How Toggle® speeds into new markets with connected data and tools

Leveraging both technical innovation and entrepreneurship, Toggle, a Farmers Company,  strives to offer best-in-class insurance products to its customers.

To create more direct relationships with its increasingly digital audience, the company saw an opportunity to tap into today’s modern consumer market with a new product.

Toggle® was created to support the growing renters marketplace. Using Twilio Segment, Toggle launched with a best-in-class technology stack to enable faster time-to-value and new consumer insights to drive more personalization. As a result, Toggle is able to: 

• Create new revenue streams and ship new products at impressive speed 

• Hit critical marketing KPIs more efficiently across channels

• Build more direct relationships with its end users

• Innovate faster to better serve the teams’ goals

Innovate faster to reach new markets

Consumers today want more control and flexibility and expect a more personalized experience. The Insurance industry is looking for ways to adapt to modern consumers and faster innovation. 

It’s more important than ever to evolve beyond past standards and stay relevant with shifting consumer expectations. However, this requires a shift in mindset. Stephanie Lloyd, Head of New Ventures at Farmers Insurance® and President of Toggle said, 

“From thought processes to job processes, it was important to hit the reset button and ask how my team and I could make the biggest impact possible. Eventually, we realized that we had to allow ourselves to shift from the confidence born of best practices toward the uncertainty and potential of, ‘Let's test and learn.’ So, I set out to take stock of what I've learned in the process.”

The mission behind Toggle is to truly understand and best solve for the needs of modern consumers, who value simple, flexible and digital-first experiences. Toggle’s research indicated  that almost 60 percent of renters did not have renters insurance. Different from the core business model, Toggle designed a simple and flexible digital insurance subscription service, which empowers consumers with the resources to help them protect their lifestyles.

Toggle created a modern technology stack with Twilio Segment as its data foundation 

Toggle offers straightforward and customizable insurance products meant for the needs of today’s modern consumer. They offer renters insurance, car insurance, and even Side Hustle® insurance and Identity Protection insurance.

Toggle has been able to grow its business with a built-in, end-to-end full service digital insurance stack automation structure, advanced tech solutions and sophisticated marketing ecosystem, which are all key to helping enhance the customer experience and provide consumers the coverage options they want, when they want them.

With the launch of Toggle, the technology, engineering and marketing teams built a modern, future-proofed technology stack, with Twilio Segment Customer Data Platform at its core. Twilio Segment empowers the brand to move quickly and iterate, enabling a digital-first and personalized user experience. 

Segment Connections has helped Toggle’s ability to scale. From day one, the team had data flowing into Snowflake, its newly adopted data warehouse, to gain actionable customer insights. With Connections, the team easily connected all of their data sources and data destinations to collect customer data across every touchpoint, power their tools with the same customer data, and create a closed loop system for data flow. This includes their mobile, website, claims tool, payment tool, and customer support tool, as well as their marketing automation tool, analytics tool, and more.

Toggle then quickly turned on Segment Protocols for data governance to align the entire company around a standard data spec. The team can now integrate new tools in minutes and have all customer data connected and cleaned with a few clicks of a button – all without relying on engineering resources. Josh LaRoche, the director of research and marketing at Toggle,  describes Segment as an enabler in their success and ability to move fast:

“Segment is a facilitator. In fact, even when I look to start a relationship with a vendor, the first thing I do is check the Segment partner list. If the answer is yes, then I know I can move fast.”

Toggle delivered personalized cross-channel experiences to drive more direct relationships with customers

After implementing Segment, Toggle gained a fuller understanding of the end-to-end user journey. Leveraging Twilio Engage (formerly known as Personas), the team can help improve the user experience at every customer milestone, from acquisition, to onboarding, to the claims process, to customer support. Toggle can now create in-depth customer profiles and deliver personalized messages and campaigns without relying on technical resources — streamlining a process that once took weeks to implement. Todd Wright, Sr. Technologist at Toggle, describes the impact of delivering personalized experiences:

“With Segment, we’ve learned things about key moments in the customer lifecycle, and now we can communicate with people in that moment. Engaging with our customers in personalized ways has decreased the cost of acquisition, improved customer retention, and reduced the number of customer support tickets.”

