Your independent insurance agency’s success lies in your client base and client service – gaining and keeping clients is what keeps you going. Although you may have a solid client base today, you know the fluid nature of the insurance business, and are always on the lookout for new clients. You need to constantly gain leads to keep your agency thriving.
In order to gain leads, you’ll need to take a look at your current clients. Once you have an idea of who you’ve already attracted, you’ll get insight in to what type of audience to target for new clients. Once you know that, you’ll need to think about howto attract more of these leads.
Once you know the who and what, it’s down to how to gain leads. In this post, we’ll look at some more traditional methods for lead generation. In our next post, we’ll cover some newer methods, which should be used alongside these traditional approaches.
DIRECT MAIL
“Snail mail” sent directly to a potential client’s home or business.
Choose the right way – postcard, brochure, greeting card, flyer
Make it stand out – bright colors, eye-catching designs
Include something special – discount, limited time promotion, etc.
Test it – ask trusted clients what they think
Follow up – call, email or send a follow up letter reaching out
REFERRAL
Providing incentive for current clients to refer new clients.
Offer a discount –offer rewards like a free month or a discount on adding a new car to a policy
Create a contest – enter those who referred someone in a drawing to win gift card to a local business, like a car wash or home and garden store
Send in the mail – enclose an easy to pass along flyer or postcard to expand your reach
Thank clients for their referral – call or send an email, and publicize those who have referred on social media, your enewsletter and other forms of marketing
WORD OF MOUTH
Individuals (clients, car dealers, real estate agents, etc.) telling others about your agency.
Give special access – help your clients and partners feel exclusive, letting them in on special announcements and frequently asking for their feedback, so they’ll want to share with others
Make sharing easy – allow individuals to share their experiences and have them seen by posting them on your website, social media, in your enewsletter, etc.
Ask for ideas – when your clients share what they want, make it happen – they will be eager to share about something they feel a part in creating
Identify influencers – specifically target clients who refer often, provide lots of feedback, and have a large social media reach as their word will make a larger impact
Once you’ve got leads coming in, your next step is to create a system to track them. We suggest using your agency management system, as you plan to add these individuals to your client base. Partner XE users find it a great tool for lead management with capabilities like Outlook integration and mobile access, agents can keep track of an individual as they move from prospect to life-ling client.
To find out more about what Partner XE can offer, contact us today at 800.747.9273 or [email protected].
In this third post on improving your independent insurance agency’s website, we focus on your site’s content. There is some content that is obvious to include, like your agency’s contact information and a description of your services, but just having the bare minimum won’t make your agency attractive and memorable to potential clients.
According to a recent study, 78% of consumers see custom content as a sign that an organization wants to build a good relationship with them. By giving your clients the content they want, you will also attract other agencies and industry leaders, thus increasing your site’s reach.
The first step is to know who you’re reaching. Ask questions like:
Where do my clients and potential clients live? How old are they?
Do they spend more time on their phone or their computer?
What challenges do they face?
What information can my agency share to help them?
Once you’ve honed in on who your audience is, start thinking about what they need. Here are a few popular content items that you should consider adding to your website:
FAQ section
Online quoting
Online claim filing
Links to online raters
Online change requests
Printable certificates of insurance
With all of these content items, be sure to include a strong call to action. This is typically placed at the end of a page and in the last step of any online process, telling the user what to do next. To help generate leads, you can include a “contact an agent” or “share this quote” – anything you can do to try and capture user information.
In addition to the resources mentioned above, it is a good idea to reach out to your target audience in a purely educational format, providing valuable content by way of a blog. You can easily generate blog content by:
Jotting down notes as clients ask questions or have concerns and address those questions: you will soon find you have a steady stream of inspiration
Making your blog personable: Highlight staff members, clients and local events
Sharing industry tips and tricks that can be picked up and shared by other sites: this increases your reach, and your links, boosting your online reputation
We at SIS love sharing relevant info and tools through our blog. One tool we are proud to share is the new 2014 Partner XE, which includes dozens of upgrades to help your agency. To get the full story on what Partner XE can do for your agency, contact us today!
Responsive website design refers to designing a website that presents itself in the best possible way for the device it’s being viewed on. The SIS website uses responsive design, so if you’re using a desktop computer try changing the width of this window from stretching all the way across your screen to shrinking it as small as it will go. As you change the size of the window, you’ll see parts of the site rearrange themselves. That is responsive website design.
Why Responsive Design
More people today are using mobile devices like phones and tablets to access websites than ever before. You never know how someone may access your site, so you want to prepare for all possibilities.
Traditional sites can cause a few problems when viewed on a smaller screen like on a phone.
