The Gerber Life Grow-Up Plan is an insurance policy that parents can purchase for their children very inexpensively. The policy is whole life insurance that builds cash value as the child ages. At age 18, the child can take over the insurance policy, or cash it in. The primary target audience is lower income, mostly African American parents. Gerber Life had been using direct mail as an acquisition tool for many years and had been utilizing email marketing for the last two years with limited success.

SKM Group discovered through the use of social media monitoring tools that there was a lot of confusion in the market about life insurance for babies. Much of the chatter online was coming from financial consultants who were saying how bad an investment this insurance was. SKM’s recommendation was that we position the product as much more than an investment. Our assignment was to provide email creative that could outperform the current email control.

The SKM Group provided creative executions to test against the control email creative. We focused on the three great benefits of this product: 1) Life insurance that would help the parents if something unimaginable would happen to their baby 2) Life insurance that the child could own later in life or 3) cash value that they could use for college or other expenses. We also implemented email best practices in formatting for better interaction.

Our email creative has resulted in a higher click through rate (21.10% vs. 5.50% for the control) and higher application rate (5.37% vs. 3.85% for the control). This campaign has continued to beat the control email design throughout 2011.