About Simply Business
Simply Business is one of the UK’s biggest business insurance providers, specializing in public liability insurance for SMEs and insuring over 900,000 small businesses and landlords across the UK.
Launched in 2005, Simply Business provides an online brokerage service, delivering policies tailored to individual business requirements. Using the power of tech and data to create the best possible customer experiences, Simply Business employs over 1,000 people across offices in London and Northampton UK, Boston, Massachusetts and Atlanta, Georgia in the US.
Owing to its internal underwriting capability and expert panel of insurers, Simply Business can cover over 1,200 trade types – ranging from plumbers to accountants to dog walkers.
An accredited B Corp for their positive social impact, Simply Business has also been voted the Sunday Times Best Company To Work For twice in a row.
Challenges
Simply Business knows that selecting a business insurance plan can be a daunting task for small business owners, who typically wear several hats and manage countless competing priorities on any given day. To streamline the insurer vetting process and attract different types of small business owners from across industries, Simply Business offers a digital brokerage service that provides fast, flexible coverage. Both prospective and existing Simply Business customers gain access to a robust knowledge base full of materials that demystify the insurance selection process. This knowledge base also houses popular business administrative materials – such as templates, guides, and assessments – that business owners use to optimize existing protocols.
Because thousands of existing and prospective buyers visit the Simply Business site each week, effectively improving visitor-to-buyer conversion rates necessitates having access to unified, actionable first-party data and the ability to orchestrate cross-channel touch points to engage site visitors in meaningful ways.
Solutions
Drive Identifiable MQLs with Lifecycle Marketing
Simply Business has long published valuable content on its website for customers and prospects, but wanted to improve their power in engaging those who read the content. Because of this reader-identification gap, Simply Business turned to BlueConic to collect and consolidate consented first-party data into unified profiles that drive Lifecycle marketing efforts.
To aid in lead generation, Simply Business established content meters that request a piece of visitor information – e.g., an email address – in exchange for access to read knowledge base content.
BlueConic Dialogues play a critical role in content gating and prospect identification: “We were initially using another tool to capture prospect emails across our knowledge base, which drives tons of organic traffic,” said Tyler Sox, Digital Marketing Manager at Simply Business, “but due to the tool’s limitations and lack of flexibility around how it could be used, we decided to test out BlueConic Dialogues.”
The marketing team at Simply Business worked to set up a range of Dialogues, activate Listeners, capture visitor events (e.g., scroll depth), and perform A/B testing, all while tracking overall efforts in a customized dashboard inside Insights within the BlueConic platform.
“When we set up the content gate to appear across our knowledge base articles, which are incredibly useful to small business owners and the source of volumes of organic search traffic, it was a big win… we had all the BlueConic filtering set up so that when somebody completed a form before or had already supplied their details, they wouldn’t see the gate again and content would be readily available to them. This made the journey simple and engaging to those already visiting the site."
Simply Business’s initial content gating efforts resulted in a 199% increase in conversion rates. When comparing conversion rates, the control group, which used native forms, experienced a conversion rate of 2.43%, while testing showed BlueConic forms converted at a rate of 7.26%.
“I've now written ‘how to' guides with step-by-step instructions and screenshots, so that anyone on my team, even someone who is a copywriter and doesn't necessarily have the skills required to do this, is able to set up Dialogues. We’ve also set up a system to make the content gate semi-autonomous for when new articles are written for our blog.
For us, the next step is to enrich the MQLs we capture through collecting additional data points. These efforts will allow us to better tailor communications with potential customers and use BlueConic to tailor experiences by serving up personalized content and Dialogues based on the collected data. This means that we can offer effective, useful content to SMEs and self-employed people, who we know are highly engaged with our Knowledge Center."
Digital Marketing Manager, Simply BusinessResults
Since implementing BlueConic, Simply Business has increased lead generation efforts. Simply Business saw a nearly 200% increase in lead-capture conversion rate within their blog, capturing in excess of 55K marketing-qualified leads (MQLs) in fewer than 6 months.
Additionally, the added flexibility that BlueConic forms offer has allowed Simply Business to capture additional data sets to further enrich MQL profiles with information such as insurance switch date, phone number, employee number and turnover – thus, improving the overall quality of MQL data collected.
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