approach had the greatest impact on customer engagement.
Revenue data sharing from the client has allowed us to further refine our strategies monthly. Over the past four years working together, we have also understood the competitive landscape and effectively projected the media spend needed on conversion channels in order to increase sales.
Result:
In 2017, our campaigns grew total sales by 12% with a similar budget to what the previous agency had spent in the year prior. We were able to build on this in the following year, growing sales by an additional 7%, with a lot of this growth stemming from new markets. In the following year, we layered on website optimization and analytics insight which drove an additional 13% in sales growth. The end result is a 35% increase in total annual revenue, in just three years.
