What is it that makes Apple’s iPhone, iMac, iTunes, and other products so wildly successful and easy to use. One suggestion, quoted in a recent NY Times article, is that they are ‘disease’ free; that is, none of these devices is afflicted with ‘featuritis’.
“A defining quality of Apple has been design restraint,” says Paul Saffo, a technology forecaster and consultant in Silicon Valley…They are edited products that cut through complexity, by consciously leaving things out — not cramming every feature that came into an engineer’s head, an affliction known as “featuritis” that burdens so many technology products.
We see insurance agents struggling under the weight of management system features; independent agents have the freedom to represent any insurance company that will sign a contract; to launch a facebook page or twitter feed; agents can build and manage their own websites without worrying about restrictions imposed by one mother-ship product supplier. But does all this freedom of choice lead to featuritis? What is the minimum feature set delivering maximum benefit for independent insurance agents? What do they need from the companies they represent, the marketing programs they choose, website solution and social media options…what is that minimum set of features that is super simple to use and provides the most important set of benefits in such a way that it would make Apple wish they had come up with the answer?
About 18 months ago, Google published a survey that showed that about 70% of the time, consumers finding the name of a business in a print medium next went to the web to learn more about that businesses’ products or services. These consumers turn out to be highly motivated, with nearly 70% purchasing a product or service – from someone. Also about 70% of the time (nice symmetry: 70:70:70), those consumers consummate the sale, not online, but over the phone or in person.
Just this week, Wells Fargo published some survey results about their insurance customers and the findings were similar: customers, particularly those in their 30’s, research insurance online before purchasing. For simple insurance products, like renters insurance, those consumers are willing to buy online. But for more complicated insurance, like car insurance, people want to talk to someone before buying. Spokesperson Melanie Donaghy noted, “when it comes to purchasing, people want an agent to talk to before making the final buy..if auto were as easy as renters insurance we would see more purchases online…”
There are a few obvious take-aways for independent insurance agents:
1. Lack of a quality website will impair sales (a finding also corroborated by PIA studies)
2. You should not use your agency website as a barrier between your people and the prospective customer; that is, don’t make them fill out on line forms – give them a choice
3. You should make it clear on your website that you welcome calls
4. If you want to measure the sales contribution made by your website, you have to ask call in prospects how they found you or if they visited your website before they called
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.
If you want to show up in the top of search rankings for the keyword ‘insurance’, be sure to empty your wallet, hit up all your relatives for loans, and let your kids know they will have to turn in their cell phones and find their own way to pay for college. Here’s a run down of the companies with pages in the top 10 search results for ‘insurance’: State Farm, Allstate, GEICO, Progressive, Insurance.com, esurance, AAA, Farmers, and Liberty Mutual. How does your insurance agency SEO budget stack up against those companies?
But don’t despair, there are alternatives for going head to head against the Goliaths of the insurance industry; the trick is to define the insurance SEO game in terms you can win.
I’m going to explore several options in upcoming blog posts, and I want to start with long tail search. Long tail search terms, not to be confused with long tail insurance claims, are longer keyword phrases. Often, competition is much lower for long tail keywords, and the big competitors are not paying nearly as much attention to them.
Consider that, of the 200 million queries that Google processed in 2004, as much as half were unique. Add to that Google’s 2007 admission that 20% – 25% of all searches were completely new to Google.* What that suggests is an opportunity to capitalize on keyword phrases that will be searched, but that are often missed by the keyword research tools used by big budget on line marketing departments.
There are three simple tactics that insurance agents can use to identify, and benefit from, long tail insurance keywords: 1. Using your staff as a sounding board for new website FAQs; 2. Create keyword ‘demand’ through traditional advertising campaigns; and 3. Use paid search to test out potential long tail search winners. I’m going to tackle the paid search tactic here, and deal with the other two in future blog posts.
