eMarketing Strategies for Insurance Companies – Understanding the landscape!

Traditional Marketing Methods don’t work as effectively anymore. Here’s why

1. Buyers have changed. Their buying behavior has changed. Product Complexity and choice has also increased greatly and customers are no longer reliant on what a sales rep tells them. Hence Insurance companies need to meet buyers needs by providing them with enough product information & expertise for them to do their due diligence. The Sales Reps or Agents are pushed back in the Sales Cycle and Marketing needs to play a more significant role in providing this information. Marketers that do not provide this information are out of the game and Buyers will go elsewhere.
2. The state of the economy has a huge impact on their buying decisions. The insecurity that the state of the economy has created in the last 18 months has resulted in buyers taking more time and caution in their buying decisions. They conduct more research on every purchase then they used to. This lengthens the selling cycle.
3. Things are changing quickly. New products are being launched more frequently than ever before. With the increasing competition Insurance companies are barely able to keep up with product innovation and differentiation and are left with hardly any time to market their products right . Technology has a large role to play in this as well.

Today Technology and the Web have a significant role to play in the buying process. The Web has made it easier not only for companies to launch new products, put out content and information a lot quicker but also for buyers to gain access to this information and valuable insight. This has a large impact on their Buying Process.

While a website is extremely important it is just a start. Here are some e-Marketing Strategies that Insurance Companies must adopt to ensure that they can market effectively to potential customers

1. Invest in Marketing Automation Software – Here are some of the benefits
   • Tracking Visitor Behavior on the website and learning about what they are interested in
   • This provides insight into how they interact with content on the website and provides visibility at a more granular level
   • Integrating the marketing automation software with a CRM software provides Sales people with lead scoring so they know which are the ones that need to focus on immediately or have the highest potential vs others.
   • This enables them to have more informed and meaningful conversations with prospects as they now have intelligence behind their behavior. Customers expect Sales People to know what they want.
2. Providing Content in various formats - Today customers are used to viewing content in various formats – whether it is linkedin, twitter, facebook, blogs etc, Marketers need to ensure that they have content pushed out on all of these networks.
3. Social Media – whether Marketers use Social Media or not to promote their products it is very important to track what people are saying about your products and Brand. The kind of feedback you can get is invaluable and must not be ignored.

To summarize Marketing Teams need to understand that their role has changed and they need to use Content & Technology (essentially the web) effectively to ensure lead prospecting and support the sales cycle.

by Subir Singh (subir.singh@edynamic.net)

Best Practices for building Insurance Websites - Part 4

Step 4 – Define “Measures of Success” against each Goal

Most often we get caught up in defining objectives, strategies and tactics but forget to identify metrics that will provide an indication of what is or isn’t working. Analytics is one of the most critical components of any web projects. Implementing an analytic tool is simple and some are even available for free.

This becomes nearly impossible as your website grows to a point that it receives more than a thousand visitors daily—no one has the time to keep up with the constant inflow of new traffic. One of the main reasons to add the Analytics Tool is to track trends. You’ll want to know, in a snapshot view, the results of different “campaigns”, posts and social bookmarking/networking stumbles etc. Without these trends, you cannot grow your site, neither do you know if you are pleasing your visitors (resulting in a general increase in traffic) or targeting the right keywords.

Although you generally form your visitor base with the content you write, implementing a statistics program on your site will benefit you by allowing you to more accurately target a market, whether in a specific country, age group, or lifestyle (earnings, home value, etc.). Out of all factors, this may be the biggest reason to ensure tracking of your website.

by Subir Singh (subir.singh@edynamic.net)

Best Practices for building Insurance Websites - Part 3

Step 3 – Define Strategies that will lead to achieving these Goal

1. Enable Customer Education & Research
2. Simplify product offerings
3. Ensure the website is a source of Information & Knowledge for Prospects, Customers, Agents, Employees, Media personnel, etc.
4. Connect the offline branding & promotion activities with the online channel
5. Provide visitors on the website with adequate tools that enable then to conduct research
6. Provide customers with self servicing capabilities
7. Encourage Lead Generation

by Subir Singh (subir.singh@edynamic.net)

Best Practices for building Insurance Websites - Part 2

Step 2 – Understand your Target Audience

Before you get down to defining strategies that can enable your goals you need to understand your Target Audiences and their needs

1) Prospects – Looking to buy Insurance can be categorized as follows:

• Those who know exactly what they are looking for. They understand their need and know the product they are looking for.
  
• Those who have a specific need and want to identify products that fit their needs. E.g someone who needs to buy a Child Insurance Plan that would provide them a sum of money for their child’s graduate education.
  
• Those who know they need insurance but are not familiar with the various categories of insurance (Child, Health, Pension, Growth, etc.)

2) Customers – These are existing customers who can be categorized as follows:

• Those looking for specific information to do with their existing relationship
• Those looking at using the web as a channel to pay renewals
• Those looking for additional products. They could then fall into any one of the categories mentioned in 1 above

3) Agents – Existing & Prospective Agents

• Existing Agents
• Self Servicing Requirement – Looking for specific information for themselves – product related, access to the Agent Portal, etc.
• Client Servicing Requirement – looking for product related information, NAVs, etc.
• Prospective Agents – Looking at a Career with the Insurance company – this could be an agent with a competitor and wants to switch someone completely new to Insurance and is looking to make a career in the Insurance Industry

Based on the objectives, the needs of the target audience need to be prioritized and the website structure laid out accordingly.

by Subir Singh (subir.singh@edynamic.net)

Best Practices for building Insurance Websites - Part 1

As the Insurance Industry becomes more competitive and product offerings more complex there is a growing need for customers to do more research before they decide on what product they need to buy.

While Customers today are willing to buy certain categories of Insurance online such as Travel or Automotive insurance the Internet is yet primarily a channel for Research. However, researching on the Web often doesn’t translate into a policy application through any channel. Low conversion rates are the result of a complex product and a low-commitment research channel.

Life insurance as an example won’t see the same online sales success that auto insurers will enjoy. However the web can prove a useful channel to promote the prospect to the next level and lead to applications through other channels.

In a survey done in the US by Forrester Research in 2007 it was seen that of the 3 million Americans who have researched life insurance during the past year, more than one in three used the Internet to do so, making it the second most popular research channel after researching in person.

Insurance companies need to clearly identify & understand the objectives and purpose their websites serve.Assuming that the website can become a huge Point of Sale is not only a false expectation but it can also ignore the need for providing information that will enable prospects to conduct research and maybe even fill out an enquiry form

So the question really is – What should Insurance Websites focus on that would make them “successful”? “Successful”being the loaded and operative word here! So let’s start

Step 1: Identify the Goals for the website

Step 2: Understand your Target Audience

Step 3: Identify Strategies that will lead to achieving these Goals

Step 4: Define “Measures of Success” against each Goal


Let’s start with Step 1– Identifying the Goals for the website

For most insurance companies the goals could be summed up into the following

1. Customer Acquisition - Both lead generation and sales in some cases

2. Customer Retention – Servicing existing customers

3. Agent Recruitment – The agent network is the primary sales channel and hence there is strong focus on this area

4. Employee Acquisition – the website could be a large source of resumes

5. Brand Promotion – last but not least this is every Marketers objective. To not only promote the brand online but also create recall and align with offline promotion activities


Along with defining your goals it is also critical to prioritize them. This is very useful when it comes to allocating real estate and defining content focus on the website

Stay Tuned for – Step 2 – Understand your Target Audience

by Subir Singh (subir.singh@edynamic.net)