Any insurance marketer who’s been at it for a while understands that attracting customers and selling insurance is hard. With over 6,000 insurance businesses in the U.S. alone, consumers have more than enough options to choose from, and there are plenty of resources available to help them find the best deal (1).
For your insurance company to thrive in this competitive environment, you have to offer customers excellent pricing and convince them that your offerings provide the most protection and value. Doing that becomes even harder when you consider that insurance is often something that many customers invest in because they are required to — not because they want to.
While securing more new customers can definitely help insurance companies grow revenue, tapping into your current customer base can be just as impactful to your bottom line.
Your customers’ lives are changing every day, and with that comes the need for more and different types of coverage. For example, a married couple currently investing in auto insurance may need coverage for their teen driver at a later time. Or, a customer who is currently renting but plans to buy a house in a few years might benefit from learning about homeowner’s insurance options. No matter what type of insurance you sell, there’s always an opportunity to offer your existing customer base something new.
Of course, targeting customers in this way is easier said than done when you’re struggling just to get today’s emails created, approved, and to the inbox. What many insurance marketers fail to realize, however, is that marketing technology has significantly evolved and improved in a way that could help them stay one step ahead of their customers (instead of trying to keep up with them). Today, marketing automation can not only help us execute our marketing efforts efficiently and at scale, but it can also enable us to gather useful insights, track customer behavior, and deliver more customized messaging to attract great prospects, close more deals, and measure our progress to improve over time.
Interested in learning more about how marketing automation can help you retain current customers and identify and activate opportunities for growth? Keep reading to learn critical tips on how insurance marketers can leverage marketing automation to build customer loyalty and drive ROI.
Build Long-Lasting Relationships Through Nurture Campaigns
One of the biggest mistakes you can make as an insurance marketer is to let your customers forget who you are until they absolutely need you or the time to renew their policy comes around. If your goal is to promote retention and growth, you have to inspire trust and confidence in your customers far before these events happen. To do so, you have to reach out to them on a regular basis with content that they will find useful and will encourage them to see the value of continuing to do business with you in the future.
Emailing customers once a month (or even quarterly) gives you an opportunity to check in to see how they’re doing, remind them of the benefits attached to their policy, and reassure them that you’ll be there to help if and when they need new or additional coverage. This is also a great opportunity to make your brand memorable by showing them what makes you stand out from your competitors. The more targeted you get with these types of communications, the better chance you’ll have of driving engagement and seeing results.
While targeting customers based on their current policy, interests, and needs may seem like a huge load to tackle, marketing automation makes this process simple through automated nurture campaigns and list segmentation. These capabilities enable you to automatically group customers based on a variety of factors and enter them into relevant campaigns that match their needs and interests. Delivering content and news that is relevant to them will motivate them to take notice, engage with your brand, and promote loyalty.
Evaluate Customer Satisfaction Through Lead Scoring
I hate to break it to you, but if a customer is unhappy once the time to renew comes around, chances are any attempts you make to keep their business are likely a lost cause. The best way to prevent this from happening is by remedying the situation before customers completely lose trust in you and decide to leave you for a competitor. Unfortunately, many insurance companies lose several customers a year without even knowing they were unhappy or having the opportunity to do something about it.
With marketing automation, that no longer has to be the case. Features such as lead scoring can help you keep track of customer behavior and engagement to better gauge their sentiment. In this model, customers who regularly open your emails, log into their portal, give you high ratings, and perform any other positive actions, will accrue points that indicate their level of satisfaction. In turn, customers who give you low ratings and rarely engage with any type of communication will receive a lower score, which will indicate that it’s time to take action to remedy the situation
Leveraging lead scoring to evaluate the overall satisfaction of each policyholder helps you be more proactive with your marketing efforts. You can continue to engage customers who are happy and show the ones who aren’t as satisfied a little more love in order to win them over. You can also use this information to anticipate renewals and improve your ability to forecast future profits for your organization.
Anticipate What Your Customers Want and Need to Deliver Personalized Recommendations
A huge advantage of marketing automation is that it grants you access to a wide array of insights that enable you to get to know your current customers on a more personal level, improving your ability to deliver what they want and anticipate what they need. These insights can help you provide relevant content that match their current needs and can also empower you to kick things up a notch by identifying opportunities to up-sell and cross-sell.
Doing this is as simple as offering your current customers opportunities to engage with content that will help you determine whether they could benefit from another one of your insurance products in the future. For example, if a customer clicks on an article on your blog entitled “10 Things to Look for When Buying a Home” and downloads an eBook called “A 5-Step Guide for Purchasing Your First Home,” you can deduce that they’ll probably take the leap into homeownership within the next year or two.
In anticipation of this, you can begin marketing related products to them before they even know they need them. Enter customers into a related nurturing campaign that will gradually encourage them to increase their coverage and inform them of any additional products that will benefit them in the future. This way, you’ll be top-of-mind when they’re finally ready to make a purchasing decision.
Make Sure to Choose a Vendor That Sets You Up for Success
Although we’ve outlined the many benefits of marketing automation, we haven’t touched upon the reason why many insurance marketers aren’t willing to make the investment — change is hard, and new technology isn’t always intuitive. That’s why choosing a vendor that provides you a platform that is easy to use and the resources you need to reap the full benefits of marketing automation is essential to your success.
At Act-On, we completely understand this immense barrier keeping many insurers from taking the leap into the world of marketing automation. That is why we’re dedicated to making marketing automation accessible to teams of all sizes through a platform that is easy to use, top-notch customer support, and strategic guidance with Marketing as a Service solutions like Act-On Accelerate.
If you’d like to learn more about how marketing automation can help you build insurance customer loyalty, we invite you to download our eBook, Optimize the Customer Journey for Improved Retention and Growth (also linked below). In this helpful resource, you’ll learn strategies for engaging your current customer base and how to use marketing automation to improve and increase your marketing efforts so much easier.