Long Tail Search Dressed for Halloween
Paid search can be expensive if you are bidding on common keyword phrases like ‘insurance’, ‘auto insurance’, or ‘business insurance’. The more specific you get, the less expensive the cost-per-click, and likewise, the less competition for those same specific keywords in organic search. Low competition is good, but low competition with zero searches is useless. The trick is to identify long tail keywords that others aren’t competing for, but which also get some search traffic.
Here’s an example. Google’s Keyword tool doesn’t show any data for search results on the phrase, ‘what is uninsured-underinsured motorist coverage?’ But any consumer performing a search using this keyword phrase is clearly looking for some education, and would likely be a high conversion website visitor. The question that has to be asked is whether anyone at all will perform a search using that phrase. A simple way to find out is to use paid search (in the case of Google, paid search is their AdWords program).
Investing a few hundred dollars over the course of a month or two and bidding on potential long-tail search terms like ‘what is uninsured-underinsured motorist coverage?’ will tell you very quickly if you can get some productive search traffic by optimizing for these terms. If the search term turns out to be ineffective, your AdWords account will not charge you, and you are free to use your budget to test other keyword phrases. If you get some click-throughs then you will learn that it may be worthwhile to optimize a few web pages for ‘free’ organic search.
*Excerpted from Aaron Wall’s excellent 50 Kick Ass Keyword Strategies. Check it out for a quick, easy to understand approach to learning what do with keywords.
There is ample evidence that suggest too many options delay decisions and increase dissatisfaction with the choices we make (See Barry Schwartz’s excellent book on the topic: The Paradox of Choice: Why More is Less). Enter a new definition of quality, posited in a Wired Magazine article: The Good Enough Revolution: When Cheap and Simple Is Just Fine. The article leads with discussion of the cheap, and easy to use Flip Ultra camcorder. Despite the lack of features, the camera has sold like hot cakes, grabbing a 17% share of the camcorder market in just two years.
Other ‘good enough to get on with it’ products and services cited in the article include gmail and Zoho Writer, a Microsoft Word substitute with fewer bells and whistles (but most of the features you are actually likely to use). Oh yeah, and what about the advantages of a (relatively) unsophisticated, unmanned Predator aircraft vs. a $45 million F-16 (options, including pilot, may cost extra)?
Wired isn’t alone in noticing that cheap and simple solutions are often the best ones. In the upcoming sequel to Freakonomics – called Super Freakonomics – Steven Leavitt and Stephen Dubner have included a chapter chapter entitled The Fix Is In – And It’s Cheap and Simple.
I think this movement toward ‘good enough is more than effective’ is good news for agency manager perfectionists. Instead of wrestling with decisions about which expensive and complex software or web service to work with, just go with what works, and can be had for little or no money. Here’s a few favorites that insurance agency managers should be thinking about:
For video calls, and free long distance, try Skype. Depending on features you may wish to add (a traditional phone number, the ability to call out to land line or cell phones, e.g.), you may pay a few dollars a month.
And speaking of YouTube, there is no simpler way to get your video converted for streaming and to add it to your website. We have been using YouTube for a variety of purposes at Confluency Solutions, and set up our own channel a little over a year ago. Use YouTube videos to explain insurance coverage, the claim process, or to highlight safety issues. Oh, and the cost – free.
Video email can be free, or you could pay as much as (gasp!) $99 a year. Eyejot is our service of choice. At Confluency, we use it for proposal deliveries, conference/trade show follow ups, and to set up renewal reviews.
Email management, CAN SPAM compliance, and newsletter sign ups can be facilitated by several services. MailChimp is free, as long as your ’subscription’ list is $500 or less. After 500, the monthly fees are low. (Your insurance agency might have 2,000 customers, but how many email addresses do you have?)
For web conferencing, including document and screen sharing, try DimDim. The service is reliable, easy to use, and free for up to 20 attendees in a session.
The list could go on and on, but in my experience, these are good places for most insurance agencies to start.
