There are people out there on a quest to find your insurance products and services, and once you capture their attention, you don’t want to lose it. So how can you win attention and trust, then turn that into revenue? That’s a great question and one that many insurance companies are asking.
One of the most important ways to grab attention and keep it is to personalize your messaging and your offers. Seventy-seven percent of insurance customers report they were influenced to purchase insurance based on personalized promotions. That’s more than 3 out of 4 people.
So, how, exactly do you go about personalizing marketing on a mass scale? That’s an easy one to answer – it’s marketing automation. This article gives you three real-life examples of how insurance companies leverage marketing automation to capture more interest, convert leads and grow business longterm.
Benefits of Marketing Automation for Insurance Firms
As an insurance marketer, you likely segment customers into groups. And this is a good strategy, it helps you to deliver more relevant content to people. But your customers don’t want to feel like they’re one of many, they want to feel like an individual. Talking to a customer in a way that makes her feel known is a matter of segmentation and personalization. Doing so at scale is a matter of having the right data, strategy and tools.
Using a marketing automation tool makes it much easier to talk to people about what they want in a way that feels more personal. A few benefits include:
Delivering the Right Content at the Right Time
Marketing automation allows you to segment your audiences by creating content triggers, and personalized nurturing campaigns. Connect with your audience at the right time with the right offer, and sometimes before they even realize they have a new need.
Boost Cross-Sell Business and Retain Customers
You already know that retaining existing customers is far cheaper than acquiring new ones. But here’s something else to consider: current customers spend on average 67% more than those new to your business. Automation helps you to cross-sell existing customers based on the products and services they most likely need because you can access the right insights at the right moment.
Let Your Prospects Convert Themselves
Research from PricewaterhouseCoopers found that 71% of people surveyed report they do some kind of digital research before buying insurance. Insurance industry marketing automation helps you to view prospect behavior in real-time, allowing you to provide relevant content and build trust.
Help Your Insurance Marketing Team Do More With Less
There’s one more important benefit to consider – marketing efficiency. If you have a large department and many resources, you still need ways to create more efficiency in processes. If you have a smaller marketing department, your team might be downright overloaded. Marketing automation helps to get rid of time-consuming manual tasks so that your team can make a bigger impact.
Ready for your examples? Let’s take a look at how 3 insurance companies are using marketing automation and experiencing these benefits.
5 Marketing Challenges Facing Insurance Brokerages
How RSA Insurance Pumped Up Email Deliverability
RSA Insurance is one of the oldest and most well-known insurance providers in the world, serving individuals, small businesses, and larger companies. Even though the company was well known, it struggled to get the attention of its audience. The company targets brokers and risk managers, and these people get a lot of emails. As a result, standing out in the inbox is hard.
Before implementing marketing automation, understanding marketing results was also difficult. RSA couldn’t see who opened their emails and who did not. Without this data, the company didn’t really know if its audience was engaged. It also made measuring ROI more challenging.
RSA leveraged Act-On’s marketing automation solution to get visibility into open rates, engagement, automated campaigns, and A/B tests to understand and improve results. RSA Insurance has had some exciting results:
- Increases open rates to 18-20 percent above the industry average.
- Designed emails faster and more easily connected with their target audiences.
- Improved ROI since they could measure how well marketing efforts worked.
- Facilitated easier compliance with GDPR.
How Physicians Insurance Implemented Automated Segmentation
Driven by a trend of doctors leaving private practices to work for larger clinics and hospitals, Physicians Insurance was navigating a decrease in demand. Many larger medical organizations have self-insurance plans, which eliminates the need to buy individual policies. Physicians Insurance wanted to expand its business model to reach different types of buyers, like hospital administrators and executives, but was stuck in figuring out how to do so.
They used an email service provider (ESP) to stay in touch with prospects and customers, but the system was rife with problems. For starters, the ESP solution didn’t integrate well with internal systems and lacked advanced segmentation abilities. Without the ability to deeply segment audiences, Physicians Insurance couldn’t provide the level of personalization that today’s buyers expect.
In addition to attracting a new clientele, Physicians Insurance needed to continue improving cross-selling activities to maintain its most important source of revenue.Email marketing was still important, but Physicians Insurance wanted to take nurturing a step further to improve customer retention and growth. Marketing automation allowed the firm to create more personalized interactions that were more meaningful and relevant to each customer.
Using Act-On’s marketing automation, Physicians Insurance could segment based on job title, specialty, geographic region, and more, helping the company to get more personal with communications.
Creating campaigns was also much easier, with a drag and drop editor that made it faster to create existing and future messages. Reporting helped the company to better understand and assess how buyers interacted with messages. Were prospects and customers responding positively? And if not, what changes could they make to do better? Greater visibility gave them the data to make changes.
For example, the company learned that doctors read their emails very early in the morning and on holidays and their days off. This information allowed them to strategize how and when to best engage.
Using automation provided several positive results, including:
- Email open rates as high as 30% for existing clients.
- Customer retention rate above 95%.
- Connected MarTech stack to create programs that do a better job at reaching customers.
- Access to the right insights, at the right time to make better decisions about who to reach, and when.
How IAMS Increased Conversion Rates
A customer with an inbox full of unread emails is looking for ways to clear it out fast. Hitting the select button and moving an email to the trash happens in seconds, and if you want to save your marketing from the trash, you need people to see value in what you deliver.
Insurance Agency Marketing Services (IAMS) is a company that helps thousands of agents across the United States with developing leads. The agency struggled to help clients stand out in a competitive market and needed to improve marketing intelligence and lead tracking.
Without personalized interactions, emails from IAMS clients were constantly overlooked by prospects and customers. Webinar registration was low, and according to the metrics, people were disinterested in receiving and opening marketing messages. The agency needed to transform a disengaged audience into one that was excited to receive emails, and willing to register for events, like webinars. Using marketing automation, the company:
- Delivered personalized content that increased webinar registrations by 470% opening the floodgates to new, fresh leads.
- Grew website traffic by 300% with click-through rates that tripled to 6% far exceeding industry email marketing campaign benchmarks.
- Improved email reputation and deliverability rates, so that more customers and prospects received emails.
List segmentation allowed IAMS to talk to the right people at the right time, and better insights helped to understand what types of content customers liked the most. With a better marketing automation tool, the organization can now view campaign performance, and make quick decisions about how to improve results.
Marketing Automation Provides the Structure for Your Best Insurance Marketing Results
You’re trying to reach customers at a time when the digital noise has never been louder. If you hope to capture their attention, you need them to feel excited every time they see your emails and open your content. And this can only happen when every experience feels personal.
Of course, you can’t personally understand every customer at every moment, which is why you need insurance marketing automation to help you use data, implement segmented programs, and scale. Marketing automation delivers the right content to people along their buyer journey and gives you the insights required to continue to improve. Do this well, and you can retain more customers, cross-sell more products and improve prospect conversion rates.
Ready to find out how marketing automation can help your insurance business take on the largest industry challenges? If so, check out the 5 Marketing Challenges Facing Insurance Brokers.