Audience Priming & Lead Nurturing Through Chatbots Qorus-NTT DATA Innovation in Insurance Awards 2025

Insurance products are often very complex and require explanation. This posed a challenge, particularly in upper- and mid-funnel marketing on digital channels like social media, where attention spans are short. Historically, this led to high bounce rates and low-quality leads from social campaigns on our local website, as users were often unprepared for what to expect after clicking an ad. We, Digital Marketing & Automation in Zurich's business unit Switzerland, aimed to change that with an updated customer experience.

For this project, we identified two major areas that users typically perceive as complex: 1. Provision and Retirement Products: These products are inherently complex and require additional explanation. 2. Zurich MyWay Car Insurance: MyWay is an innovative car insurance where customers pay by kilometres driven, requiring an adapter installation in their car - yet this often caused confusion.

Together with our colleagues in local Underwriting we teamed up with Zurich’s Global Innovation team and their external partner, LoyJoy. As a winner of Zurich’s annual Innovation Championship, LoyJoy provided an easy-to-use chatbot solution suitable for our challenge: explaining our products to users before they click through to the website. This aimed to ensure higher quality visitors, reduce bounce rates, improve lead quality, and support future demand generation. The chatbot would sit between the social media ad and the landing page on zurich.ch, priming the audience for our products/services.

The idea was to engage users in a conversation about our products through a series of playful questions, allowing them to decide if the products were right for them. Only at the end of this conversation would we present them with a call-to-action leading to our website.

Following the two identified business areas, we adopted a two-step approach to align with them: 1. Retirement and Provision Campaign (Autumn 2024): We added a special paid campaign layer on social media platforms to direct users to the LoyJoy chatbot. 2. Zurich MyWay Car Insurance: Based on insights from step 1, we designed a more elaborate customer journey with LoyJoy. The goal was not only to explain the product but also to attract a younger audience, which had been a challenge in the past. This was also supported by a paid social media campaign driving clicks to the chatbot.

For both campaigns, our Brand Management & Content team created all assets in-house. Since ad creatives contribute to between 50% and 70% of the success of a digital campaign, having the right assets was imperative for our project. LoyJoy’s easy-to-use platform, along with the support from our colleagues at Zurich’s group office for internal approvals and media funding, reduced our go-to-market time to just a few days, especially for the second step. For the insurance sector, which traditionally moves at much slower paces this was groundbreaking.

Beyond halving the bounce rate for traffic from social media ads on zurich.ch, the project successfully marketed Zurich MyWay to a younger audience, resulting in a measurable uplift in sales compared to the previous year during the campaign period.