You could say ‘insurance’ is the answer, and at some level, it is. But that glib answer makes many of us miss several of the imperatives of any business: getting customers, keeping customers, and making sure our customer relationships are profitable (so we can stay in business). I attended a recent agency association convention where I heard two comments repeated that I have heard for years:
1. Oh, you guys do web stuff? I’ll give your information to my technology guy to review.
2. I’m in the insurance business, not the technology business.
I felt the need to post my take on those comments, but I didn’t feel like typing. So here’s what you get:
Please take the time to read to the end and answer our poll question. I’ll share the results in this blog. If you would like to know when they are available, you can follow me on Twitter – @cfluent; or you can subscribe to the RSS feed to this blog. Or just check back here.
I picked up a new guide to writing web page sales copy about a month ago, and finally, due to a power outage the other day*, I had time to really think about it. One common ‘hook’ in sales copy – the thing that grabs your attention sufficiently that you scan a little further – is the problem-solution formula. That’s the most pervasive one, both on and off the web, in insurance sales copy: ‘Your insurance costs too much and we can save you money.” It is a hook that works, of course, or else GEICO wouldn’t continue to beat it to death. I think that is also the easiest one for an insurance agent to latch on to, even though it leaves some of us with the queasy feeling that we are demagoging and commoditizing a service that shouldn’t be a commodity at all.
There is another variation on the problem-solutions recipe that shows up in insurance sales messages. I’m going to call that the Allstate angle after their recent TV advertising campaign: “If you don’t have the right insurance, you could find yourself leaving a courtroom bare-chested, the shirt having just been sued off your back. We won’t let that happen.” That’s a message that seems to work for Allstate, and many independent agents have adopted that same sales hook.
But as I read the copywriting guide, I was struck by the effectiveness of using scarcity as the sales hook – you know, “this offer expires at midnight tonight”, or “we only have five widgets left” (a la QVC). The scarcity message is problematic on a web page – “Look! I just refreshed the page after 2 hours, and there are still ‘only 5 widgets left!” It also requires a little more thought in an insurance context; I mean, is there a limit to the number of insurance policies that can be printed?
But scarcity does fortuitously present itself from time-to-time. A recent example here in Florida followed in the wake of State Farm’s announcement to pull out of the homeowner market. A few of Confluency’s insurance agency customers seized that occasion to let customers and prospects know that their agencies had a number of financially solid markets that could accept State Farm homeowner customers at competitive rates. They also warned (accurately and honestly), that due to market volatility, they might not have the capacity to place homeowner policies indefinitely. The message: procrastinate and increase your risk of not finding quality coverage at competitive rates. And it worked. All three agencies that I know of that used this approach more than doubled their new customers over about a two month period. And then the tumult sibsided, scarcity moved off stage, and new business reverted to normal levels. But what if your agency could manufacture scarcity and make a compelling case to a prospect for why they should act now? I think it can be done, and I think it will improve agency bottom line results. But first, some more background.
Doctors and dentists use a scarcity sales hook when they say they are not taking new patients or they are accepting only referrals (and some agencies work on a referral only basis). These health care providers may not think about positioning their exclusivity as a sales hook. A doctor may have a patient maximum imposed by their malpractice insurer. Or a dentist may simply want to preserve free time and quality of life instead of piling in even more income. But most always, professional service providers recognize the reality imposed by time constraints and the necessary trade off: if I take new patients, I’ll have less time to spend with my existing patients. Insurance agents face the same trade off.
Suppose your agency were to set a monthly new business quota and then let potential customers know that if they wait too long into the month, they may not be able to become a customer. OK, I get it. Who among us is going to say no to a new customer. But hear me out. And by the way, this is something we wrestle with at Confluency Solutions; I firmly believe that within the next 6 – 12 months we will limit the number of new customers we take on for the very reasons I am about to explain.
The fact is, new customers cost money; we all know that. For every quote that converts, somebody had to produce quotes for 3, 4, or 5 prospects that didn’t convert. And every quote opportunity was earned through multiple phone calls, emails, and other lead nurturing activities. All that takes time. How much? Four hours per each new customer? Five? I don’t know, and it will vary from agency to agency. The point is, every minute spent acquiring new customers could be spent nurturing incumbent clients. There are things you do for your customers (or would like to do, if you had the time): personal annual reviews, claims monitoring, educational safety or risk management seminars, etc. And we all know that multiple, high-touch, value-added customer contacts result in better retention, more policies per account, and more referrals.** In short, spending more time with your customers means more income.
