Insurance Agent Web Power

Your Agency and the Independent Agency Distribution System

For thirty-years now, pundits have been predicting the demise of the independent agency in personal lines.  It still  hasn’t happened.  Oh sure, there have been losses in market share over the last several decades, mostly to captive agency companies, but also some to the direct marketing companies.   But there are still plenty of insurance agencies making a good living producing personal lines.  Can it last?  I think so, but I’m betting that over the next 10 years there will be a far smaller number of agencies with the majority of their revenue coming from car and home insurance and those agencies that are 60% commercial today will be 75% – 80% commercial.  That means less income stability year-to-year for most agencies; personal lines, while not sexy, does’t exhibit the rate and underwriting capacity volatility that commercial insurance does.

But some agencies will continue to thrive in personal lines and I have a good idea which ones.  Here’s how to tell if your insurance agency is likely to be one of the personal lines survivors – just answer this question:  How many policies does your agency have per personal lines account?  Here are your possible answers:

1. I have no idea
2. about 1.5 policies
3. 3 or more policies

If you chose answer 1 or 2, and you don’t make some changes to your customer development programs (i.e., actually implement some customer development programs) then your agency has no future in personal lines.  If you chose answer 3 then you probably will continue to produce personal insurance business profitably.

What has really changed in 20 years?  A lot, yet in some respects, nothing.

I was at an industry conference in the fall of 2011, the keynote speaker was Risk Information’s Brian Sullivan.  As always, he delivered some thought provoking information in an engaging way.  During the Q and A, someone asked him what he thought about the future of personal lines for independent agents.  His answer, more-or-less, went like this:  Independent agents can continue to grow in personal lines but they have to do something to justify the extra cost of doing business (within the independent agency system).  The only way to do that profitably is to do more business with fewer clients.  Today, most agents don’t do anything extra and the average number of policies per personal lines account is 1.4.

Over 20 years ago, I spent time in a lot of insurance agencies, helping them analyze their marketing opportunities and one of the things I measured was the number of policies per personal lines account.  Guess what that number was.  If you guessed 1.4, you would be absolutely right.  The number hasn’t changed in over 20 years; the conclusion I would have to draw is that most agents, despite all the rich and inexpensive communication mediums available today, still don’t communicate regularly with their customers.  That is, there is no systematic communication process to capture more account sales, improve retention, and earn more referrals.  However, the agencies that have 3 or more policies per account are on their way, and for the most part, these agencies are using their website blog, Facebook, and email newsletters to build relationships with customers and reinforce their value proposition.

I have seen estimates of seven as the average number of ‘personal’ insurance polices held by the average person.  I can’t cite the source however, so instead, let’s think about policies a person should have in three groups:  Must Have, Should Have, Might Need…

Must Have (Bought Products)

• Car Insurance
• Home, Condo or Renters Insurance

So there’s two.  They are in the Must Have group because (with the exception of renters insurance) the state or the bank require most of us to have this kind of insurance.  These insurance policies are what I call ‘bought’ products, meaning you don’t have to create demand for them – people will shop for them and buy them because they have to.  Because of that, most insurance agents start their personal insurance relationships with one of these products.  Unfortunately, most agents also end their customer relationships with these products as well.

Should Have (Sold Products)

• Life Insurance
• Health Insurance
• Disability or Accident Insurance
• Critical Care Insurance
• Inland Marine (Valuable Articles)

I’m counting Inland Marine as a separate policy because it is often written on as a separate line from homeowner insurance.  Most people, even renters, have some personal property that is not adequately covered by unendorsed home, condo or renters insurance.  Yet how many property policies in your book-of -business include some inland marine policies?  Individuals may get basic life insurance through their employer as well as health and disability, but we all know that employee benefits have been slashed over the last several years and far fewer people have employer-provided coverage today.  Maybe your agency doesn’t write life, health or disability.  That’s a business decision and is certainly your call – but if that’s the case, instead of 5 more potential product relationships you are limited to one.  These policies are different than the Must Haves in that there is generally no government agency or financial institution telling people they have to buy one of these policies.  For that reason, I call these products ‘sold’ products; you have to create a demand through education and that requires customer communications.

