Back in the 80′s, I blossomed into a full fledged beverage snob:  coffee, scotch, but especially, beer.  In the part of the country I lived in at the time, craft beer was hard to come by and brew pubs were a bit of novelty.  Fortunately, I traveled quite a bit, and was able to sample some excellent micro-brews from a then burgeoning micro-brew movement.  I even got into home brewing, just to prove my street cred.

When I visited a brew pub, I was most keen on sampling interesting beers and ales.  Don’t get me wrong, I like my food and ambiance as much as the next guy, but I figured there were lots of places to get those things.  When I walked into a brew pub, I was there for the beer.  Some brew pubs were small and obviously bootstrapped by the owner/brewer.  The large brew pubs had nice graphics for all their beverages, fancy menus, and fresh decors.  Who almost always had the better line up of beer?  The small breweries.

The large brew pubs, I’m sure, we’re capable of brewing whatever beer they wanted, but they had to cover their overhead.  Read that as, they had to sell as much beer to as many people as possible. Because of that, they tended to keep their range of beers pretty tame, and used their trappings to lure you into the establishment. They weren’t for me.  Which brings me back to insurance agency service providers.  Those that invest a lot of money in advertising and keep a healthy staff of well paid people around may well be in a position to provide expertise and assistance to your agency.  But they also have overhead to cover so they are more likely to need to convince you, with a really hard sell, that you need their service, when in fact you really don’t.

So now the principles from the blog post…When confronted with a decision about whether or not to make a really big business investment in an insurance agency marketing service:

1. Make sure you understand all the costs, not just what service provider is going to charge you, but other expenses you may incur as you implement their system.
2. Run some rough calculations about how much new commission you would have to generate to make the investment pay off.
3. Take your time, never make a decision on the spot, and check with a number of the service provider’s client agencies to get an accurate picture of whether you are likely to generate the level of new commission you need to make the investment make sense.

Common  sense, really.  And it sort of applies to beer.

Do it yourself, or get someone to do it for you, but get listed with the local search engines and directories.  Agencies that take advantage write more new business every month courtesy of an essentially free tactic.

Dominate Local Search a local search service from Confluency Solutions

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.

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.

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/2010/03/local-search-solution/ http://www.insuranceagentwebpower.com/2010/03/local-search-solution/#comments Tue, 30 Mar 2010 16:22:09 +0000 admin http://www.insuranceagentwebpower.com/?p=261 This screen shot of the local search portion of a Google search for ‘insurance chattanooga, tn’ points up the problem for insurance agencies.  Why are four of the 7 pack spots occupied by doctors?

The answer is because no local agencies have optimized their local listing in the Google Local Business Center.  Most haven’t even claimed their free listing.  I have seen local SERPs with attorneys, body shops and even Wal-Mart’s Vision Center better positioned than local insurance agents.  An individual searching on the word insurance is far more likely to be seeking an insurance provider than eye or medical care – and Google would like to provide options that fit a searcher’s objectives.  But even Google needs a little help from time-to-time.  This oversight committed by most insurance agents provides a golden opportunity for others.  Confluency Solutions is conducting a free webinar for insurance agents on April 22.  If you want to boost your agency’s search visibility, and write more new business,  you might want to think about signing up and sitting in.

Some agencies are concerned about the errors and omissions risks that might arise out of the use of social media outlets…

E&O exposures can be managed to zero – if your insurance agency is willing to go out of business. On the other hand, E&O exposures can shoot through the roof if agencies don’t manage their communication policies at all. Somewhere between going out of business by practicing absolute avoidance and going out of business by not controlling E&O is a level of Errors and Omissions exposure that can be acceptably managed. That management should start with a policy, include staff training and monitoring of communications. Social media, including blogs, Facebook, Twitter and the like, are communication tools, just like the telephone, snail mail and email they should be managed the same way.

Many agents are reluctant to blog because they view themselves as insurance people, not writers….

All businesses – insurance agencies included – are in the business of acquiring customers, keeping them, and maximizing customer value by doing as much business as possible with each customer. There are numerous and varied techniques for getting new business and developing customers but one thing all tactics share in common is communication; without communication, no business gets done. Insurance agents need to know about insurance products and coverage if they are to provide professional counsel to customers and prospects (besides, licensing pretty much requires it) but that counsel won’t be received unless agents can communicate effectively. Increasingly, people use social media to communicate all kinds of things. Taking a head-in-the-sand approach to social media will eventually lead to deteriorating business results – even for insurance people.

Some (insurance agents) see social media as just fad…

MySpace used to be the leader in the U.S. in online social networking until it was supervened by Facebook. LinkedIn is the leading business social networking tool among Americans but it is being challenged by the Europe’s leading social network Xing. Twitter is a johnny-come-lately; maybe it will be a force a year from now, maybe not. The point is this: individual social media services may be fads but social media, as a communication trend, is clearly not.

Who was #1 on the enjoyable list?  USAA.  USAA is a unique animal, to be sure, but there is something to be learned from their Facebook page.  I just scanned their currently displayed wall, top to bottom.  Nowhere did I see a we-can-save-you-money sales pitch or read a dreadful claims scenario wherein someone found out they didn’t have the right insurance.  USAA understands that Facebook isn’t a medium for the hard sell…it’s for fun.

Independent insurance agencies have a wide range of feature options, not only with their agency management systems, but with other technology tools like email, websites, and mobile devices.  So, if there is a shortcoming that insurance agents are guilty of, it probably isn’t under utilizing the technology available to them, but rather, the shortcoming may be not choosing the right five or ten tech features that help achieve agency growth and profit objectives.