Putting Insights in the Hands of Product Managers Boosts Sales 53%

Insight/Action/Outcome: During a discounting campaign to cross-sell health insurance to existing customers, ACKO gained insight into user interactions with video. Amplitude proved that rather than decrease revenue, discounting optimizes yield. Among other results, the discount improved ACKO’s cross-sell rate by 41%, prompting the insurer to continue efforts to reward customer loyalty.

Using Amplitude allows product managers to play with different attribution windows, leading to immediate business and product decisions. During the Cricket World Cup ad campaign, real-time dashboards combined with looking at the data from different angles allowed the team to reduce in-journey errors by 64%.

At ACKO, we are in the protection business. People buy insurance because they want to protect their loved ones and assets, and we deliver that value to the consumer.

ACKO is an Indian InsurTech that recently attained unicorn status. But when I started as a product manager right out of university, ACKO was much smaller. We had less than 100 employees among our tech teams, and the initial 8 members of the product management team focused solely on just one insurance category: automobiles (car + bike). As a startup, the work was varied, and prioritization happened on the fly—we were always thinking on our feet and learning as we went along. We found great success and, with it, great change.

Today, our product & design team is +50 people strong. We launched new divisions and functions as we expanded our products to include electric vehicles, health, travel, and recently, life insurance. This growth brought cultural changes, too. Once you pass the hyperscaling stage, the learnings from more mature teams are built into up-and-coming categories. This involves imbibing tried and tested processes to set the right guardrails, course-correct & achieve predictable success. It became apparent to all that constantly leading with data-backed decisions across all forums becomes pivotal, yet it became more challenging for the company to be transparent with our data.

Frictionless features make for confident users

In 2021, we began exploring Amplitude Analytics as a way to help simplify data consumption and analysis while also helping us with insights to increase conversions. Around the same time we adopted Amplitude, ACKO launched the health retail division, which I transitioned into a few months later. We would become the first division to analyze data with Amplitude from its inception. The platform’s ability to perform complex analyses like attribution and forecasting increased our agility and boosted other teams’ confidence to incorporate Amplitude into their workflows.

For most of ACKO’s Amplitude users, segmentation and funnel charts are our bread and butter. Other analytics platforms have these capabilities, but Amplitude makes switching between segmentation and funnel views for the same data points frictionless. That ease gives people the confidence to generate insights on-the-fly, and not necessarily depend on the data and analytics team, which were better suited for more complex arrangements. Suddenly, anyone could bring data-backed insights to the table. These helped drive widespread adoption not just in health but among all divisions.

In the health division, we also use more advanced Amplitude features. A recent launch involved our Munnabhai-themed omnichannel campaign for the 2023 Cricket World Cup. This campaign culminated with TV ads playing during the Cricket World Cup. Amplitude’s real-time capabilities allowed us to track views, page visits, insurance quotes, and even payments as the ads ran during these matches.

As we saw website traffic spike, our technical team monitored real-time performance using metrics such as downtime and errors. We also turned to Amplitude’s forecasting capabilities to determine how our baselines had changed beyond these spikes. Finally, Amplitude Notebooks helped us tell a data-backed story of our campaign success in a format that is easily shareable across the entire organization.

The benefit of fresh insights

We have encountered a few aha moments with Amplitude, most notably in our discounting campaign, where we cross-sold health insurance to existing car insurance ACKO policyholders. We framed this as a time-bound loyalty discount: For 30 days, ACKO users would receive a 25% discount on health insurance; beyond 30 days, a 10% discount. Cross-selling products became an organization-wide priority since it not only delights our existing customer base with an incentive to increase their wallet share with us but also drives sales revenue to hit our profitability goals.

As a result of this discounting campaign, we saw an increase in the visit-to-quote (V2Q) and quote-to-payment (Q2P) journeys. Significantly, we did not see an accompanying drop in the average order value of our health insurance purchases, as we had also competitively raised prices just below our competitor's pricing, thereby also improving our margins. Tracking metrics against our launch confirmed our working assumption that discounting with competitor-benchmarked pricing is the right move in attempting to cross-sell. At a business level, our amplitude dashboards also helped us notice a 112% increase in customers viewing a health plan immediately within 24 hours after purchasing car insurance from us. Finally, an interesting user insight we came across was that rather than decreasing revenue due to a lower average order value, we found discounting optimized both yields as well as our average order value because existing customers are not only motivated to purchase health insurance at a discounted price but also see it as an opportunity to increase their family’s total health insurance coverage which raises prices inline with what is offered by our competitors.

