Insurance Agent Web Power

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.