All agencies need new customer growth and I’m not arguing against that. But every agency eventually bumps up against a dilemma, wittingly or otherwise. That dilemma is encapsulated in this question: Is my insurance agency producing income from new customers at the expense of income (and better profit) we could produce by developing current customers? To answer that question, you need to have specific customer development activities and results you can measure. Maybe your agency does, maybe not. But for the sake of illustration, and my only hope of wrapping up this post, I’m going to assume a hypothetical agency does have a customer development program in place and can measure the results.
This hypothetical agency has determined the optimal number of new customers is 20 a month. Further, the agency recognizes that half those new customers come from referrals. So the agency decides to set a quota of 10 new customers a month, aside from referrals. Then they craft a sales hook for their website sales pages and other sales collateral that goes like this:
We want to make sure you are never on your own when you have an insurance claim; our agency wants to be available to answer every question you have, in as much depth as you want; we want to recognize when a change in your lifestyle or business situation requires different insurance. Because of that, we may not be able to accept you as a customer. We have to protect the time we need to provide for all our customers’ needs, so we can only accept 10 new customers a month, exclusive of customer referrals. We hope you understand. And we hope you contact us as soon as possible, because we really would like to have you as a customer.
Think about the implications of a sales hook like that. It creates a sense of urgency. It articulates a value (actually value-added) proposition instead of just doling out the usual ‘we’re all about service’ platitudes. It communicates to agency staff the commitment behind the kind of service you expect them to provide customers. It also probably boosts office morale because the sales hook implies that you care about stress and overtime – you want to manage and protect staff time and sanity.
So there it is, scarcity vs. ‘you could save 15% or more’. The anti-GEICO. The question is, would you ever seriously consider implementing an approach like this in your agency. I’d love to know.
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*In his book, The Age of Unreason, Charles Handy wrote about the benefits of unstructured time – protecting time for creative development and ideas; in particular he made not of several top performing companies that allow employees 15% of paid time for tinkering on their own projects. I must confess, that except for sitting around in the dark without electricity for several hours, I can’t remember the last time I enjoyed any unstructured time.
**Of course, not all customer contacts need to consume a lot of time or cost money. For a short video discussion about how to use a gift card program to improve agency results, check out Agency Resources website.
Two ways to use the inexpensive Eyejot video email service to differentiate your insurance agency by making a distinguishing impression on new customers, and compressing the sales process by using video references. For more, check out the video:
There are 3 levels of the Eyejot service, the first is free, the top level Pro Plus is $100 a year. Try it out at the free level, to get comfortable, but the uses and benefits at the $100 level will pay for itself over and over again.
The atmospheric noise about website search engine optimization and search ranking has increased significantly in the last year or so. Insurance agencies are just as caught up in the chatter as other businesses. Search optimization (SEO) and rank are complex topics, with signficant business implicaitons, so much so that our company, Confluency Solutions, has set aside at least six separate segments of an upcoming best practice series to deal with that single topic. At the risk of over-simplifying the matter, I’m going to try and deal with the fundemental issues in this one post. I’m going to do that in three parts by discussing SEO budgeting, metrics to measure website effectiveness, and evaluating a blandishment fom a company offering to provide SEO services.
I don’t know if the economy is behind this or not (snake oil salesmen seem to multiply when times are tough), but the insurance agencies we support at Confluency Solutions seem to be hearing from more and more individuals and companies that can ‘get you higher search rankings’. There are legitimate providers of search optimization services (SEO), of course, and I don’t mean to besmirch the reputation of the several companies that deliver top notch optimization services. I’m just musing on our willingness to listen to money-for-nothing pitches when we are casting about for ways to replace lost income.