For example, to acquire new customers, the team sends hyper-targeted audiences built with first-party customer knowledge from Segment to model lookalike groups in ad platforms like Facebook and Google to retarget users with tailored ads based on actions prospects have taken on the site. Similarly, once a user purchases a specific insurance product, the team leverages customer information to send tailored content, curated newsletters, and complementary insurance offers. The team also uses Segment as a primary component for opt-in/opt-out management. Todd explains:

“We can send emails and newsletters to different customer segments with curated content and offers that they are actually interested in, all based on the insurance they have already purchased. For instance, we send information about keeping pets healthy to our pet insurance customers,  and we can promote complementary insurance packages based on a user’s purchase history.”

Similarly, Toggle can deliver relevant Web content based on user profiles and insurance products purchased. The team sends customer data from Segment to Braze to create custom content cards in the mobile application targeted to specific audiences. This enables the team to deliver important updates to targeted audiences, like severe weather warnings for car insurance customers in areas expecting a storm. The team can also offer proactive advice on how to avoid damage or when to stay off the road to better serve them and optimize the business.

Toggle also uses Segment to provide better, faster, and more personalized customer support. By integrating claims data through Segment, the team is able to reduce friction and build a robust claims engine. For instance, after a claim has been filed, the team can send tailored 1x1 messages with updates on the claim and helpful links to help settle the claim faster. They can also provide tailored content that helps users resolve technical issues on a self-serve basis, which can reduce the number of customer support tickets and improve the overall experience. 

Trusted consumer insights fuels new relationships for expanded growth

Toggle is making a bold move into the fast-growing embedded insurance segment by offering auto insurance through the embedded experiences of participating brands like Toyota and Credit Karma. As an intentional player in the embedded space, Toggle recognized that with the pandemic, consumers increasingly sought out digital services and transitioned to online purchasing for a wide range of products, which included insurance.

 For Toggle, embedded insurance is about simplification and convenience, which is why they have expanded their ecosystem by integrating insurance into the purchase journeys of third-party brands as an efficient and frictionless alternative for consumers. This can allow for more relevant and personalized products and services when and where customers need and prefer, further enhancing a customer’s unique experience.

Toggle enables a culture of innovation to better serves customers and drive meaningful business results 

With Segment, Toggle can innovate at impressive speed and help today’s modern consumers get the insurance products they want. A universal source of truth for customer data has saved thousands of engineering hours and enabled personalized experiences at scale, resulting in more effective campaigns, higher LTV, new revenue streams, more efficient customer support and more direct relationships with its end users. 

Toggle has achieved remarkable business results in a short period of time as a result of using Segment:

Acquisition

• Decreased cost per acquisition by 64%

• Increased sales by 67% 

• Improved funnel throughput 

Velocity 

• Decreased time-to-value by 4x for new campaigns and product updates

• Reached a two-week turnaround for critical updates

Optimizations

• Reduced reliance on engineering for strategic launches, automated retention plays, and new market expansions

• Increased Return on Ad Spend (ROAS) with more targeted audience segmentation

• Reduced customer support tickets by 35%

Data trust and Insights

• Proved success in new renters insurance app and extracting value through new campaigns

• Improved understanding on which levers drive increased retention and increased revenue

• Validated reporting for new embedded insurance revenue streams 

What’s next? For Toggle, innovation is a process that never ends, and the brand’s start-up structure has allowed for the appropriate agility and adaptability needed to consistently develop and enhance its products and services with customers’ unique needs in mind.

As an innovative brand heavily focused on making bold moves to provide relevant and personalized insurance offerings to today’s customers, Toggle® is consistently looking to expand its portfolio of focused offerings that try to anticipate customers’ needs.

Toggle has served as proof of concept for customizable insurance. The best practices learned from Toggle are being adopted across the core business and driving digital transformation to better serve its customers.