Swinton Insurance merges 6 sites into one

Swinton Insurance is a UK insurance provider with over fifty years’ experience in the financial space. Having developed a strong market presence offering car, home and commercial insurance on the high street, Swinton has evolved its digital presence within the online insurance marketplace.

Given the complexities of regulation involved in the financial sector, building an effective online presence is no easy feat. As a result, Swinton had developed a disjointed brand platform, spread across six individual websites based on service offering. To address this, Swinton decided to simplify its approach, pulling together all aspects of the brand into a single, transparent space – Swinton.co.uk.

At the heart of this digital transformation project was a commitment to develop genuinely useful reactive content, including advice to warn customers of potential adverse weather conditions that could impact their insurance. This content would also be used to help guide customers through the insurance buying cycle. In supporting this task, the Episerver Digital Experience platform was chosen to manage Swinton’s new, agile approach and to meet the demands of its mobile audience.

The Objectives

• Make reactive digital content an essential part of Swinton’s wider content marketing strategy
• Create a single web presence that supports customers on the go
• Increase traffic to the Swinton website and keep them on-site for longer
• Build relevancy for product-related pages in search engine results

The Solution

Having expanded its digital presence over the last ten years, Swinton was faced with a disjointed brand platform spread across multiple websites. As part of a wider rebranding and transformation project, these six websites were merged together to form Swinton.co.uk – a reactive, mobile-responsive content hub based on Episerver CMS.

Launched in March 2014, the project took a content-led strategy, designed to differentiate Swinton within the crowded insurance space. By integrating a wide variety of external data sources, Swinton developed a highly responsive platform for every user.

This solution combines real-time data from the World Weather Online API, as well as keyword monitoring and social listening tools across relevant hashtags on both Facebook and Twitter.

Based on this information, Swinton’s digital content team can develop videos, infographics and reactive guides to help customers protect themselves, their websites and their homes in the event of wet, icy and stormy weather conditions. For example, the website can warn and assist customers one to two days before a significant or costly weather event helping customers avoid hazardous driving conditions and flood risks.

Through Optimizely Content Management System, this responsive content can be launched in real time for customers to browse and use while on the move. The sharable content generated is then used to provide additional social media collateral, based on geo-targeted tweets and Facebook posts. 

Some tweets as examples:

https://twitter.com/SwintonGroup/status/735070160466350080

https://twitter.com/SwintonGroup/status/711899831271346177

Explaining this approach, Adam Moran, Senior Marketing Manager – Digital of Swinton, said, “We learn from data in surveys, social listening and the search terms used to determine the kind of content our customers are looking for. Then we look to be critical about whether the content we create suits a real need or purpose.”

Current content on the site includes everything from infographics explaining the difference in cost between diesel and petrol, right through to videos telling customers how to weatherproof their homes.

The Results

The six Swinton websites were successfully merged together into a single, responsive site, running on Optimizely Content Management System. This central platform is now host to both proactive and reactive content, including personal accident advice, driver and buyer guides and embeddable infographics. The site also hosts Swinton TV, a series of “How To” YouTube videos produced to help customers get the most from their existing insurance policies.

Using the integrated World Weather API, the new website has so far made use of over four million weather warning and reports, providing relevant and timely information to customers. Combined with Optimizely’s easy to update CMS, Swinton has been able to flag weather warnings, develop instant help guides and launch them on the website in as little as five hours - significantly quicker than the original target of one to two days.

Social media integration also allows this content to be shared beyond the Swinton site, using geo-targeted twitter campaigns to alert those in potentially hazardous areas.

 In addition to this content-led approach, the new website continues to provide customers with the practical user interface and account management tools that have come to define Swinton’s digital service approach.