Might Need (could be Must Have or Should Have)

• Boat Insurance
• Home Business
• ATV, RV
• Motorcycle
• Pet Insurance

There are more of these, of course, but these insurance policies are the most commonly needed.  Sometimes, as in the case of motorcycle insurance, the products are actually ‘bought’ products courtesy of the DMV licensing process; other times, individuals will finance a boat or RV and the bank will create demand for you.  Home business insurance and pet insurance are most always ‘sold’ products – you’ll have to do a little work.

So in short order we have a list of 12 fairly common personal insurance policies.  The average of 7 per person is starting to look very plausible.

Developing deep customer relationships in personal lines requires systematic communication.  That communication can be scheduled in advance – a newsletter, for instance.  That communication can be planned in advanced but developed ad hoc, as information becomes available – Facebook or blog posts, e.g.  But systematic communications should also be situational.  For instance, I recently filed two auto insurance claims.  In both cases, I contacted the insurance company claims department directly, because that’s what I was instructed to do.  The insurance company did a good job for me in both cases (of course, I haven’t seen my renewal premium yet).  I knew what to expect, was kept apprised of the process and settlement was speedy.  And the number of times my insurance agent checked in with me during either claim?  Zero.  If I were a cynical person, I might start to ask myself why I have an agent at all.  And when my renewal does come, and most likely with a premium increase, do you think I will hear from my insurance agent then?  Probably not.  It’s scenarios like this that predispose consumers to shop their insurance – and never tell their agent.  If I were to move my car insurance I would become a one policy account instead of two…and I’ll bet my agent’s policy per account ratio is 1.4.  Does he have a future in personal lines?  I’m dealing with anecdotal evidence here, but it doesn’t look like to me.

How about your insurance agency – do you have a future in personal lines?

What Kind of Internet Marketing Should Your Insurance Agency Be Doing Right Now?

I’m going to vastly oversimplify the exercise of choosing internet marketing components by making these assumptions:

• You know your insurance agency’s target customers, your key products, and your geographic marketing area;
• You have decided upon which traditional marketing programs you will use -direct mail, print advertising and the like;
• You have a budget for marketing and you know how much of that budget is available to you;
• You also know which programs will be implemented in-house and which ones will be outsourced.

So it’s August already…and your insurance agency is coming up a little short on some sales commitments that could cost you some contingency income and maybe some other preferential treatment from one or more of your insurance companies.  Your problem is short term in nature and you need a short term fix.

For most agencies, the main internet marketing options are these:

• Email marketing (in the short term, this would be confined to your current list)
• Local Search Optimization
• Organic Search Optimization
• Social Media Marketing
• Pay-Per-Click (or PPC)

On a relative basis, the costs for reach line up something like this:

Since we assumed you know your insurance agency’s available marketing budget, you may be able to rule out an option or two at the outset.  But budget aside, each program has different lag-time to sales and each program has a different sales production curve as you move to and through program maturation.   The next illustration shows the different lag times as you move through implementation phases:

This should make your choices fairly easy.  In the short term, Local Search Optimization and Email Marketing are probably your best bet.*  If you don’t have a good email list, one that has been updated, then your option may winnow down to just Local search optimization.  But September is right around the corner and your insurance companies, if they haven’t already done so, are going to start talking to you about marketing plans and commitments for next year.  So it’s a good idea to also consider the longer term sales potential of some of these programs.  Relative to each other, that potential over time looks like this:

When you have the luxury of time, return on investment (ROI) should enter into your decision criteria.  The chart below shows ROI ranges for both social media marketing and SEO.  There is some risk associated with each tactic for multiple reasons (I may blog about that later, if someone asks me to).  But the range of risk is something like good-to-great as opposed to horrible-to-good.  Risks associated with SEO and social media marketing are something most of us can accept and still sleep at night.  PPC would appear to be another matter.   PPC can produce acceptable ROI, but because insurance keywords are so expensive, pay-per-click ROI is unacceptably low for many insurance products.

*although as your short term gets shorter your only option may be to purchase leads

Here’s what Wikipedia has to say about ecommerce, ‘… (it) consists of the buying and selling of products or services over electronic systems such as the Internet and other computer networks’.  They say a little more of course, and concede there is often a physical deliver component, but for the most part, the classic definition of ecommerce involves little more than circuits and networks.

