Unum

Business challenge

Unum wanted to provide customers with preenrollment education to drive overall enrollment and sought an innovative way to communicate that was not labor-intensive, but lacked the necessary IT resources.

Transformation

When Unum reached out to IBM for a recommendation on how to best communicate pre-enrollment education to its customers, IBM recommended its Landing Pages product.

Results

Business challenge story

The Challenge

Unum has been a longtime user of IBM Watson Campaign Automation for its email communications, which include newsletters and promotional messages. Until recently, recipients have been brokers who sell Unum’s benefits/services and companies that buy these benefits/services but now includes employees of these companies who use the services.

“We are sending emails to a high volume of recipients, and IBM Watson Campaign Automation has been able to scale with our business over the years,” said Richard White, electronic marketing and communications manager, Unum. “We are a small marketing team, but IBM Watson Campaign Automation enables us to execute at a high level and allows us to look like a much bigger operation.”

Communicating enrollment to customers is crucial to Unum’s bottom line. And a vital part of the enrollment process is pre-enrollment education, which serves a dual purpose for both Unum and its customers. Customers receive valuable information about their benefits and upcoming deadlines for enrollment, while Unum is able to proactively communicate with customers and drive enrollment for its products.

“Pre-enrollment is a key component of the sales process for Unum,” said Rob Howell, director of electronic marketing, Unum. “Our challenge was to determine how to best provide company-specific enrollment information to our customers in a replicable way without using IT resources or incurring additional expense.”

Transformation story

The Solution

When Unum reached out to IBM for a recommendation on how to best communicate pre-enrollment education to its customers, IBM was quick to recommend its Landing Pages product. As an early adopter of IBM products, Unum had been using the IBM Watson Campaign Automation Engage Landing Pages module since the product’s introduction in mid-2007 to build microsites for individual articles linked from all of its newsletters. The benefit for Unum is that the landing pages host the bulk of the newsletter article content, including other mediums such as videos and podcasts, which allows the emailed newsletter layout to be much more streamlined and easy to replicate for future mailings. In some cases, Landing Pages are used as a standalone campaign where the landing page url is sent to its clients to distribute to their employees via internal email.

Since Unum was already a power user of the IBM Watson Campaign Automation Engage Landing Pages product, designing and executing the pre-enrollment educational landing page campaign took relatively little time and did not require any additional marketing or IT resources. These cobranded landing pages are an integral part of Unum’s pre-enrollment communications strategy campaign—in which a series of three emails are sent communicating the start of enrollment, reminding customers of the enrollment deadline, and communicating the cutoff period—which features links to landing pages in every message. On each landing page, Unum provides its customers with clear calls to action to enroll via multiple channels (phone, online, or by setting up a one-to-one meeting with a benefits counselor).

“Each Landing Page mimics the look and feel of the Unum Web site while still being personalized with company-specific information and the company logo,” said Natalie Roberson, electronic marketing consultant, Unum. “By setting it up this way, we are able to easily replicate the landing pages and scale to growing demand.”

Results story

The Results

Today, Unum is managing dozens of co-branded landing pages on behalf of its customers to help educate their employees about enrollment benefits and deadlines. The IBM Watson Campaign Automation Landing Pages product has enabled Unum to achieve this goal without additional marketing or IT resources. Moving forward, Unum will have an easily replicable way to create co-branded landing pages that help drive enrollment for its product and enable the enrollment process.

For Unum, another benefit of creating landing pages for its customers through IBM Watson Campaign Automation is the ability to provide metrics that show Unum’s added value to its customers—a key competitive differentiator for the company. “Our customers are highly appreciative that we are able to provide a service directly to their employees,” White said. “Using IBM Watson Campaign Automation Landing Pages, I get the flexibility I need to create customized messages promptly and with zero IT involvement. And best of all, we’re seeing click-through rates that are three times higher than average.”

IBM Watson Campaign Automation powers the delivery of exceptional experiences for customers across the buyer journey by leveraging customer data and behaviors, providing analytical insights and automating relevant cross-channel interactions. The cloud-based digital marketing platform provides email marketing, lead management and mobile engagement functionality to inform and drive personalized interactions in real time.
 

Unum

A Fortune 500 company, Unum is a market leader in disability, group life, long-term care and voluntary benefits for more than 100,000 companies and 25 million people. It offers a full array of benefits solutions—including education, enrollment services and cutting-edge claim support—to meet the needs of both employers and their workers.
 

Take the next step

To learn more about IBM Watson Campaign Automation, please contact your IBM representative or IBM Business Partner, or visit the following website: ibm.com/watson/marketing-automation.

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