Salaam Halal:  Segmenting the UK Population by Belief Using NOMADD

Winners in the 2009 Data Strategy Awards - Best Use of Data for a Financial Product Category and Best Targeting Solution Category.

Salaam Halal insurance is the UK's first insurance provider dedicated to providing insurance tailored to meet the needs and beliefs of the British Muslim community.

All the products are designed in accordance with the underlying Shariah principle of Takaful,* are approved by a committee of Shariah scholars.

Salaam Halal Car Insurance was both a new product and a new brand launch.  The objective was to create a Direct Mail campaign that would target Muslims with a requirement for car insurance.  The product would be fully compliant with Shariah Law.

Strategy

The strategy was to accurately identify those individuals who would form the potential market for Shariah-compliant car insurance.  These individuals would primarily be Muslim in their religious orientation.

The challenge for the data service provider was to:

• Identify individuals within the high Muslim density areas.

• Indentify Muslims outside these high Muslim densities as they are both more likely to own a car and to hold Shariah beliefs, for example third or fourth generation members of the community; in other words, harder to locate but a more likely prospect for this product.

An additional strategic challenge was to stay within both the letter and the spirit of the laws designed to protect personal information such as the Data Protection Act (1998) and to respect the sensitivity that would surround such a campaign. In order to be fully compliant, meetings were held with the ICO.  The ICO is the UK's independent public body set up to promote access to official information and protect personal information. The project was taken forward under their guidance.

Thus a bespoke analytics tool was designed to interrogate the UK population using algorithms that searched for certain letter combinations in both first and second names as being distinct to UK citizens of African, Far-Eastern, Middle Eastern and Asian ethnicity, focusing on the geographical areas which would deliver a Muslim population.  This tool was called Nomadd.

Identifying Muslims

Confidence levels have been adjusted to reflect likelihood to be Muslim, based on geo demographic overlay.

Nomadd was further developed to indicate a need and propensity to buy that went beyond a mere ethnic** match. In order to identify those most likely to want this type of product,  Nomadd was used to help build a marketing prospect database that offered the flexibility to encompass frequency capping and decile analysis to identify prospects and to develop effective contact strategies. The pool was made up of data that was drawn from home and car renewal data and then scored  0 - 100 against Nomadd to reveal the likelihood of being a Muslim, for example, the tool would score 'Shelia Ali' as attracting a lower score than 'Sakina Ali' but higher than  'Sheila Allen'.

A unique component of the response and conversion modeling was Acculturation - name analysis (first or surname changed) and names used (indicates generations in UK).

Results

Response rates were extraordinary.  A 30-day matchback was carried out because though the industry standard is 90 days, there was a need to set the DM results apart from the above the line marketing activities that were taking place for this product.

The response rate was 4.49% as against an industry average of 1 - 3% for cold mailings.

Conclusion

We developed and implemented a unique data enhancement product;  one that provided a highly targeted prospect pool for the client, locating their target customers, together with behavioural characteristics. These were overlaid on the data to indicate powerful propensities to purchase a product that was new to the market. The strength of this analytics tool was proved by the fact that the top 50 scores outperformed the lower 50 by 328%, the response levels validate Nomadd as a tool for prediction and indication.

Footnotes:

* Takaful ( التكافل) is an Islamic insurance concept which is grounded in Islamic muamalat (banking transactions), observing the rules and regulations of Islamic law.

** Ethnic - For the purposes of this entry, we are using the following definition: Ethnicity is a multi-faceted phenomenon based on physical appearance, subjective identification, cultural and religious affiliation. Berthoud, Modood and Smith (1997)⁵ Ethnic group statistics.

Source: A guide for the collection and classification of ethnicity data published by the National Office of Statistics 2009.