Conseco Insures Agent Success By Connecting Exact Target To 5Buckets

January 14, 2009
Written by
Published in DemandGen Reports

Integration is a critical concern at every level for Indianapolis, IN-based Conseco. As a leading provider of supplemental health insurance, life insurance and annuities for Middle Americans, Conseco has to seamlessly connect vendors, technologies, and communication methods in order to succeed. Integrating communications each day for hundreds of individual insurance agents through print, email and phone calls proved to be one of its biggest challenges and also one of its biggest successes.

In order to move agents along the relationship continuum towards advocacy, Conseco recently launched an engagement program and deployed a behavior-based marketing automation program to help manage the delivery and measurement. The agent engagement program is designed to assist the sales team in improving an appointed agent’s production with an overall goal to keep agents engaged, educated and incentivized to strengthen their relationship with Conseco.

Because Conseco uses an array of technologies to support its overall marketing efforts, it was imperative the solutions integrate seamlessly. Conseco uses Salesforce.com as its centralized database of record and ExactTarget for its email marketing platform. When it came time to add marketing automation functionality, Conseco chose Right On Interactive’s 5Buckets solution. 5Buckets extends the capabilities of ExactTarget for AppExchange by providing a marketer-friendly user interface designed to easily automate email campaigns.

5Buckets was able to connect Conseco’s existing marketing platforms so the agent data within Salesforce.com had the ability to personalize ExactTarget emails to agents on a weekly schedule. 5Buckets also automated fulfillment of Conseco’s “Welcome Kits” with its distribution center.

Right On Interactive is a preferred agency partner of ExactTarget and provides enhanced email marketing services and support to ExactTarget clients and their own. The 5Buckets integration allows clients who use ExactTarget to tap into multiple data sources to segment their audiences for a wide variety of communications, which optimizes relationship building. Because of its ease of use and straightforward implementation, Conseco is now planning to add more data sources and marketing devices to the mix—including survey and Web analytics data.

“With 5Buckets, we can easily schedule and deliver a series of actions or events, such as sending ExactTarget emails, printing and mailing direct mail pieces, or creating tasks for sales-team member follow-up,” says Stephanie Jenkins, Senior Director, Marketing Communications for Conseco.

Conseco’s marketing team is no longer limited to manual marketing campaigns, and is able to spend time planning and testing to create more relevant communications. At the end of Q2 2008, Conseco was up 17% over 2007 in the number of new producing agents for its supplemental health business (its most profitable line). Conseco is able to link all of its marketing tactics together, which results in substantial time savings, increased efficiencies and improved agent communications follow-through.

“5Buckets has allowed us to combine both online and off-line communications to agents during the ‘on-boarding’ process,” says Jenkins. “We have become more efficient with internal resources and have increase agent engagement during this critical period of time,”