Bupa Case Study

Bupa is a diverse health and care company committed to a purpose of longer, healthier, happier lives. An international health and care group, it supports 32 million customers in 190 countries and employs 84,000 people.

In Australia and New Zealand, Bupa is an increasingly diverse health and care company, supporting more than 4.7 million customers. It operates dental clinics, aged care homes, retirement villages, optical stores, GP clinics, rehabilitation centres, wellness and medical visa services.

Recently Bupa extended its insurance offering beyond comprehensive health and medical coverage to provide travel, pet, car, home and life insurance.

With a constant focus on delivering better customer experience and profitable growth, the Bupa team identified the need for a sophisticated, insights-led optimisation program for its digital assets.

Although Bupa already had an understanding of the way customers used its website, it sought a partner with the expertise to help improve the way that it communicated with its customers online and ultimately aim to improve both desktop and mobile conversion rates.

After a tender process, Bupa selected Webtrends Optimize as one of its optimisation partners.

“We chose Webtrends Optimize for its proven track record in helping companies improve the effectiveness of their digital assets,” said David Hirsch, Head of Financial Services at Bupa.

“But we needed more than a standalone product. The Webtrends team of optimisation consultants offered a strong partnership approach with the expertise and commitment to help to achieve our goals.”

Leveraging the capabilities of Optimize, the combined team worked on an in-depth analysis of both historical and current customer behaviour across all of Bupa’s digital platforms.

From this analysis, they identified that travel and pet insurance conversion rates were falling short of expectations and prioritised these categories as the focus of the initial testing programme.

During the initial phase of the testing programme, progress was rapid and successful. A key travel insurance multivariate test experimented with a combination of page and pricing table layouts and achieved a significant 17.5 percent lift in confirmed policy sales.

The team also tested an improved policy summary page designed specifically for mobile devices that generated a lift of more than 21 percent in mobile conversion rates for their customers.

“We are building a more in-depth understanding, on where customers drop out of the purchasing process and are struggling without sales pathway. We value the extensive experience of the Webtrends Optimize team, which enables us to identify and design subsequent tests for future customer journeys through the pet and travel insurance funnels, and also to refine the test schedule for the longer term.” said Hirsch.

Building on the positive start to the testing programme, Bupa and Webtrends Optimize are now working on additional MVT and AB tests that will combine Optimize and analytics data in order to explore and maximise user engagement and utility. The team also has plans to identify, design and run its own independent self-serve tests to execute simpler optimisation initiatives.

Going forward, Bupa will continue to work closely with the Webtrends Optimize team on more complex optimisation and website personalisation projects while its internal team will manage the more straightforward tests on its own.