HiRoad: Cutting Acquisition Cost 94% in 18 Months

HiRoad's proposition was genuinely differentiated…behaviour-based pricing that rewarded good driving. The economics were not: customer acquisition cost sat far above what the lifetime value of the book could carry.

The Situation

Telematics insurance asks the customer to change how they think about pricing, and asking customers to think is expensive. Acquisition spend was buying awareness in broad channels while conversion leaked at every step from click to bound policy. The brand was admired and the funnel was broken…a combination more common than most boards realise.

The Moves

We treated CAC as a full-funnel property, not a media metric. Spend was reweighted from broad reach into channels where the proposition could be explained to people already predisposed to it. The quote flow was rebuilt around the behaviours that predicted binding, and the onboarding experience around the behaviours that predicted retention. Pricing, product, and marketing worked one shared scorecard…cost per bound policy, not cost per click.

The Result

Acquisition cost fell 94% in 18 months on the portfolio. The mechanics matter less than the principle: in insurance, CAC is an underwriting problem and a product problem long before it is a media problem. Buying growth at a loss is easy; engineering the funnel so growth pays for itself is the actual work.