In this study, we analysed the top 25 Swiss insurance companies.

We focused on their marketing technology stacks. In essence, what technologies are these companies using for their website, mobile application, analytics, marketing automation and more?

How do they leverage these technologies to build an appealing customer experience and engage with their clients?

The top Swiss insurers are Zurich Financial Services, Swiss Re, Swiss Life, Helvetia Insurance, Axa Group, Bâloise, Helsana, CSS, Groupe Mutuel, Suva and 15 others. 

What is a Marketing Technology Stack? 

To simplify things, we didn’t analyse every single marketing tool used by Swiss insurance companies. 

We focused on the main elements of their marketing stack, which include:

• The website and content management system as the baseline for customer experience and content
• Analytics to collect data about website visitor’s behaviours, as well as personalisation engines to personalise the user experience
• The marketing automation solution chosen to connect and engage with customers via email or other channels
• The mobile app offering services directly via smartphone
• The chatbot to engage in a conversational way

Now, let’s dive into the details of the marketing technology landscape of Swiss insurers.

Adobe Experience Manager is the leading CMS for Swiss Insurers

Adobe Experience Manager (AEM) is the most used Content Management System by Swiss insurers. Adobe’s CMS is the leading solution for content management systems and customer experience. 

Ranking first for several years of the Gartner Magic Quadrant and The Forrester Wave, it makes sense to see Adobe’s CMS flagship widely used by large enterprises. 

Of course, we, as a Swiss Adobe and AEM partner, are a bit biased at One Inside, but the market proves that it’s one of the best digital experience platforms.

AEM is used by 50% of the Top 10 Swiss Insurers and overall 36% in the top 25. Sitecore is also present. The .NET CMS is one of the top three solutions of the CMS segment and is often a choice for large enterprises. 

Magnolia CMS is the little one of the trio with good market share. Magnolia is a Swiss-made CMS and has an important footprint in its home country. AEM actually also has Swiss roots (if you remember the days of CQ).

In a February 2021 EY survey, that interviewed the IT leadership from more than 70 European Insurers, the result was that insurers have a bold ambition to move to cloud solutions.

The survey says: “most insurers aim to move at least 80% of their business to the cloud in the coming years to meet the primary objectives of increased agility and digital transformation.“

We could argue that this trend is valid for Swiss insurers, and that the challenges they face are similar to other European companies: agility and time to market.

What does this mean for their choice of content management system?

At the core of the customer experience, lies the CMS. New cloud CMS solutions offer all the benefits insurance companies are looking for: cost optimisation and more agility with a speed of execution.

In the upcoming years, insurance companies might adopt such a solution and give up their on-premise solutions. They will get the benefits of delivering new customer experiences and releasing new offerings faster.

The current CMS landscape will evolve in the next 3 to 5 years, and insurance companies might then use native cloud CMS more commonly. 

Adobe and its AEM Cloud Service already has an excellent chance to gain market share. Indeed, its CMS is, for the moment, one of the only cloud-native Enterprise-CMS on the market.

Sitecore and Magnolia are technically speaking behind and offer a “cloud” CMS closer to managed cloud hosting or PaaS than an actual SaaS model, such as Adobe does. New players might enter the market, such as Headless CMS vendors.

Analytics and Personalisation: Google vs Adobe

Google Analytics is the leading analytics solution and is used by two-thirds of the 25 top Swiss insurers. The only contender is Adobe Analytics. 

Adobe Analytics is used by half of the top ten insurers. It is often used together with AEM and other solutions of the Adobe Experience Cloud, such as Adobe Target, for personalisation purposes.

Both analytics solutions answer the needs of enterprises. While Google Analytics might be more straightforward to set up, Adobe Analytics offers more web analytics features.

Analytics and personalisation often come in pairs but don’t always come together. While 100% of the companies use analytics solutions, not all of them use them together with a personalisation solution.

A personalisation solution can adapt the user experience based on behavioural information and helps the marketing team run A/B Tests.

Only ten of 25 Swiss insurers are using a personalisation solution. The leading vendors are Google, with Google Optimize 360, and Adobe, with Adobe Target. 

Both products offer a set of similar features with A/B testing and personalisation. 

Optimize 360 is natively integrated with Analytics 360, so you can use Analytics 360 reporting to understand where to improve your site quickly. 

Adobe Target offers a native connection with Adobe Analytics, Adobe Experience Manager and other Adobe Experience Cloud solutions. The native integration with the CMS offers great opportunities, such as adapting the display of web components based on behavioural rules or even based on complex evaluation by AI.

For instance, the Swiss insurance company CSS offers a personalised experience by leveraging Adobe Experience Manager with Target. 

