Why Agents Should Use Marketing Automation to Engage Policyholders

In our previous article “How to Improve Customer Experience in Insurance“, we highlighted the importance of customer experience in insurance. In this article, “Why Agents should Use Marketing Automation to Engage Policyholders”, we’ve outlined the benefits of digital marketing automation and how to unlock this amazing return on investment, even while you sleep!

Marketing automation strengthens the relationship between the insurance agents and policyholders. Automating marketing efforts and prioritizing personalization results in loyal, engaged customers and accelerates the insurance sales cycle.

Use Marketing Automation to Engage Policyholders

Automation boosts policyholder’s engagement by personalizing marketing content to their unique characteristics. Marketing automation in insurance provides the following benefits, inter alia:

  • Acquiring new leads and increasing engagement of current policyholders
  • Access to reporting and insights to track behaviours metrics for cross selling tactics
  • Distributes personalized, segmented content to target a particular type of customer
  • Provides agents with knowledgeable insights to sell the proper protection and coverage

Insurers that automate with Marketing Automation Softwares will experience higher ROI’s due to:

  • Score and rank leads to sales-ready- Automatically score and rank your leads based on policyholder’s interactions. Monetize by providing the list of highly ranked leads to your sales team for higher conversions.
  • Test, measure and improve campaigns- Track email response rates including opens, clicks, bounces, unsubscribes, and spam reports. Results in higher click open rates on your campaigns and newsletters.
  • Design, send, and measure newsletters Send email newsletters to targeted prospects.

To be even more impervious to low quality marketing, utilize an Insurance Agent Management Software that offers behavioural tracking . For instance, Yocale’s booking widget has Google Analytics capabilities which captures the behavioural metrics of policyholders in real time. In addition, to create a professional and unique experience, aesthetics of the booking tool can be personalized (and updated as desired) to better captivate the policyholders interest. Agents can add their unique booking URL to email signatures for direct, fast booking.

Now that we understand the significance of marketing automation and its resources, let’s explore its branches in more depth.

Personalize Email Marketing; Dynamic Content

Each one of us is a unique individual and we want to be perceived as such, which is what makes marketing automation and web personalization is extremely powerful. A recent report by VB Insight presented that 87% of companies experienced higher conversion and engagement rates when personalization was incorporated within their marketing communications.

To put in perspective how prevalent email marketing automation is, the following graph displays its statistics based on quantitative studies:

Email marketing to engage policyholders
Source: OptinMonster

So, what exactly is dynamic content in email marketing? Say, you’re sending a mass marketing campaign and each policyholders first name is used, that’s the basic foundation of a dynamic email content. Dynamic content adjusts based on the criteria and metrics set in your database. These characteristics include demographics, preference, customer behaviour, and geographic to name a few.

When insurance agents understand demographics, behaviours and preferences of their customer, it results in quality experiences and adds value to cross selling tactics. The key is to personalize an email to make it specific to the recipient based on their preferences, needs, and behaviors.

Keep in mind that email marketing personalization goes beyond referring to the policyholder with their first name. Agents really need to understand the preference, history and needs of the customer in order to create value and cross sell additional insurance coverage.

Here are 8 ways to incorporate personalization within your email marketing:

  1. Recommend insurance coverage based on the geographical and weather forecast of the policyholder (e.g., if they live in region with high floods or earthquakes, agents should highly promote natural disaster coverage)
  2. Chose targeted vocabulary and terminology in promotional emails
  3. Change pictures in promotional emails based on demographics such as age and postal code (we will look at list segmentation in the next section)
  4. Promote details on insurance coverage based on policyholders previous purchases and browsing behavior
  5. Send celebration birthday emails and offer membership rewards-program or promotions
  6. Pay attention the sales funnel and personalize the message accordingly ( e.g., your call to action should be different for a new prospect versus a loyal, long term policyholder)
  7. Send transactional emails to customers with recent travel insurance purchases. Engage by including relevant links and places for them to visit on their trip
  8. If customers found your insurance website through a blog, create white paper material or an e-book relevant to the topic and engage them further

The more engagement you create in your marketing content, the more your subscribers list will evolve. Studies show when email marketing is personalized, the numbers of subscribers increase. With pertinent email engagement and deliverability, frequency of email sent can enhance your return on investment.