The Seduction of Insurance Ecommerce

And the idea of ecom is alluring, how can it not be?  You set up a website, humans find it and enter information, get coverage and pricing information, and then enter payment information.  On the other end,  money comes out, straight into the pocket of the insurance provider.  And there’s flaw number one with insurance as ecommerce from an insurance agent’s perspective:  There is no role for the insurance agent in the foregoing scenario.  If insurance consultation and purchase could be conducted this way, why would anyone need an agent.  This view of insurance and ecommerce was pretty much the thinking in 1995 and it hasn’t come to pass yet.

Life Insurance and Auto Insurance for Basic Needs Consumers

That isn’t to say that some insurance sales have gone mostly online, term life and personal auto are two examples.  But even there, many consumers would be better served by involving a trusted adviser.  I sometimes ask agents how often coverage options on an original car insurance quote submission end up the issued policy limits.  The answer is almost never.  That’s because, even for basic auto insurance, consumers don’t understand how to determine coverage needs or the interplay between deductibles and other credits.  And while term life quote requests are easy to complete, not every company offers advantageous rates to consumers with health concerns or  a little long in the tooth.  A little experienced guidance would come in handy for many term life prospects.

A Shot in the Foot?

Advertising by term life insurance companies, and particularly advertising by the likes of direct marketing giant GEICO, lead people to believe they don’t need an agent.  And that mentality extends beyond just those two products.  Insurance agents have lots of opportunities now to participate in ecommerce through auto and home rating portals for comparative rateers, like EZLynx and Silver Plume, and company provided website widgets that allow website visitors to quote and buy online.  But if we just throw these on our websites indiscriminately aren’t we just reinforcing the message being pounded out by GEICO?  Are we shooting ourselves in the foot?

Internet Communication with a Sprinkle of Ecommerce

Most agents are local businesses and are no where close to fitting a traditional ecommerce model.  Most insurance agents can deliver benefits that can’t be matched by ecommerce alternatives but they need to make the case for agency value proposition and that’s where internet communication comes in.  Using email, the agency website, and social media agents have multiple low cost channels through which they can reach out to customers and prospects and communicate differentiate value propositions; but we need to actively communicate and those communications need to include a clear and advantageous alternative to quoting and buying online.

There is evidence that consumers want, and maybe even expect, to be able to get comparison pricing online.  So let them do it, but also let them know that going lone wolf may not yield the best combination of price, protection, claim paying ability and service, and convenience.  And let them know you have a good alternative – your insurance agency.

Something Old, Something New

I talk to a lot of insurance agents.  Some are happy with their sales and profit growth, most aren’t.  That’s one thing most agencies have in common.  Some have little free cash to invest in marketing programs, some have literally invested over $100,000 in what they believe to be state-of-the-art marketing systems.  Even these agencies have something in common.  Almost none of them are engaging in the four basic tactics that cost almost nothing and deliver demonstrable sales results.  Two of the tactics are as old as dirt and two of them wouldn’t exist without the internet.  As much as anything, I think that shows that the insurance agent who achieves top quartile growth combines a little of the old with the new.

The New

Local Search

Almost all insurance shoppers turn to the internet at some point during their research and purchase process.  And increasingly they are presented with a short list of local businesses next to a map.  Informal research conducted by Confluency Solutions indicates that 80% of all insurance agents have not claimed their local listing with Google Places, Bing Local, or Yahoo Local.  Claiming and enhancing your agency’s business listing is free and takes little time.  That’s why every agent who cares about sales growth needs to manage their visibility in local search.

Email Marketing

Email marketing has been with us for so long that it hardly seems new but it was not possible without the internet.  Spam abuse has brought us tightened regulations (CAN-SPAM) and tightened email filters to keep out unwanted email.  Many agencies use email abuses as a rationale for not collecting and using email addresses.  But, as the Marketing Sherpa chart below shows, those businesses that use email marketing, have *not* seen diminishing returns over the last three years.

There are lots of techniques for gathering email addresses and obtaining permission to send out emails but the best place to start is with your customers and current prospects.  Intelligent email communications to the first group improves retention, account sales, and referrals.  Emails to the second group can introduce additional product (sales), expand your insurance agency value proposition, and maximize sales conversions.  And emailing to either group will have almost no impact on your marketing budget.  You can get money for nothing.