While browsing the website and visiting different offerings and insurance products, the visitor will see teasers and other web elements aligned with his centre of interest. Find more information about the CSS project here.

A fragmented Marketing Automation landscape

For the marketing automation part, we focused mainly on lead generation and nurturing aspects via email.

Identifying the marketing automation solutions and email providers used by the 25 top swiss insurers was not the most straightforward task. Indeed, this information is not always publicly available. 

From the information we gathered, we noticed that the technology landscape of marketing automation is fragmented.

No vendor is leading in this segment, and various software vendors are used, such as Salesforces, Adobe Campaign, Sendinblue, Emarsys, Campaign Monitor, XMPie, Mailjet and even Mailchimp.

It’s pretty surprising to find Mailchimp on the list 5 times total.

Why surprising?

Mailchimp is a marketing automation software targeting SMB and e-commerce websites, and the marketing automation features are less appropriate for large enterprises. But it seems that Mailchimp fulfils the needs of a few insurance companies anyway.

Use cases in regards to requirements are limited. The main lead capture tactics are executed through premium calculators or newsletter subscriptions. We believe the first one drives the most leads. Also we noticed that the nurturing campaign is not so advanced, at least for the ones we tested.

Few marketing automation success stories are publicly available.

Suva, the Swiss National Accident Insurance Fund, uses XMPie for its email campaigns and achieving a 127% increase in signatories to the Suva Safety Charter, from 1,500 to 3,414 companies thanks to an omnichannel onboarding mixing email and print document (Source).

Chatbot, an under-exploited channel

As we already noticed with the use of Marketing Automation software, chatbot solutions are also not very present on the public websites of Swiss insurance companies.

Chatbots offer similar benefits as Marketing Automation software. They are an excellent tool to capture lead information and engage with the client in the channel of their choice, if done right.

On top of this, chatbots get the advantage of offering immediate answers to clients while collecting great insights to the company about the questions and concerns of their audience. 

Of the 25 companies from the study, 15 don’t offer any chatbot on their public website.

For the ten companies with a chatbot, again, the solutions are disparate. Some offer Whatsapp or Facebook bots; others offer simple rule-based chatbots. Very few companies fully embrace the conversation channel and offer advanced AI chatbots.

At One Inside, we had the chance to collaborate with CSS and build a fully integrated AI chatbot.

Firstly, the chatbot is seamlessly integrated into the layout of the website and offers an outstanding user interface. Secondly, the chatbot is completely integrated into the Adobe Experience Manager CMS. 

Integration in AEM allows marketing teams to manage chatbot questions and answers directly from the same back-end they are used to administering their web content: It facilitates the reuse of web content. Plus, the chatbot is intelligent and learns over time.

The below video explains the AEM Chatbot Module.

It’s hard to explain why Swiss insurers are reluctant to deploy AI Chatbots.

To compare with the US market, ​​according to a 2019 LexisNexis survey, more than 80% of large U.S. insurers have fully deployed AI solutions in place, including the research and development of chatbots – and this was two years ago.

It could be that the priority has shifted to other areas of the marketing stack, or that chatbot projects for enterprises are still hard to execute.

Mobile App, the customer portal in your pocket

84% of Swiss insurers offer a mobile app for iOS and Android smartphones. The few companies that didn’t invest in a mobile application are the ones that don’t have a customer portal. 

Indeed, the primary mobile application use case for insurers is to offer access to all customer information directly from a smartphone. The mobile app is an extension of the customer portal. 

Some insurers, such as Visana, found innovative use cases with their mobile application to increase customer engagement.

The solution built by Visana is called myPoints, and it’s a bonus programme. By doing more physical activity every day, you get rewarded with up to CHF 120 per year. An excellent way to stay healthy.

A step toward digital maturity

From the single prism of marketing technology, we were already able to judge the digital maturity of Swiss insurance companies. 

The foundation of the customer experience is already in place, at least for the top Swiss insurers, and they make great use of their content management system to support their content strategy.

More improvement could be gained on automation, conversational channels, and artificial intelligence.

Especially in marketing automation, the maturity could be higher, for example, by introducing a modern solution, such as Adobe Journey Optimizer, the new cloud-based marketing automation solution from Adobe that is seamlessly integrated in Adobe’s real-time CDP. 

We assume that certain insurers are already working on such solutions, as they are aware that they always need to modernise their marketing stack.

To conclude, the leading insurer, Zurich, sets ambitious targets to meet customers’ needs. As mentioned in this media release, Zurich will continue “to further transform insurance, using technology to meet changing needs and create rewarding experiences“. 

We’re very excited about the results, and are curious to see if the other market contenders will follow suit.

Samuel Schmitt

Digital Solution Expert