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.
Insurance agents, especially when shopping for a new website provider, are right to ask a few questions regarding how their investment will pay off. The number of site visitors you can expect isn’t the only question to ask, but it’s an obvious one. The answer however, isn’t quite as straightforward as ’1,000 a month’ or some other objective number. The number of visitors you can expect depends on a number of factors and many are within your agency’s control. As often happens in these cases, the answer to ‘how much traffic can I expect’ is the standard ‘that depends’. But rather than leave you hanging on that ambiguity, let me elaborate.
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.
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.
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.
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.
