One of the biggest challenges of running an insurance agency is marketing and sales. Without a solid lead generation strategy, it will be tough for financial institutions to stay afloat and competitive. Insurance businesses need a powerful system to acquire quality leads and convert them into paying clients.
Fortunately, today’s world is driven by advancements in technology. Insurers embrace digital transformation, helping them get in front of their target audience and increase annual profitability. Online lead generation enables them to improve efficiency, reduce costs, and enhance customer service.
Before we jump into the best methods for insurance lead generation, let us learn first how technology helps insurance agencies thrive.
5 Benefits of Getting Insurance Online
1. Faster Processing
There’s a lot of paperwork involved in traditional insurance. Customers need to carry out a lot of tasks and have to deal with lengthy forms and constantly track the documentation process. By switching to digital insurance, financial services can save more time and eliminate all the hassles.
It requires less paperwork and gives insurance providers easy access to network hospitals and third-party service providers to assist in claim settlement. Simplifying the tedious process also improves customer service and resolves customers’ queries instantly. With the intense competition in the insurance industry, investing in technology and online apps can make a big difference.
2. Reduced Operational Costs
Going online offers a lot of advantages for insurance providers. Creating a website and setting up social media pages come at a lower cost than paying for traditional advertising and print media. Newspapers, brochures, and brand signages only reach a very limited audience, while online marketing allows you to reach a wider audience and connect with your target customers.
This helps reduce operational costs and allows the advertising money to be used for more important campaigns. The savings can be passed on to customers in the form of cheaper policies and discounts.
3. Fraud Prevention
Unlike traditional insurance where customers pay in cash to an agent or distributor and risk losing their money (the agent not depositing the money), online digital insurance provides strong security. All digital transactions and online applications are tested to ensure that everything is transparent and accurate.
Agent involvement gets reduced, which lessens the probability of theft, fraud, and related schemes. Digital technology allows you to fill out forms, and monitor data sharing and payment information. Strong data protection controls are designed to look for data breaches constantly and miss-selling. Digital signatures add a level of security to your account while data analytics work to prevent claim payouts and enhance the fraud detection process.
4. Billing Efficiency
Making and processing payments has now become easier and faster than ever. With insurance companies integrating payment gateways into their websites, customers can now send their payments with just a few clicks of a button. Digital wallets make it possible to improve payment transactions within the insurance industry. The automated systems can send alerts and reminders to customers when due dates are approaching, promoting on-time payments and lowering unintentional defaults.
5. Lower Insurance Rates
Online insurance is significantly lower than offline insurance. This is because insurance providers can eliminate agents’ commissions and reduce their overhead costs in online transactions. With this, you can save 30-70% on insurance costs when you purchase online.
Opting for online insurance also makes comparing prices convenient since you can just browse different websites instead of visiting insurance companies and scheduling a meeting with an agent offline. You have ample time to review and compare various options and choose the right policy that fits your needs and financial situation.
Why Insurance Companies Need Marketing Automation
• Converting Leads to Customers
Marketing for insurance providers is not just about selling to a broad audience. Whether you are offering life, home, boat, or other types of insurance, your main goal is to attract quality leads. Instead of blindly selling to prospects, it is important to appeal to the right people who will likely convert into paying customers.
With the competition growing online, acquiring leads can be a challenge. By using marketing automation software, you can understand your prospects’ behaviors and interests better. This can help you optimize your sales funnel and know where your prospects at in the sales cycle. You will also learn where the majority of the topic comes from, be it on your website, social media, emails, or other sales channels.
• Maintaining Communication with Existing Clients
The success of insurance companies does not solely depend on the services and policies it offers. Customer service plays a vital role in customer acquisition and retention. Keeping customers happy is not a simple task, especially if you do not have a proper system in place. With marketing automation, insurance agents can maintain regular contact with customers and resolve any inquiries or issues that may arise.
A powerful CRM does wonders as it can automatically list information, schedule phone calls, send emails, and automate tasks quickly and effectively. The happier your customers are, the longer they will stay at your company. In this fast-paced and competitive industry, providing helpful information matters.
• Maximize Cross-selling Opportunities
Cross-selling is a marketing tactic that insurance providers use to generate more sales. Marketing to an existing customer has a selling probability of 60-70% while convincing a new prospect usually falls just between 5-20%. Tapping into the power of marketing automation, insurers can segment their customers’ data and tailor a specific campaign to build more trust and drive referrals.