The Old

Lost Business Reclamation

Customers leave for a variety of reasons but always a variation on the ‘grass is greener on the other side’.  Often it isn’t.  Customers are frequently gone before you know you’ve lost them.  In those cases where an agency can learn about a potential customer defection before it happens, the customer is retained 86% of the time.  They just want to know you care.  And if you show them that you care, even after customers have left your insurance agency, you can win back that lost business.  You can pick and choose who you want back, and a process employing a few well placed phone calls, surveys, and emails can bring ex-customers back into the fold once you’ve helped them realize the grass really isn’t greener on the other side.

Managed Referrals

Most agencies get nearly 70% of their new business from referrals.  Nothing wrong with that, except that in most cases those referrals happen fortuitously.  A simple program, wherein you reward customers for referrals with small gifts and constantly promote – with your email, website, on-hold message, and conversation – the existence of your referral program, you can increase the number of referrals your insurance agency receives dramatically.  Of course, if you are employing the first three tactics discussed in this post, your percentage of new business from referrals will decline.  But there is nothing wrong with that – it’s all low acquisition cost.

This Marketing Sherpa Chart of the Week provides an interesting context through which to view your insurance agency website analytics and lead management results.  Not all website inquiries turn into leads, but this chart suggests  that a healthy proportion could, and probably should.  If you are getting a lot of traffic but little sales activity, then some page redesign may be in order.  Of course, you have to be able to track lead sources first, especially since a significant proportion of web-sourced quote opportunities ultimately arrive by phone.

What this chart suggests is that, if you get 100 new visitors to your insurance agency website, 38 of them would graduate to sales-ready lead status; indicators of this might be signing up for a newsletter, staying on  your website more than two minutes, viewing 4 or more pages, or visiting a specific page to view a video or use an interactive tool.  All of this can be measured through site analytics.  Generally, you would define someone as a prospect when you have a chance to quote.  If the chart above is representative of your agency then of the original 100 web inquiries, you would have a chance to quote on about 15 (100 times 38% times 39%); again, these quotes might happen by phone or they might come through the website.  Ultimately, for every 100 new visitors, assuming site design helps people graduate to lead status, you would write about 4 new customers.

Not all visits are new, but if we assume that site visits breas down in a 60% customer visits, 40% new consumers visits ratio, then 500 unique visitors to your website in a month should beget between 8 and 9 new customers.  Additionally, some of your customer traffic should result in new sales as well, particularly if you are directing customers to website insurance resources through links in monthly e-mail newsletters.  We consistently hear from agents that about 1 new policy is written each month from e-newsletter campaigns for each 100 emails.

So, what would a modestly promoted website do for an small agency sending out 500 emails each month?  If 1.5 policies are written for each new customer and that number is added to the customer development policies sales resulting from just the e-newsletters, monthly totals would stack up like this:

14 policies per month from new customers
5 policies per month from existing customers
19 new policies each month purely from web sources

That’s 228 new insurance policies a year; not enough to turn your independent agency into a e-marketing phenom, but generally enough to feed one of your carrier commitments for the year, and the extra $35,000 – $75,000 in commission revenue (recurring, by the way) is a nice addition to the bottom line.

One more thought before I go:  independent surveys performed by comScore and Google all suggest that between 70% and 80% of consumers will go to the web after seeing an ad for insurance.  The more traditional advertising and direct mail you do, the more site visits you should see – if your campaign is effective.  What happens to those inquiries, that is, how many convert to leads and prospects, has a lot to do with landing page design.  So if you are going to spend a significant amount of money on an ad campaign, it makes sense to put a little time into designing and testing a landing page for that campaign.  If you do, you can maintain or improve upon the inquiry –> sales conversion rates shown in the chart and achieve a much higher ROI for a traditional advertising campaign.

Poor old email.  Celebrities don’t use it to communicate their fans, and infotainment talking heads encourage viewers to check their Twitter tweets. So is email dead?  Should we send out the funeral service notices?  The chart below tells the tale.

Poll:  How do you share information you receive in email?

Despite the hype surrounding blogging, Facebook, Twitter, and social networking in general, email is still the way most people share information with friends, family, and associates.  Social media is a very, very distant second.  That doesn’t mean that your insurance agency shouldn’t be developing a social media strategy, but the chart should give you a visual clue as to the amount of time you should be spending on that social media vs. gathering, managing and using email addresses.

