5 Questions For Every Insurance Performance Marketer Prepping For 2027

By Tom Blenkin, Commercial Director & Snowflake Lead.

I spend a lot of my time talking to performance marketers at insurers, and as they moved into planning for 2027, the conversation changed. It's less about finding new audiences, new channels, and more about getting more out of the approach they've already got.

I'm not surprised. 

EY expects UK motor insurers to pay out around £1.08 in claims and expenses for every £1 of premium earned in 2026 - not a business model anyone would choose on purpose! It also expects the sector to remain loss making in 2027. Home insurance isn't much better: Deloitte's forecast for 2026 is a combined ratio of 102%. When underwriting margins are under that kind of pressure, every pound of acquisition spend comes under scrutiny.

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Direct or PCW: it changes the answer

Before going further, it's worth being clear about where your new business comes from, because it changes how much of this applies to you.

Direct-led. Customers come to your brand - through search, paid social, your website or app. You control the media investment, and you pay for every impression. Everything below applies, and the acquisition savings are the biggest prize.

PCW-led. Most new business comes through price comparison websites, and you pay per sale. One insurer I spoke to recently gets 90% of its new business that way. The acquisition saving is smaller here. The opportunity is in the direct and paid social budget you do control, and in keeping the customers you've already won.

Most insurers are a mix of the two. Either way, the five questions below are worth asking.

1. Are existing policyholders excluded from all your acquisition activity - Google, YouTube and CTV as well as Meta?

2. When someone buys a policy, how quickly do they drop out of those acquisition audiences?

3. Do lapsed customers receive a tailored a win-back message, or the same ad as someone who's never heard of you?

4. Are quote abandoners treated differently from cold prospects?

5. Are your lookalike audiences built from your best customers, or simply everyone in your customer base?

If you're not sure of the answers, you're probably not alone. In my experience the problem is rarely the thinking. It's that the customer data sits with the data team, and getting it into the ad platforms involves exports, legal sign-off and someone remembering to upload a new list (usually after the campaign's gone live).

What it's worth

Saga is a good example of what changes when that gets easier. Using their own customer data through AUDIENCES, they cut cost per acquisition on Google Customer Match by between 16% and 42%, depending on the product. They also stopped paying to show Meta prospecting ads to people who already had a policy.

These aren't complicated marketing strategies. They're the fundamentals of good audience management, made possible by giving marketing teams more timely access to the customer data they already have. And the opportunity goes beyond acquisition. The same approach can help insurers reconnect with lapsed customers, tailor messaging to different policyholder groups and make better use of existing customer relationships.

How we do it

It's fairly simple. AUDIENCES works with your customer data where it already sits, within your existing cloud environment, including AWS, Azure, Google Cloud and data platforms such as Snowflake and Databricks. Your data team retains control over which data marketing can use, while marketing teams can build and activate audiences across paid social, search, CTV and other digital channels.

There's no need to move or duplicate your underlying customer datasets into another platform. You can activate approved audiences through the advertising channels you already use, with the appropriate controls in place. The result is a much closer connection between customer data and media investment, without the usual operational complexity.

With 2027 looking like a bit of a slog approaching your planning with a renewed focus on  accuracy in lock-step with your data colleagues might be exactly what you CMO and CFO need.

If you'd like to go through those five questions against your own campaigns, I'd be happy to do it with you.

Tom

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Sources

• EY motor forecast (Insurance Business, Jul 2026)

• Deloitte home forecast (Insurance Business, Oct 2026)

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