Marketing automation empowers nurturing campaigns and guides customers along the cross-buying journey, offering additional policies that are most applicable to them. Upselling, cross-selling, and referrals are responsible for an additional 30% of revenue which is why automating these processes is essential.
• Automate Manual Tasks
In the insurance industry, time is one of the most valuable resources. About 20-25% of insurance agents admit that they know they need to connect and stay in front of their network yet they do not have time to do so.
Marketing automation automates and expedites manual tasks and ensures that all data and communication are stored in one place via CRMs. You don’t need to deal with paper files for each client, notes lying on your desk, and documents filling up your cabinet. Storing clients’ data is easy with software tools. Digital marketing tools help you gather and track leads and seamlessly cultivate client data.
Insurance Lead Generation Tactics
1. Build a Conversion-focused Website
Your website acts as your storefront online. You want online visitors to come to your website and have a good impression. Ensure that your website is professionally designed, and visitors are seeing clean and easy-to-navigate web pages.
Create FAQs (Frequently Asked Questions) to answer the common questions of your audience. Share attractive and engaging content that targets your audience’s search intent. Include helpful links that lead to appropriate information and landing pages. Use effective CTAs to encourage visitors to take desired actions. An attractive and functional website is a powerful lead generation machine.
2. Use SEO Strategies to Drive Traffic and Conversions
The main objective of an effective content marketing strategy is to acquire leads by providing value to the target customers. Marketers call this, a “lead magnet”. Create content that gives relevant information on how you can solve your prospects’ problems. Identify their needs, frustrations, and worries and align your content based on the most-used search phrases.
Then, offer lead magnets such as detailed guides, checklists, reports, case studies, and webinars. Review your conversion funnel and ensure that you have enough content that guides customers throughout their buying decisions.
3. Utilize Social Media
The majority of the global population are active internet users. About 73% of Americans spend 2-3 hours daily on social media platforms such as Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube. Social media is not just a tool used to communicate and connect with our family and friends. It also acts as an effective marketing channel where you can promote your insurance company to potential clients.
Sharing relevant content and creating ads that are shown to the right audience can boost your online brand image and build more credibility. Social media is also an excellent platform to drive traffic to your website. Adapting a robust content marketing strategy, social media will help your insurance business gather more leads and fill up your sales pipeline.
4. Contact Forms
You don’t want your prospective clients to visit your website, read about your services, and leave without taking the desired action. Your objective is to capture their information so that you can use the data for your marketing campaigns. This is why it is important to have a sales page and a contact form.
Visitors who are interested in your insurance services may opt-in to your form and request an email reply or a call. Integrate a contact form on your website which asks for important details such as name, email, phone number, customized message, service request, and other essential information that could help you understand their needs better.
Include the link to your contact form on your home page, landing pages, emails, and even social media posts. The easier it is for your customers to contact you, the better interaction will be.
5. Email Marketing
The insurance industry is one of the industries that struggle to have a positive reputation. Inflicted by fraud and deceiving practices of other ill-mannered companies, building credibility with the audience can be challenging. Email marketing can help solve this issue by sending personalized messages and removing communication barriers.
Insurance providers can establish a deeper connection with their prospects and leverage their lead generation efforts. Building an email list, performing email segmentation, writing personalized email copies, and including compelling CTAs significantly increase conversion rate and sales. Email marketing is a powerful tool to track and grow both prospective and existing customers.
6. Get Noticed on Local Directories and Review Sites
With easy access to the internet, customers browse different websites to look for insurance options and compare prices. Not just that, they also look for customer reviews to check the credibility and customer service of a certain business.
To stay ahead of the competition, you need to establish a positive presence on review websites. Get your company listed, fill out the necessary information, and promote your brand. Encourage your happy customers to leave a review and share their experiences with your brand. This will build trust and increase your credibility.
Also, don’t forget to list your business on listing directories such as Yellow Pages, Yelp, Bing, Yahoo, LinkedIn, and Google My Business. This will improve your local SEO so your business will get to appear in local searches.
7. Create a Content Marketing Strategy
Good content helps you spread your brand message and highlight your expertise. When creating content, do not stick to one format. Instead, engage your audience with a variety of helpful content relevant to their needs and buying stage.