I can’t quite leave the theme raised in the last post:  is it technology or is it communication?  I also can’t quite move on from using the lazy approach to posting:  video.  Watch as I opine:  I don’t see the reticence many insurance agents have toward using email as being a new phenomenon; and watch as I wax nostalgic on managers from my distant past not setting a good example using tools they encourage others to use.  Insurance agents are under utilizing email, a tool that is certainly in decline as social networking gets bigger.  It’s time to maximize email benefits before it’s too late.

I have had several insurance agency managers and owners tell me recently that they have employees who prefer to forward business emails to personal accounts because they are more comfortable with their personal email service, or they want to work at home and the agency doesn’t have or permit web mail access to the agency email.

You cannot stop agency employees from forwarding emails to themselves, but approving of the practice can create some risks for your agency.

• Emails sitting on home computers can potentially be viewed by any family member; and especially where the family includes kids, by friends of family members. It is inevitable that private client information will be contained in some of these emails. Allowing employees to forward business emails creates privacy violation possibilities.
• You have some control over viruses when employees use business email,but not so much when personal email is used. What happens when your employees’personal (business email) transmits a virus that crashes a client’s business email? The possibilities are gruesome and numerous.
• Permitting employees to forward work emails to personal accounts can allow individual employees, over time,to amass a good deal of account information in a repository outside of the agency. That provides a great big hole in any measures you may have taken to protect proprietary account information, and can make it easier for an employee leaving the agency to take accounts with them.
• What about allowing only ‘trusted employees’ to forward business email to personal accounts? Unfortunately, the precedent set can allow another ‘less trusted’ employee to forward email and then claim they didn’t realize the policy regarding forwarding emails was selective.

Employees may still forward emails, but random monitoring of outgoing email should alert you to an violations of a policy against forwarding to personal addresses.

YouTube vs. Eyejot

There are a few differences between YouTube and Eyejot that you might want to consider before selecting one or the other for your video storage and playback on your insurance agency (or other business) website.

YouTube videos are publicly accessible via the YouTube site. This can be a good thing or not, depending on what you want to accomplish. Video information can include links back to your business so the fact that your videos may be found on YouTube may help with web traffic. Inasmuch as YouTube is available via m.google.com offerings, videos you may upload to the service and your videos can be viewed on a mobile browser.

YouTube also allows you to permit or deny others the ability to copy and embed your video in another website. You can also add annotations (like your agency web address), and allow or disable comments from others via the YouTube site. YouTube also provides a number of options that are worth checking out like RSS feeds, statistical tracking that can all help draw people to your videos on YouTube, and to your insurance agency website.

Eyejot videos are accessible to you through an in-box that Eyejot provides. The only way to gain access is if you use Eyejot to send a video email, or if you add the video and player by pasting the embed code onto a web page.

Set Up a Blog for Videos

Pasting embed code onto a web page should be very routine maintenance item that your web master, or hosting provider should turn around quickly. If you aren’t able to get quick updates from your provider, or control them yourself, you should really think about changing providers. As an alternative, you can create a website for content you want to change with some frequency, like videos, by using a free blog service like Blogger or WordPress.

Even if you get satisfactory service from your web hosting provider, setting up separate blog pages may be something to consider. You can use these forums as an interactive testimonial page, and you can include information, and resource links that are more tangential to your agency business. You will need your provider to link to your blog page, but that is a one time service request. After that, you can easily control content and changes via the blog administration.*

Eyejot Video Email

As noted in the Act cFluent newsletter article, Eyejot is primarily a video email service The idea is simple, fire up your web cam, do a video, enter an email address and hit send, and the recipient gets an email with a video player embedded in it.

Recipients of your video email will also be able to copy html embed code that the recipient can use to paste into another website.

You could use video emails to extend a personal invitation for an account review, to remotely – yet personally, introduce key staff to customers who might not otherwise get the chance to meet the people that work on their account. Any other ideas?

*Blogs are part of the ‘Web 2.0′ landscape. One hallmark of Web 2.0 is the ability for the non-technical to use internet based communications by controlling functionality that previously could only be set up and altered by those with technical skills. If you can type a document in Microsoft Word, you can set up and administer a blog site. It’s that easy.