Case Study

Manulife

Background

Country

Thailand

Service

Performance Marketing

Industry

Insurance

Platform

OBJECTIVE

How Elixus' bold move in Performance Marketing allowed Manulife Thailand to successfully and efficiently venture on a new platform, TikTok, far from the traditional marketing approach of insurances

ABOUT MANULIFE

Manulife is an international insurance breaking away from traditional insurance codes by tending towards an e-commerce system, different from traditional insurance brokers, thereby cutting intertmediaries and costs.

THE CHALLENGE

Our mission was to increase Manulife's brand awareness in Thailand wherer it is not well-known, while we faced several challenges going into the Covid-19 pandemic: - Manulife, like many other companies, banned the use of Facebook in Q2 2020 - Covid-19 travel insurances were made mandatories for any travelers coming to Thailand, therefore increasing the cost of insurance-related keywords on Google Search.

We had to find alternative channels since we couldn't use a social media channel with the ban of Facebook, Google was becoming more expensive and ineffective, other channels couldn't get them the results wanted. Therefore, in the same spirit of breaking industry norms, we explored TikTok as a new advertising channel.

Our Strategy

1 Blue Ocean strategy

Use Tiktok as a disruptive and alternative channel proved efficient during the second month of the trial period. When Google's leads dropped by -33% while the CPL increased by +33%, the number of TikTok's leads remained stable on Tiktok and the CPL dropped by -46%.

2 A/B testing best combination of
carefully selected Targeting

A/B testing best combination
of carefully selected Targeting

Extensive audience A/B-testing to maximize the performance as much as possible while minimizing the CPL.

3 Full-funnel remarketing

Restructuring their marketing funnel to maximize the cost efficiency across their key business objectives & deferring levels of customer interest from top to lower funnel.

4 Data-driven optimization

Invite cost cap to play an important role in the account to control and also compress the cost, preventing it from rising up.

The Result

+

%

leads on TikTok than on Google

-

%

Cost per Purchase

THE WINNING APPROACH

Extensive A/B tests results Interests vs Retargeting

Despite a limited amount of creative resources, we managed to deliver extensive A/B testing on audiences for Manulife. by eliminating non-performing audiences, we managed to keep the cost per lead as low as possible even with short term campaigns.

We started by picking the interests audience based in personal care since our experts have done A/B testing on other audiences earlier during the kick-off and personal care was a top performer. And, for retargeting, we have delicately selected all the retargeting audiences based on the page where most of the audience dropped off to bring them back to finish the lead with the test based on lookback windows to see which lookback windows in converting leads.

A/B test result: Retargeting has performed better than the people who are interested in personal care in CPL, the CPL was 22.90% cheaper than the people who are interested in personal care, and in the volume of the leads, retargeting also has achieved 78.21% higher volume more than the people who are interested in personal care.

The campaign has generated +20% quality leads than Google in 2 trial months while we decrease the CPL until it got +100% cheaper than other paid social media channels and 2.4 times cheaper than Google. Moreover, the same budget has delivered 9.4x more views on TikTok than on Google.