TOWER Insurance has tried numerous approaches to selling household insurance to high-value members of the great New Zealand Survey, a purchased database of New Zealand shoppers. None of them had been successful. Yet TOWER’s Home and Contents Insurance offered market-leading cover for high-value items, so we had to come up with a novel way of demonstrating the benefits of this cover. Oh, and it HAD to be via email. Hmmm!

Unlike previous attempts, this one had to actually get them to open the email. That alone would be considered a success, such as the product’s market leadership.

Using segmentation, we targeted members with a greater propensity to own high-value items, luxury items and antiques than other sectors of the database. We then sent them an email. As with many emails, users were asked to download images to see the email in its entirety. With ours, however, when they downloaded the images, they discovered that one was still missing—a piece of stolen art. Users were then asked to contact TOWER about protecting their valuables.