I actually came across a site that forced the site visitor to watch a new video on nearly every page.  Even though I wanted to leave screaming for exit after the second page, my fascination (and perhaps masochism) made me stick around and count the number of pages that included forced video.  Forced video is usually a bad idea – don’t take my word for it, check pretty much any forum of web marketers or developers who work with web video for their opinions (you’ll need a LinkedIn profile, but there is a good example of such a forum in the LinkedIn Answers service).

My advice, include video where you have some concrete evidence that it will increase conversions and improve business results – avoid using video for the sole purpose of amazing visitors (or yourself).  And be very judicious in choosing to force a visitor to watch your video – the potential irritation factor needs to be weighed against the business benefit.

We tend break down website contributions to business results (i.e., income) in three areas:

Passive Web
Complimentary Web
Pure Web Contributions

There is some overlap between these categories so you can quibble about the arbitrary groupings, but this broad organization of traffic sources give us a disciplined way to think about the amount of website traffic you can expect, and equally important, the quality of traffic as measured by conversions of visits to income.

Passive Web refers to the tendency of consumers to look for you on a Google search, even though they hear about your agency offline and through no direct effort on your part (although direct efforts to manage a referral program indirectly influence this kind of traffic).  Studies performed over the last couple of years suggest turn to the web between 75% to 85% of the time after they learn about your agency.  This is generally very high quality traffic because visitors have taken the second step on the way to a purchase decision:  ‘I have heard about your insurance agency, now I am going to take a closer look.’  The amount of passive traffic you get is proportionally related to a couple of things:  The number of customers you have who have positive experiences (word of mouth); and How actively you promote referral programs (encouraged word of mouth).

Complimentary Web is a category of web visits pulled primarily by email push but also by direct mail and traditional advertising.  Email push can take the form of E-newsletters that contain links to your website and emails you may send as a standard part of your sales process.  But most likely the larger proportion of this type of traffic will be existing customers, assuming your agency has some type of e-newsletter program in place.  Direct mail supported by specific landing pages for mail recipients picks up more website traffic as well as higher conversion traffic  – additional detail and special calls to action can and should be part of the landing page.

Pure Web Contributions are visitors that start on the web and stay on the web.  Search engines, through SEO, is the source we most often think of for this type of traffic but even search engine traffic can be split into local search traffic and organic search.  Other sources for pure web traffic are inbound links that might come from insurance company or association agency locators, PPC (pay-per-click) advertising, links found on social media profiles like Facebook, LinkedIn or Twitter or even a link from the local chamber of commerce.

Website traffic quantity, and quality – the number of visitors who ‘convert’ – is influenced dramatically by which of the three sources predominate in site visits.  Let me illustrate that by looking at analytics screen shots for three different insurance agencies, viewed over a 30 day interval.

Example 1

This agency largely relies on the Passive Web approach but they do have active producers and the agency web address is part of all email signatures, business cards, and other agency print collateral (web promotion 101, circa 1995).  Top level visit counts aren’t that impressive but those visits are productive.  The number of pages per visit and average time on site is quite high, meaning that these visitors likely convert at a higher rate.  The bounce rate – the proportion of visitors who look at one page and leave – is distorted because Google can’t count visitors who launch a secure quote request form and those visitors who pick up the phone to call are also counted as a ‘bounce’.  But a lower relative bounce rate is good and this bounce rate is relatively low.  Also, a large proportion of visits are new viewers, meaning that the agency website most likely benefits the agency in new business activity rather than retention or account rounding.

Example 2

The agency in example 2 is more engaged in Pure Web tactics than most agencies but this agency is active in a variety of ways – they do push email to customers, they engage in PPC campaigns and banner advertising, they use print advertising and they also have a blog and Facebook page.  All that activity is translating to fairly high levels of website visits but all the conversion indicators are lower than in example one.  Is one agency’s situation better than the other?  That is hard to say, it depends on the kind of business being produced and is highly dependent on the individual agency’s acumen at rounding and retaining accounts.  The agency in example 2 is certainly putting more time, money and effort into traffic generating tactics and that might be the right thing for that agency, depending on their marketing budget and objectives.

Example 3

The agency in Example 3 falls somewhere in between the first two in terms of both top level traffic and conversion indicators.  They tend to rely on Complimentary Web tactics with a little Pure Web seasoning via local search.  This agency does periodic print and traditional media advertising as well as neighborhood focused direct mail campaigns.  The direct mail approach dovetails nicely with their attention to managing local search through Google’s Local Business Center.

So how much website traffic and conversions can your agency expect?  That depends on your objectives and tactics.  But hopefully these illustrations have given you some objective numbers to better inform your insurance agencies website development decisions and your tactical web traffic management plan.

Marketing Sherpa recently posted a chart illustrating the growing importance of local search. As noted here before, most insurance agencies have not

caught on to this business source.  And those insurance agents who have not taken the simple step of claiming and optimizing their local listings in Google, Yahoo and Bing, are losing money because of that.  And that lost income may be substantial.  In the last two days I have had an interesting phone call with a Midwestern insurance agent and reviewed local search results for 41 established insurance agencies.

My Midwest agent mentioned that she had recently picked up a $60,000 commercial lines account.  When she asked the client how they found her agency he said he did a web search and chose the agency with the most professional web site.  Moral of the story:  if you can’t be found, even an astonishing website won’t help you.

The 41 agencies I reviewed are all well established agencies; most have more than 10 employees and are located in a variety of communities:  urban, suburban and rural.  I should note that these insurance agencies are regarded as top quality by their competitors and are highly sought after by insurance companies seeking representation.  All of them have aggressive commercial lines growth objectives.  I did a Google search to see how visible these agencies might be to business insurance prospects in their market areas.  I gave each agency an unfair advantage by using the zip code of the agency location as take from an insurance company agency locator*.  Here’s how these agencies ranked for a search on ‘business insurance zip code’.

Only 7 of the 41 agencies had claimed their listing in the Google Local Business Center; of those, four had a number 1 ranking in the local listing, and two ranked in the top 10, just outside the 7 pack.  34 agencies had not claimed their local listing at all so the information Google ranked on and displayed was derived from third party sources like Info USA.  Two of those 34, who were located in small towns, fortuitously showed up in the 7 pack and another rural agent made the top 10.

Even the agencies that claimed their listing in the Google Local Business Center could have taken greater advantage of the details Google allows businesses to provide, like company representation, key products and insurance coverage provided, photos and video. But the most striking thing about this graphic is that 73% of the agencies just don’t show up (see the red and yellow regions).

Even quality insurance agencies could be competing a lot more effectively for new business and local search is possibly the most budget-friendly item missing from agency marketing repertories.

Insurance agencies can learn more about local search through a free webinar offered by Confluency Solutions.

*Insurance agencies who are providing P. O. box zip codes to directories and agency locators are often not doing themselves any favors with local search.

]]> http://www.insuranceagentwebpower.com/2010/04/agency-search-visibilit/feed/ 1 http://www.insuranceagentwebpower.com/2010/01/insurance-agency-solution/ http://www.insuranceagentwebpower.com/2010/01/insurance-agency-solution/#comments Sun, 31 Jan 2010 14:37:56 +0000 admin http://www.insuranceagentwebpower.com/?p=234 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?

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.

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.

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.

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:

_________________________________________________________________

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.

*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.