Host webinars to establish thought-leadership. People prefer listening to informational content to promotional one.  Find out the most pressing questions your audience has regarding insurance and provide educational answers. You can also create videos where you talk about a certain topic. This will let people know you more and connect with your brand on an emotional level.
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How Marketing Automation can help Insurance Providers
Marketing automation helps insurance companies to level up their performance and operational efficiency. Collecting, storing, analyzing, and organizing data is a tedious process. If you want to free up time and boost productivity, you need to consider having marketing automation tools that help you accomplish goals with less time and effort involved.
From attracting, acquiring, and qualifying, to nurturing and converting leads, marketing automation will get the job done.
• Call Tracking
With many people getting in contact with your business, it is easy to lose track of the conversation and information. The insurance industry relies on communication and trust between customers and insurance agents. Communications via direct phone calls are crucial.
Marketing automation allows you to record phone calls and import vital information to your database. This helps you keep everything on track and avoid any confusion. CRMs also allow you to schedule phone calls after a lead fills out a form on your website. This ensures that every lead that comes in is being attended to, increasing the opportunity for a sale.
• Lead Assignment
To increase efficiency and productivity, you don’t want your team to have miscommunication and delegation issues. Automating every lead based on certain criteria and assigning agents accordingly eliminates all the hassles.
Automation tools can connect leads and interactions to the assigned agent. They can easily schedule phone calls, send emails and text messages, and nurture the leads assigned to them.  Alerts and notifications also help in giving the agent an overview of all activities.
With automation, you can have a better view of your organization’s workflow and workload. It enables you to connect leads to the right agent, evenly distribute tasks, and consistently follow up on every lead.
• Data Entry
Inputting leads and customers’ information into your database is time-consuming. However, this day-to-day job is a crucial part of sales and marketing. With the help of CRMs and other software, insurance agencies can automate their data entry tasks.
Gathering and collecting essential information such as emails, inquiries, and phone calls, as well as securing it to a centralized database lessens the workload of your agents and thus improves productivity.
• Email Marketing Campaigns
Email marketing is a powerful sales tool that helps insurance providers to increase revenue. People enjoy reading informational emails. It makes them more informed and better decision-makers. When it comes to email marketing, it is a must to build a content strategy and email flows rather than crafting and sending emails randomly.
Insurance companies can benefit from email marketing by doing the following practices:
a. Nurture Emails – Send emails to those leads who have stopped interacting and engaging.
b. Alert Emails – Send notifications about new insurance products.
c. Follow-up Emails – Send engaging emails to those leads who have (and have not) completed the application process. Respond to inquiries and share free resources.
d. Onboarding Emails – Send welcome emails to new clients who get their applications approved, and share more steps and information about their insurance.
e. Promotional Emails – Send marketing emails to your leads and customers, letting them know about your amazing deals, promos, and product offers.
With marketing automation, sales and conversions can increase. It’s because leads go to a system with the right workflows and parameters. Automation tools offer amazing features such as custom email and text message templates, lead tracking, appointment setting, and a lot more.
• Transactional Correspondence
The lack of updates drives customers away.  It is your responsibility as an insurance provider to notify your customers about every transaction. Customers expect nothing but transparency and promptness.
Thanks to marketing automation, you can handle transactional communications seamlessly. From sending confirmations to every action such as purchase or renewal of policies to sending proofs of payment, the automation platform makes your job easier.
Automating email flows also allows insurance companies to upsell and cross-sell other policies to boost sales and growth.
• Marketing Attribution
One major advantage of marketing automation for insurance companies is you can review and analyze the performance of your marketing campaigns. CRMs and digital tools help you determine which channels and messages drive the most conversions and evaluate your customers’ buying behavior.
The goal of marketing attribution is to improve your marketing ROI. The data and analytics that your insurance software provides help you identify the best step forward. This can be about improving your customer journey, creating more creative ads, optimizing your sales funnel, developing better branding and content, and more.
Conclusion
Lead generation doesn’t have to be difficult. While you keep on pushing your offline efforts to get more leads, tapping into the power of online lead generation is a game-changer.
With over 70% of customers using online search when looking for insurance providers, it is a sign to get your automated marketing system set up.
We, at Boost Media Group, help insurance companies with their lead generation and digital marketing needs. Our digital marketing experts are ready to give you insights and develop your online lead generation strategies.
Schedule a FREE marketing assessment with us today and gain a competitive edge in your industry.
