How The Zebra Drives 25% More Conversions With Iterable, Snowflake, and Hightouch

The Zebra is the nation’s leading insurance marketplace, specializing in auto, home, and renters insurance. Partnering with hundreds of carriers, The Zebra’s online comparison tool helps consumers find coverage that meets their unique needs at the best available price.

But The Zebra’s vision extends far beyond initial quotes. Their goal is to become a true one-stop shop for insurance—guiding users from first comparison to purchase, renewal, and ongoing savings opportunities. Achieving this means staying connected with customers throughout their insurance journey, delivering timely, relevant offers, and ensuring each interaction moves them closer to securing or reshopping a policy.

With Iterable, Snowflake, and Hightouch working together, The Zebra has built a unified data and engagement ecosystem that enables them to recover abandoned quotes, deliver personalized rate updates, and efficiently launch new engagement campaigns — driving more policy purchases and keeping customers coming back.

The Zebra partners with over 100 insurance providers to deliver millions of quotes to consumers. To achieve their vision of becoming a true one-stop shop for insurance, they needed to elevate their cross-channel engagement and create seamless user experiences. Their key priorities included:

• Recover abandoned sessions and quotes to guide potential buyers back on track toward completing their purchase.
  Continuously re-engage users with timely, personalized rate updates that remain relevant well beyond their first visit.
• Unlock faster, self-serve access to data so their marketing team can move quickly without engineering dependencies.
• Build a connected data ecosystem to orchestrate personalized campaigns across every channel.

Previously, The Zebra’s marketing efforts were slowed by limited data access, manual processes, and siloed tools. This made it difficult to guide users through the entire insurance journey — from first quote to future policy reshops.

To solve these challenges, The Zebra turned to Iterable, Snowflake, and Hightouch to create a single customer view, enable real-time marketing activation, and run high-impact campaigns that increase purchase conversions and keep The Zebra top of mind whenever insurance needs arise.

The Zebra’s data infrastructure is built entirely around Snowflake, as the platform acts as the underpinning engine that powers the entire organization. Previously, the data team relied on a legacy data warehouse that was difficult to scale and support diverse workloads. Since adopting Snowflake, the data team has been able to work seamlessly, spinning up as many as 50+ warehouses.

The number one blocker for the marketing team at The Zebra has always been data accessibility because the data team simply couldn’t keep up with demands. Moving data out of the warehouse meant writing custom scripts, downloading manual CSVs, or building custom integrations with various third-party APIs.

Anytime the marketing team needed a new attribute or data point, they were forced to submit a ticket and wait on the data team. Depending on the priorities of the data team, it could be up to six months before that data was made available.

Since adopting Hightouch, this bottleneck has been completely eliminated. The data team can now seamlessly and reliably sync data out of Snowflake to customer engagement platforms like Iterable and various ad platforms–and the marketing team can build self-serve audiences using all of the data available in Snowflake.

“We’ve gone from what could have been a six-month wait for data down to a matter of days, and that means we can run experiments and launch new campaigns immediately,” said Ian Shogren, Lead Lifecycle Manager.

At The Zebra, every lifecycle journey is designed with one primary goal in mind: increasing policy purchase conversions. Iterable powers all of The Zebra’s user communications, using advanced personalization (Handlebars logic) and AI features to engage users at key decision points.

Cart abandonment journey
The Zebra operates two core activation funnels. The first is a generic funnel, where users answer the bare minimum questions needed to generate quotes from top carriers like GEICO, Bristol West, and others. If a user likes a quote, they enter a carrier-specific funnel with more detailed questions unique to that insurer.

One high-friction point is when users are prompted to enter their driver’s license or VIN number — information many don’t have readily available. This is a common point of drop-off. Using Snowflake and Hightouch, The Zebra pinpoints exactly where in the funnel a user abandoned, then triggers a targeted email in Iterable, sending them back to the previous page to finalize their rate. This campaign has helped increase policies sold that are attributed back to the lifecycle program by 25%. 

Price tracking and reshopping – in development
Modeled after flight price trackers, this new initiative continuously monitors auto insurance rates every 30 days. When a better deal is found — whether it’s an improvement over the user’s current policy or a past quote — Iterable sends an alert prompting them to review the new option. This approach keeps users engaged long after their initial visit and positions The Zebra as their go-to partner for ongoing savings.

AI Copy Assist for subject lines
To maximize engagement, The Zebra tests and optimizes subject lines using Iterable’s Copy Assist alongside internal creative review. Early campaigns show strong performance when referencing personalized savings or specific quote amounts. In campaigns where The Zebra has used Copy Assist and personalized subject lines, they have seen open rates increase by 15%. 

By combining Snowflake’s scalable data infrastructure, Hightouch’s real-time data activation, and Iterable’s orchestration capabilities, The Zebra delivers timely, relevant customer experiences that drive measurable results.

The Zebra’s continued focus will be on leveraging this powerful data infrastructure to further refine customer journeys, explore new market segments, and ultimately solidify its position as a leading innovator in the insurance tech landscape. They are well-positioned to continue delivering highly relevant and timely experiences that drive customer loyalty and sustained growth.