Insurance customer buying patterns have changed drastically over the past few years, and today’s consumers are accustomed to conducting thorough online research and comparing their options before making any kind of purchasing decision. While every industry has had to change its tune to meet the demands of these new buying patterns, insurance brokerages have had to do a complete overhaul.
In the past, insurance brokerages could rely on word-of-mouth and reputation to drive more business. But today, they have to be ready to deliver the right message at the right time to attract, engage, and convert new policyholders.
Unfortunately, although securing customers is a major challenge in its own right, many insurance brokerages are also finding it difficult to retain customers — even those they’ve had for years. Just like the new policyholders insurance brokerages are trying so hard to acquire, their current customers now have the freedom to shop around and find policies that better suit their needs.
To prevent this, insurance marketers must be prepared to engage and nurture their customers with relevant offers that solve their pain points. A great challenge for insurance marketers is that, although the tasks required to remain competitive has grown, most smaller teams lack the resources, time, and systems to get the job done.
Thankfully, technology has significantly evolved to help insurance brokerages deal with the demands of today’s consumers. Marketers now have access to affordable and powerful marketing automation software that can help them innovate their marketing strategies with less effort and better results. The right solution can help them deliver more personalized marketing, streamline processes, and measure success.
Keep reading to learn a few ways you can use this powerful technology to help your team expand and execute your marketing strategy to build better customer relationships that encourage growth.
Leverage Automatic Segmentation and Lead Scoring to Deliver Personalized Messages
You’ve probably heard time and time again about how important it is to deliver the right message at the right time. But trying to predict your customers’ behavior and what sort of policies they’re looking for is easier said than done.
If you’re working with an email-only platform or a disconnected CRM, grouping customers into relevant lists can be tedious and, many times, inaccurate. Throw in messaging and timing, and matching your customers with relevant policies and offers can seem almost impossible. Marketing automation helps you mechanize many of the steps required to deliver personalized messaging so you can focus your efforts on enhancing your overall marketing strategy.
To start, marketing automation enables you to eliminate the guesswork and reduce the amount of time it takes to segment your audience. For example, Act-On allows users to automatically segment contacts as you uncover more information about them and track their behavior. So, if a potential policyholder visits a certain insurance product page or clicks on a link to learn more about bundle pricing, marketing automation platforms can automatically enter them into the appropriate contact lists so you can communicate the right message to them moving forward.
You can also ensure accurate segments by implementing lead scoring. This process allows you to measure where your customers are in the buyer journey by assigning points (negative or positive) each time they complete an important action (such as filling out a form, downloading a piece of content, or visiting a webpage). Knowing exactly where your customers are in the buyer journey and how they got there empowers you to provide them with more targeted messaging and product recommendations. This tactic will keep customers engaged, cultivate policyholder loyalty, and lead to more upsell opportunities.
5 Marketing Challenges Facing Insurance Brokers
Remain Top-of-Mind With Lead Nurturing Campaigns
Good marketing (and good customer marketing, especially) is not only about delivering the right message at the right time, but also consistency. You can’t go weeks or months without talking to your insurance customers and expect to be their first choice when the time to renew their policies comes around. You also can’t blame them for researching other vendors that can meet their needs if you haven’t taken the time to communicate what you have to offer.
With all the work you have to do, the last thing you want to hear is that you need to start sending more emails. Launching automated nurture campaigns is a great way to keep customers in the loop, introduce them to helpful offerings, and help them build confidence in your brand — all without using more time and resources.
Even better, the engagement information you gather from these campaigns can mobilize your team to reach out with even more targeted information and resources that improve loyalty and promote retention. Your team can leverage nurture campaigns to track user behavior and identify opportunities to match customers with additional insurance products, remind them of their current benefits, or step in to remediate a situation if there is ever any conflict or sign of customer dissatisfaction.
The best part is that Act-On allows you to create automated nurture campaigns for a variety of customer marketing efforts (such as onboarding, customer loyalty, and upsell programs) that launch whenever a customer completes an action or meets certain criteria. This allows you to send frequent and relevant communications to your customers without having to go into the platform manually to ensure that the email is sent.
Educate Customers With Relevant Content
As I’ve mentioned, your prospective and existing policyholders will actively look for solutions to their pain points. As they do, they’ll likely come across your competitors’ websites and marketing materials. If your rivals are offering targeted content and product offerings that match your customers’ needs, you run the risk of losing them to the competition.
You can prevent this from happening by distributing relevant content and information to all of your target audiences. Placing content front and center on your website is the first step toward guiding your customers to the information they need. Taking the extra step of gating this content behind manicured landing pages allows you to collect additional prospect information that you can use to inform your marketing efforts and improve your outreach.
Once you know a customer is interested in a certain insurance topic, you can enter them into a related automated email campaign to provide more information that can help them in their decision-making process.
Own the Customer Journey From Beginning to End With Act-On
Marketing automation equips insurance marketers and agents with everything they need to get to know their customers, deliver timely and relevant messaging, and stand out from the crowd. It also allows you to automate your efforts and streamline processes, empowering you to focus your skills and expertise where they will make the most impact. As a result, your organization will reduce costs and improve results.
If you’d like to learn how marketing automation helps insurers overcome common marketing challenges to drive results, you should check out our eBook “5 Marketing Challenges Facing Insurance Brokers.”
And if you’d like to see our platform in action, please book a demo with one of our marketing automation experts. They can show you how to leverage Act-On to implement the strategies mentioned above — and much more!