Regal.io Helps Kin Insurance Improve Outbound Marketing

Kin Insurance is a direct-to-consumer insurance company focused on the $110 billion homeowners’ insurance market. Customers of the Chicago-based insurer receive a direct, frictionless experience through Kin’s technology platform, which uses thousands of data points to evaluate the risk profile of each home and price policies.

The insurer’s marketing relies heavily on outbound calling, which has become difficult because of the bad actors who have skirted existing technologies and regulations with heir phone scams using automated dialing equipment, according to Michael Sandow, the insurer’s senior director of revenue operations.

“There are a variety of services that enable you to register with telecom carriers as a legitimate business, which allows us to display our name and logo (for phones that support it), so someone knows that they are getting a call from an insurance company, not from some scam person from overseas. We wanted to improve the likelihood that they would answer the phone.”

If these were strictly cold calls, the chances of the consumer answering would be very low, but most of Kin’s calls are to current customers or prospects who have shown some interest in its products, according to Sandow. “They’re already working with an agent on our side, and we need to follow up to get documentation or to answer further questions that they might have. For existing customers, they might be coming up on renewal or they had a claim and we need to reach them about it.”

Kin had already started investigating a solution for this issue when Sandow joined the company in August 2021. Part of the problem was that at the time, no single solution would work with all of the major carriers. So the insurer started with three different companies to register as a legitimate business, but it wanted to consolidate that effort with a single provider.

Regal.io was the only company that could work with all three of the major telecom carriers, according to Sandow. The insurer found Regal.io’s solution in the fourth quarter of 2021 and started using it early in 2022. The contract included a 90-day opt-out period so that Kin Insurance could walk away from the agreement if the technology didn’t perform as expected.

“We signed, but we were still skeptical,” Sandow recalls.

However, the skepticism was gone at the end of the 90-day trial, Sandow says. “What we saw was pretty exciting.”

Kin and Sandow saw an 8 percent increase in active leads—leads that the company considers to be strong enough to assign to an agent; an 11 percent increase in signed contracts; and a 36 percent increase in engaged calls lasting at least 60 seconds, indicating a high level of interest from the prospect, even those who might not be in the market for a new policy at the moment but would consider Kin for one in the future, according to Sandow. “We were able to capture a higher share of people who were interested. Regal’s call branding solution allowed us to connect with more leads, have more meaningful conversations with those leads, and ultimately convert more leads into paying customers.”

Sandow adds that the rules for outbound telemarketing continue to evolve as regulators try to stem the tide of illegal robocalls, which reports put at more than 4 billion per month. Regal.io is helping Kin stay on top of those changes to ensure it can continue to improve its active outbound calling effort while complying with the evolving rules.

The Payoff

Since adding Regal.io's call branding solution, Kin Insurance has enjoyed the following results:

• an 8 percent increase in active leads;
• a 36 percent lift in engaged call rates; and
• an 11 percent increase in signed contracts.