The text can appear very small. The size of your font and the length of your lines of text might look nice when they appear on a computer monitor, but they could be unreadably small on a phone screen. A responsive website will resize the text and change the line breaks to keep everything readable.
Traditional menus can be difficult to use on a phone. Typical website menus that require you to hover your mouse over one item on the menu to see the other menu-items that are “below” it in the menu-order sometimes don’t even work on a phone. Instead, responsive websites usually entirely change the menu to function as a drop-down list, making it much easier to navigate on a small screen.
Many site layouts are designed for wide screens, not vertically aligned phone screens. Your computer screen is probably horizontally aligned. That means if your site were designed only for your computer monitor it would probably have multiple vertical elements (like sidebars). When the width of your screen is only three inches across, though, it can be difficult to make sense of what you’re looking at. A responsive site will take sidebars and move them from the side of the screen to below the other content when viewed on a phone.
How to Use Responsive Website Design
Taking advantage of the benefits of responsive website design is surprisingly simple. Many of the common website-building tools (like WordPress, Joomla, and Drupal) include templates and tools to help you build a responsive website. If you are working with a marketing partner to build your site, ask them about responsive website design, and make sure your site will be responsive.
Your website is complicated mix of technology and marketing. It’s an intersection of many of your agency’s services, helping you gain new customers and keep the ones you have. Because of the important role of your website, it’s important that you invest in it and make sure it is up-to-date. You need to consider the different roles your site plays to make the right investments in it.
Digital Storefront
You know to make sure your storefront or office looks nice because potential and current customers will consider your storefront to reflect the kind of business you run. No matter how simple it is, your storefront is an expression of your brand.
Think of your website as your “digital storefront.” It will form important first impressions for potential customers, and your current customers will see it as a reflection of the service you offer. You want to make sure your website – from how fast it loads to what it looks like – reflects the business you run. It should match the brand you want to convey and provide functionality to help you gain new customers and keep the ones you have.
Inbound Lead Generation
Your website should be built in a way that helps it earn new business for you. There are two components to building a site that will do this for you: an effective search engine optimization (SEO) strategy and the ability to collect website visitor information via website forms.
Improving your SEO will cause you to be found more for searches on Google and other search engines. The best SEO strategies are built into websites from the ground-up, beginning with when the website is first being conceived. Your SEO strategy should target specific local searches in your area. For instance, if you’re in Columbus, Ohio, you’ll want to specifically target searches like “auto insurance in Columbus.”
Once you get prospects on your site, you want to make sure they contact you to buy insurance or learn more about your services. Your site should include effective calls to action (like “Request a quote”) with website forms that allow prospects to easily contact you.
Self-Service
If your site doesn’t include self-service functionality yet, you should begin thinking about if this kind of functionality would be a good fit for your business. “Self-service” refers to the ability for customers to take care of some services on your site without needing to take up your time or the time of those in your office.
You might want to think about allowing customers to print off auto-ID cards, for instance. There are other self-service capabilities your customers may be interested, too. If you talk to them you’re likely to find more. Allowing your customers to take care of these services automatically through your site frees up the people in your office to take on more important tasks.
Your website is a hub of activity for your agency. It’s important to keep it up-to-date to help you gain new customers and keep your current customers impressed with your service.
Many insurance agencies are now marketing their company online. The key to doing this correctly, without spending too much money is a challenge for many agencies to overcome.
Another key item to focus on when setting up a digital marketing campaign is search engine optimization (SEO). SEO is the method of affecting the visibility of a website in a search engine’s (such as Google or Yahoo) search results. The higher ranked websites appear not only closer to the top of the list of search results, but more frequently in a list of search results as well. Essentially, the higher the SEO the more clicks or viewers a website is bound to receive. Search engine optimization takes a lot of in-depth knowledge and you may need to hire a professional in the field to assist with an SEO initiative.
So how can you ensure your website is promoting a strong marketing message with a high SEO? Here are a few tips to assist you in managing these items.
Website Marketing Strategies
Spend Ample Time on your Home Page: Your home page is one of the most important marketing assets on your website. It is best to look at your home page as your calling card or face to the world. Many customers research their purchases online prior to making a decision. Make sure your home page is professional, informative, well-organized, and contains your contact information.
Follow the Rule of Simplicity: Making sure the design of your website is simple will make it easier not only for visitors to gather information, but for you to update information as well. A website that is easy to use with a clean design and simple navigation will be more inviting for viewers.
Build Your Business: The main reason for having a website is bring in business for your company. Viewing your website as a sales generating tool opposed to simply a flashy brochure will generate more web leads and business opportunities. Initially, you want to drive customers to your site, keep them there with a professional look, simple navigation, and compelling content, invite customers to join your email list or blog, and follow-up with them to build trust and business.
Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
Select Your Keywords: The first step of your SEO process is deciding what terms you want to try to optimize for. Try to put yourself in the shoes of your potential customers and think what they are searching online. (Keep in mind many of their searches may include their city or neighborhood.) Once you have come up with as many potential searches you can think of, pick the most important phrases and words from those searches. These will be the keywords you will target on your site.
Incorporate Keywords into Your Page Titles: Write a descriptive title for each page using keywords you want people to find you with. (Your titles should be less than 70 characters long.) Page titles are the easiest way for you to target searches for specific keywords. Remove as many unnecessary words from the title as possible (i.e. as, the, and, etc.), however, ensure the title is still readable. This title will be your identity on the search engines, so try to incorporate your business type as well as your business name.
Make a Site Map: Creating a site map page with links to all of the pages on your website is not only helpful to visitors, but search engines as well. This is especially the case if your website is large and contains a lot of pages. There are free tools available such as www.XML-Sitemap.com that will assist your creation of an XML sitemap. Simply upload it to your website following creation and submit it to the search engine companies. Instruction on how to submit your sitemap is available on each search engine site.
Write Meta Descriptions: When you conduct a search online, the each result has a link and an accompanying description of that page. You can use tools like this one, Yoast SEO, to customize these descriptions. The tool you use to write these will depend on what you used to make your site. These descriptions serve as an ad for your pages, encouraging searchers to click on your page instead of the other search results.
Fine Tune Your Site: Once you have made an effort to increase your SEO, utilize software such as WebPosition to check your current ranking and compare your webpage against competitors. Based on the results and suggestions made by WebPosition, tweak and fine-tune your website to increase your SEO. Finally, keep in mind that the search engines decide what to list and how to list it. If you write page titles that seem to just pack keywords in without saying what’s actually on the page, for instance, the search engines are likely to pick their own title for that page. Think of the titles and page descriptions as suggestions to the search engines. If they are truthful and well-written, the search engines are more likely to accept them.
This means it is imperative that your agency stay on top of your marketing game by utilizing effective and innovative marketing techniques. One website marketing technique that we have found to be very successful is writing creative and helpful blog posts such as this one to provide our clients with the information they need to succeed. While not each blog that we write will apply to each of you, we strive to provide helpful insight that could be referenced, if not now, in the future as your agency grows. Building a similar relationship with your current and potential clients via blog posts on your website will not only convey your interest in their success, but will assist in building relationships as well.
Aside from providing a solid software platform to help agencies run better, we aim to provide assistance to our agency partners in every way we can. For that reason, we have taken the time to research and write about areas such as this that we feel would be of benefit to independent agents. In cases such as this we are able to draw from the knowledge of the marketing team at NuGrowth Solutions, our parent company, and Agency Marketing Partners, the insurance marketing arm of our business.
If you would like to find out more about our core competence – our Partner XE agency management system – and how it can help you as you strive to streamline workflow and build your books of business, please contact us at 800-747-9273 or [email protected].
We’re almost halfway through the year, and a lot has changed since January. At this mid-year mark, we took a look back at some of our most popular posts and put together a list of the essentials. These posts can help hone your insurance marketing strategies for the remainder of the year and beyond.
Posts to Improve Service
• What Customers Want and the Insurance Software to Get It (view post)
• What Insurance Tech Do Agency Customers Want (view post)
• Digital Insurance Customer Service: Keeping it Personal (view post)
Insurance is now digital insurance. The same goes for almost every consumer sector – from banking to healthcare and beyond, most consumers are finding what they need online.
But just because people are searching for what they need online doesn’t mean they only make purchases via digital means. Customers still want that personal connection, they just want to get business done faster.
This is the conundrum of the independent insurance agency – responding quickly, yet personally, to prospects and customers. These statistics tell that story.
When it comes to your insurance prospects and customers, there are three main areas to focus on:
1. Improving ease and speed of service
2. Personalizing prospect and customer experience
3. Gaining data for expert advice
Each of these areas answers the question, “what do insurance customers want?”. Are you leveraging the right insurance sales software and processes to respond to these needs?
Responsive website design refers to designing a website that presents itself in the best possible way for the device it’s being viewed on. The SIS website uses responsive design, so if you’re using a desktop computer try changing the width of this window from stretching all the way across your screen to shrinking it as small as it will go. As you change the size of the window, you’ll see parts of the site rearrange themselves. That is responsive website design.
Your website is complicated mix of technology and marketing. It’s an intersection of many of your agency’s services, helping you gain new customers and keep the ones you have. Because of the important role of your website, it’s important that you invest in it and make sure it is up-to-date. You need to consider the different roles your site plays to make the right investments in it.
Many insurance agencies are now marketing their company online. The key to doing this correctly, without spending too much money is a challenge for many agencies to overcome.