The role of SEO for an agency website is complicated because quality of traffic has such a bearing on insurance agency profitability. Most retail businesses, for instance, do not share this challange. If someone arrives at www.widgets.com, places an order for a widget in exhange for a few dollars, the costs and profit associated with that transaction are pretty much known right then and there.
When someone requests a quote via the www.mostexcellentinsuranceagent.com site, cost and profitability may not be known for sometime, and sometimes not at all. Here are a few traffic quality questions that insurance agencies need to concern themselves with:
How many quotes will I have to provide for each sale? Will my conversion rate be too low?
If I spend too much time quoting the wrong kind of business, or quoting prospects that don’t convert, how much other income have I forgone from other sources (opportunity cost)?
How long will I keep that new customer? How much service burden will they place on my staff?
First of all, let me try and address the question of how much you should budget for SEO. I’m skipping right past the question of whether you should optimimize at all – you should. Let me fram the budget issue in terms familiar to an insurance agency.
Suppose a personal insurance customer pays $4,000 a year to insure a home, cars, and a certain level of life and disability coverage. If that customer skipped on insurance coverage altogether, they would save $4,000 certain. If that same customer was involved in a car accident and was sued for $100,000, they would be out a lot of cash in the absence of insurance. Going in the other direction, that same customer could purchase the most fabulous insurance possible – the highest limits, the lowest deductibles, and buy back all the policy exclusions and limitations – and spend perhaps $20,000 a year in premium.
The right answer for that customer is somewhere between $0 and $20,000 in premium and is a question of balance between cost and risk (and the answer may be $4,000). For your agency, the $0 in premium is analagous to having no website at all – no money spent, no website traffic. $20,000 a year might get you a lot of traffic (but not necessarily good quality); so, just with the insurance customer, the right SEO budget answer for your agencyis somewhere in the middle.
Your insurance agency website is an investment in a business tool, and if the investment pays off (ROI), your agency should realize additional commission income in some multiple of the costs associated with the website and SEO. New income sourced from an agency website is often masked because sales influenced by the website but consummated by phone, for instance. I’m not going to cover measuring ROI here, but I think it is important to stop and consider there is a level of complexitity to teasing out reliable ROI. What I am going to cover here are leading edge indicators that will tell you if you are on the right track to acheiving good ROI. Those indicators are Page Rank, Traffic Counts, and Traffic Quality (I’m going to discuss these in an insurance agency context; for a discussion in a more generalized business context, SEOMoz has an excellent whiteboard on SEO consulting that also addresses these metrics, and I’ve included that video at the end of this post).
Page Rank
This is the easiest measure to latch onto because we all see it when we do Google searches. It’s also the one measure that is least indicative of SEO success. Just because one of your web pages ranks in the top 10 in an organic search listing (vs. paid search or local search) doesn’t mean you get site traffic, let alone revenue. Moreover, you would have to ask what ‘ranks’ and ranks for ‘what’? Search listings return web pages, not ‘websites’, although search engine algorithms score website quality when performing page ranking. Individual website pages will rank differently for different search inquiries (that’s the ranks for ‘what’ question). For instance, searches for these plausible search terms will all display different top 10 lists: insurance; auto insurance; insurance Asheville NC, Travelers Insurance Asheville NC. And traffic originating from search on different terms will vary in quality, as we discuss below.
Traffic
This is a better lead edge indicator than page rank because when web searchers click through to your insurance agency website something can actually happen. That web surfer can come back for another visit, sign up for a newsletter, use an interactive tool, or - the holy grail – complete an online form or pick up the phone and request a quote. Without traffic, nothing happens, and since you can have search rank without traffic, traffic numbers are a better measure of SEO effectiveness than search rank.
Traffic Quality
The concept of conversion is not new to insurance agents (e.g., quotes per policy written), and as with quote activity, high conversion website traffic is also better quality. Not all website visits will result in quotes and commission income on the first go-round, but might produce income later. Because of that, the definition of conversion should be expanded. Here are some possibilities:
Average Time on Site; Average Number of Pages Visited; Number of Visits to a Certain Page (like a video, or interactive tool), phone call or email inquiries.
