The Case for Customer Retention
There’s an adage that getting new customers is expensive, but keeping them is profitable. Insurance agency owners know this conundrum. Yet, owners continue to struggle with investing in their insurance agency marketing.
A 1990 study by Bain & Company and Harvard Business School’s Earl Sasser famously showed that increasing customer retention rates by 5% can increase profitability by 25-95%. A recent Invesp infographic backed up the case for customer retention, showing it costs five times more to attract a new customer than to keep one.
For insurance agencies, customer retention is especially important: personal and commercial policies can take two to three years to show profit based on commissions paid. Keeping customers around for those two or three years becomes important.
Digital Marketing: Your Customer Retention Boost
Digital marketing allows you to communicate with your customers more effectively and at a lower total cost per impression than ever before. Plus, digital marketing lets you capture information on customer engagement and preferences to continually improve your tactics.
Follow these 8 steps to bolster your agency’s digital footprint
Take a digital newsletter, for example. With today’s technology, you are easily able to write, mass distribute, and collect information on exactly how your customers are interacting with that newsletter. You quickly pull a distribution list from your management system, create the newsletter using agency blog posts, and track interactions through your newsletter distribution platform.
That same newsletter content can be posted to Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Google+, and other areas where your customers engage with your agency. This helpful content can be customized per channel, and all serve to help drive pertinent information to your clients, directing them back to your site for more.
Find out how to do digital marketing…on a budget
And you know what’s happening every step of the way. Through this simple process, you can capture what’s working and where your customers are going. You’ll get stats on who’s visiting your website, accessing your blog, and leveraging your self-service portal among other information.
With this information, you can reach out via phone to touch base. You’ll be armed with the knowledge of what they viewed, giving you insight into what they need, and inviting to help them with more.
It beats the heck out of sending a postcard.
Get Connected through SIS
If you aren’t fighting for space in your customers mindshare – no matter how small that space is – you are essentially surrendering it to your competition. The best way to fight for that space is to get the right tools and tactics. At SIS, we work with our partners at NuGrowth Digital to stay up to date on industry marketing trends, providing solutions through our marketing arm Agency Marketing Partner. And, we continually collaborate with the Partner XE community to integrate the Partner XE agency management system with the latest marketing tools.
