Data Axle Genie Conjures a Solution for Aflac Amid the Pandemic

Supplemental insurance company Aflac was forced to adjust its lead generation strategy when the pandemic's social distancing requirements put its main marketing tactic on hold. The company's ability to upend its sales focus didn't take a miracle, but it did rely on a form of marketing magic via its evolving three-year partnership with advertising analytics provider Data Axle. In pre-pandemic times, Aflac agents routinely reached out to customers through traditional channels such as door-to-door contact and cold calling. The pandemic essentially eliminated those in-person sales. "I may have to do 200 phone calls to get to 10 appointments, where I was possibly doing 100 face-to-face [meetings] to get 10 appointments," Luke Mansour, senior manager of sales technology at Aflac, told Adweek. To uncover a new way for its agents to reach new customers, Aflac turned to Data Axle's lead gen product, the Data Axle Genie. The insurance giant had begun using the product three years ago when it was known as Salesgenie—before Infogroup rebranded to Data Axle in 2020—but the pandemic accelerated the rollout to its team of over 20,000 agents. The Y2K Crisis Was the Aflac Duck’s Moment to Shine The Data Axle Genie parses information from over 45 years of public records such as real estate filings and local directories. It then verifies this data to make sure the information is up to date. "There's a very powerful data pipeline that we go through to ingest all these sources, cleanse that data, and then finally make it available for our customers and through our applications or through the services that we offer," said Hossam Bahlool, senior vice president of product management at Data Axle. That "cleansed" data yields the names of tens of millions of businesses and their relevant contacts, as well as consumer data for over 300 million Americans and 11 million Canadians, according to Bahlool. Each business or individual consumer has 100 distinct data attributes. Previously, the company's lead generation process was not centralized. As a result, sales teams didn't have a clear understanding of the total number of new customers being added. They also couldn't get a holistic view of how many new enrollments Aflac's outreach produced. Lastly, the process itself was stuck in an era before marketing automation became ubiquitous to even the smallest brands: Agents also had to manually update lead contact information during outreach. Data Axle promised its tech could address this lagging processes for Aflac over the course of 2020 and into 2021. I dream of sales Data Axle also helped establish a new framework for Aflac to examine how it's generating sales from leads. The Genie's information is especially helpful in giving agents a way to break the ice with potential customers. "It gives you that more of a personal entry touchpoint," said Haleigh Rentz, senior sales technology coordinator at Aflac. "Having the basic information of a customer makes [calls] less cold and more inviting and warm. Sometimes that's as easy as just knowing their name." Looking into a crystal ball The changes implemented last year with Data Axle's help aren't finished. Aflac is working on improving its sales outreach based on the information provided by the Genie. One method involves the use of lookalike models in its marketing to find customers who act and buy in the same way as its target audience. "We're going through in-house activity now," Rentz said. "We're looking for what the attributes that make a good lead for Aflac are. Is the account size in this location? In this industry code? What are the things that we need that in the past turned into a really good, successful account with Aflac?" Aflac Names Dagger as Agency of Record