Whatever your definition for ‘conversion’, those measures, like the ones suggested above, should be harbingers of higher future quote and new income activity. Traffic from e-newsletter mailings and from local search will exhibit better quality characteristics than organic search traffic, and visitors arriving via organic search, but using different search terms, will also exhibit differing quality characteristics.
Finally, on the last topic, evaluating an offer to perform SEO. Here are some high level considerations that will allow you to dismiss many offers at a glance:
Did the offer come in an email that resembles spam? Why would the sender use a gmail or hotmail email address instead of an email domain that matches a company website address?
If the sender email domain matches a company address, see if you can find a website for that company using that address. If not, again, why would the sender want to hide?
If you can find a website for the company, and they are offering SEO for a fee, see how well they rank for a term likely to be used by a company searching for a provider like ’search optimiztion consultants’ or ‘SEO services’; many spam emails will suggest the term you should search on, and it may not be one that would actually be used by a company seeking SEO help.
Does the offer guarentee to get you top listings? Nobody can guarentee that because of all the dynamic elements that go into SEO.
Is the email offer confined to improving your ‘website rank’? As noted above, search engines ‘find’ web pages, not websites, and search rank by itself is a weak measure of future ROI.
At the outset I said this was a complext topic, but I hope this post helps your insurance agency evaluate how to fit SEO into your marketing mix. If not, (this is the shameless self-promotion part of this post), sign up for the Confluency Solutions newsletter and find out when the best practice series (including a robust treatment of SEO) kicks off.
In general, I think the most effective bios are the ones that support your agency ‘brand’ and unique value proposition (the things that make you demonstrably different and better than competitors). Suppose for a moment that your brand and UVP include these general attributes:
Professionalism
Service
Personal Relationships
A lot of agencies throw around attributes like those above, but have a hard time backing the words up, or describing what they mean. Staff bios can help. For instance:
Professionalism – Continuing education, designations, and awards all back up and help explain this attribute; so it’s not a bad idea to include that information in staff bios.
Service – There are two kinds of service, and the first type has no place on you bios since it does nothing to promote a brand or UVP that would differentiate your agency. The second kind of service merits consideration for publication. I would lump services into two categories: meeting minimum customer expectations, and exceeding expectations. Returning phone calls on a timely basis and processing transactions accurately are both expected. If you don’t measure up, you have a problem; but if you do meet these expectations, you don’t get any extra credit. On the other hand, if you have producers, account managers or CSRs, whose job it is to ‘meet with at least 5 customers a month to review their protection needs’ (annual review) that kind of information can be compelling in a bio. Likewise, individual situations where an agency staff member has found better insurance protection for a customer or helped out in a claims situation will make the ‘service’ component of your UVP tangible and meaningful. Inclusion of these little stories in bios is worthy of consideration.
Personal Relationships – I read an article a few years ago about medical malpractice lawsuits that pointed out the relationship between average time spent with a patient and the incidence of malpractice lawsuits. The condensed version is that doctors who spent more time with patients were sued less often. That is, those doctors who bothered to build some kind of personal relationship benefited by spending less time in court and paying less for their malpractice insurance. Patients, and people in general, will cut you some slack if they like you; they will also be more likely to refer people to you. You definitely don’t want to be gratuitous in presenting personal info in an online bio; be sure any personal information you provide through staff bios actually represents and supports the kind of relationships you have and want to build. And you definitely don’t want to jeopardize anyone’s safety by putting too much personal information on your website. So this one requires some careful thought, but there are very good reasons for including this kind of information.
Active vs. Passive Bios
You may also want to think about how you might use your online bios. For example, you might want to include links to bios as part of your proposals to prospects (here are the professionals that will be your risk management team); or you might want to routinely include a link to a CSR or Account Manager bio as part of a new business ‘welcome package’, or when there is a change in service assignments.
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