While we expected discounting to improve conversions and the Cricket World Cup campaign to increase traffic to all our touchpoints, we also launched the videos in our digital purchase journeys in this same period as a new way to engage users. For the first time, we could extract data from the video player and gain insights into how health insurance customers interacted with different types of video content (eg. marketing vs educational videos).

The speed of gathering these insights and the transparency of Notebooks made it easy to create a dashboard with real-time data to share with other teams. Among these metrics, we could also see when a user watched one of our bite-sized education videos multiple times. Previously, this insight was unavailable to us because we could only track video clicks on a unique-user level, which is binary: Did the user click on the video or not? Being able to tap into the data more granularly (eg. event totals) revealed much more about the users and their behaviour against different video content categories.

After the 30-day window of this discounting campaign, we saw a 41% increase in the cross-sell rate. Users who received the discount saw their Q2P jump by 200%, which impacted our ongoing strategy since it indicated we should continue rewarding customer loyalty. Daily visits increased by 56%. Quotes alone increased almost 87%. These figures impacted sales, which increased by 53% in October vs the prior month. At an overall level, all these efforts combined to bring us a sustained revenue increase of 209% from Q2 to Q3 (MoM from July → October).

During our first campaign tracking video, we saw an almost 10X jump in video views. We also witnessed a 25% increase in app downloads for Android and a 2X increase in app downloads for iOS. The download figures demonstrate great potential—although India is primarily an Android market, iOS users tend to have the highest consumer discretionary spending.

We think of Amplitude’s ROI in multiple ways.

• Speed to insight. Previously, we would either have to drop what we were doing to work on the analysis or ask the data team to do it, both of which took considerable bandwidth that a product manager could use elsewhere. With Amplitude, neither of those scenarios exists. Instead of waiting your turn for a week for the data team to build a dashboard, we now have insights on tap.
• Understanding attribution. Product managers have gained a superpower that previously only the data team had: understanding attribution. Suddenly, it’s in our power to play with different attribution windows, leading to immediate business and product decisions. For example, if we get an alert that our conversion rate has dropped, we can identify a potential break in the funnel over a specific time range, as well as a cohort of users for a specific period. During our Cricket World Cup ad campaign, real-time dashboards combined with looking at the data from different angles allowed us to reduce website errors by 50%.
• Forecasting ability. It would be difficult for our data team to build a projection from our match-day ads and predict whether viewing spikes would translate into anything meaningful. Amplitude’s forecasting shows us that in addition to these spikes, the ads caused a sustained baseline shift. As we launch products, we also want to understand the sustained success of that launch. Forecasting clarifies early trends and helps us keep our eyes on the future.
• Driving revenue through insights. Our cross-sell campaign showed that accurate user insights could drive real revenue growth—in this case, by 53% during the Cricket World Cup period and overall by 209%, considering we launched discounts moving in from Q2-to-Q3.

A fast-growing startup needs transparency, structure, and speed

As our product has evolved to include multiple categories, our data needs evolved, too. We had more people working across more functions, and each of those new functions had specific needs. At the same time, we wanted to understand the customer holistically. We needed greater data transparency in a faster, more structured format.

There was also the issue of accessibility. In the early days, learning SQL meant learning an entire language to communicate with databases and extract data. It offers more control & speed, but it comes at the cost of a Product Manager’s bandwidth, which could be time better spent uncovering hidden opportunities or prioritizing higher-ROI activities within the organization. It also presents a significant barrier to people adopting analytics. We were also concerned that, just at the moment when ACKO was rapidly growing, potential hires would see learning SQL as a barrier to employment.

In the early days, we were used to leveraging Google BigQuery and Excel to manipulate day-to-day data. It was often a lot of manual work to pull up even rough estimates to inform product decisions, and we didn’t have many ready sources about user behavior-based cohorts. Around 2020, we onboarded the visualization platform Tableau. By then, we also had a dedicated, fast-growing data + analytics team, which removed some of the burden from the product team. But this solution also created new problems: Launching any new dashboard or asking the data team for ad hoc analysis took time and planned effort, so there was still some friction built into getting a steady insights pipeline running. Essentially, anyone wanting to quickly perform the analysis themselves still had to know SQL.

Amplitude was easy to use and offered robust capabilities out of the box. The plug-and-play model offered easily shareable insights and was very appealing, considering our need for greater transparency and our desire to attract new talent even when hiring.

Amplitude was pivotal in monitoring and optimizing ACKO’s pricing strategy and performance. Having a holistic view of the customer that we can easily share with all stakeholders has helped us spread a culture of data-ready consumer roadmaps for the company, enabling us to creatively excel with regulatory constraints in a challenging market at the intersection of e-commerce, technology, and Insurance in India.