From Lyft to Spotify, here are top examples of personalized email messages.

Segment Your Audience – Automate Personalized Campaigns

Segmented email newsletters and campaigns can increase revenue by 760%. What’s more? 82% of consumers say they will most likely purchase additional coverage if the email message was based on their preferences and previous purchases.

In marketing, market segmentation is the act of segmenting consumers into sub-groups of consumers based on shared attributes. Market segmentation can include existing and potential customers. List segmentation allows you to distribute pertinent marketing content to the right policyholders at the right time. You can achieve this by dividing and automating your email list into smaller segments based on the information customers provided during form submissions or opt-in.

Segmentations can include characteristics like gender, age, location and any other data that is relevant to your campaign:

Automate Email Segmentation
Source: Campaign Monitor

Marketing automation tools help you captivate engagement by tailoring content relevant to the policyholder,-it takes into consideration past insurance purchases, browsing history, and geographical location. In fact, email segmentation is so powerful that it transmits powerful results:

Why Agents should Use Marketing Automation to Engage Policyholders

So, if you aren’t slicing and dicing your email database into specific segments and tailoring communication, we hope you prioritize list segmentation in your marketing content going forward. Tip: Email segmentation by geographical location is a great start to personalize campaigns and increase engagement.

Increase Engagement with Targeted Social Media Ads

Over 70 percent of insurance agents utilize social media as the main source for attracting customers born between 1981 and 1996 (otherwise referred to as millennials). However, only 30 percent of insurance agents actually engage with clients on social media.

Social media has evolved far beyond keeping tabs on your friends and redundant scrolling. Today, customers are using social platforms to not only connect, but also to research and make purchases.

To increase engagement with potential policyholders, your marketing team should be distributing frequent and organic, relevant content on each platform. Furthermore, insurance agencies should use social media ads to promote brand awareness and gain more of the market share by reaching leads out of their range.

While you can promote your insurance services on every platform, we recommend investing in Facebook retargeting ads.  Facebook is the biggest social media platform in the world with roughly 2.85 billion monthly active users. Targeted Facebook ads help retain potential policyholders who displayed interest via browsing your insurance website, but exited without a purchase or request of your services.

Analytics and Reporting: Automate for Better Engagement

What gets measured gets improved. Only 16% of insurers expressed that they’ve assimilated full benefit from their customer data. That leaves over 80% of insurers who are uncertain who they’re communiating to, where their prospects are within the sales funnel, and whether their marketing approach is up to par with the consumer needs and preferences.

Are you marketing efforts bringing in no Return on Investment (ROI)? Do you have random optimization with no end goals? Is your cost per acquisition high? With Google Analytics, insurance agents have unlimited access to a plethora of data to help them understand the behavioural metrics of the policyholder. Building an audience engagement strategy based on accurate measurable data and insights, is a significant primary step.

Ready to benefit from all the amazing benefits of Google Analytics but hesitant on where to start? Google Analytics 101 and How to Use it to Maximize Revenue explains GA’s top essential metrics to help you identify the policyholders behaviour and therefor, personalize your marketing strategy to increase engagement. Start by setting goals in Google Analytics and based on its conversion and results, alter, strengthen, and evolve your marketing focus.

Now that you have more knowledge in regards to analytics and reporting, it’s time to clean up your data. Inaccurate data can kill a marketing campaign before it can even thrive. Poor reporting and insights wastes time, money, energy and increase bounce rates, exit rates and even encourage policyholders to hit that unsubscribe button.

These are the negative repercussions your insurance company will face if your data is out of date and website visitor ID and tracking in neglected.

Wrapping it Up

A Marketing Automation Software along with an Insurance Agent Management Software provides coherency and the tools insures require to segment policyholders and further personalize dynamic content. With access to reporting and insights, insurance agents can identify the behavioural metrics of policyholders and personalize marketing promotions and interactions to increase engagement and cross sell additional coverage.

As your Insurance agency evolves, it becomes increasingly vital for your data to enhance your workflow rather than obstruct it. Yocale’s Insurance Agent Management Software provides insights and analytics agents need to improve customers engagement. Having access to client’s quotes, policies, past purchases in one organized place with up-to-date information accelerates the sales cycle in insurance.

Incorporate powerful technologies to streamline processes more efficiently. Request More Information.

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