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ACT-ON EBOOK

And How to Improve Processes and Results Using Marketing Automation

5 Marketing Challenges Facing Insurance Brokerages

5 MARKETING CHALLENGES FACING INSURANCE BROKERAGES 1

Unfortunately, a lot of local brokerages are spread too thin trying to generate new policyholders and retain existing customers with disconnected and outdated software and processes.

This is especially challenging for small or non-existent marketing teams that are doing their best to develop creative initiatives while having to constantly execute manual tasks with limited resources. Meanwhile, agents still aren’t getting the detailed insights they need to attract the right prospects, strengthen relationships with existing customers, and have meaningful and productive conversations that lead to more policies being sold to both.

Thankfully, you can overcome these obstacles by consolidating all of your marketing initiatives and data collection using marketing automation.

Most people research insurance policies online before they make a purchase, which means that insurers have to deliver more helpful and personalized digital experiences than ever before.

A thoughtful digitization program can improve conversion rates by more than 20%.

Infinity Leads

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By interconnecting this powerful software with a customer relationship management (CRM) platform or broker management system (BMS) and other data sources, you can give your agents all of the valuable information and insights they need to sell more policies and strengthen existing relationships for more policy renewals.

In this eBook, you’ll learn what marketing automation is and how it can help insurance brokerages overcome challenges around:

Overwhelmed agents lacking the crucial information they

need to close the deal

05

Poor content that isn’t targeted to your ideal

customers

04

Renewing and upselling existing policyholders

02

Attracting and acquiring new policyholders

01

Keep reading to learn how building a powerful and easy-to-use marketing technology

(MarTech) stack can address all of your pain points to create great customer

experiences that result in loyal and enthusiastic policyholders.

Disconnected technologies and

ineffective processes

03

5 MARKETING CHALLENGES FACING INSURANCE BROKERAGES 3

So What Is Marketing Automation, Anyway?Marketing automation helps move prospects and policyholders through educational and sales processes by:

о Automating repetitive tasks (emails, social media, paid advertising, etc.)

о Aggregating and sharing key data and insights

о Building more effective and efficient marketing campaigns

о Passing leads and customer information to Sales

Build and improve sales processes

Create great customer experiences

Generate excitement around your insurance offerings

Promote brand awareness to attract prospects

Drive inbound traffic

Engage early in the sales cycle to turn prospects into leads

Nurture leads with compelling content and campaigns

Transfer hot leads to agents for more productive sales conversations

01

02

03

05

06

07

04

08

Marketing automation allows insurance brokerages to:

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In short, marketing automation helps insurance brokerages of all shapes and sizes deliver awesome customer experiences that help them stand out in a crowded field. Most people who are considering purchasing insurance do about 60% of their research online before engaging with an actual person. Using marketing automation to capture critical information during this research phase is pivotal because you can leverage this data to nurture your prospects along unique and dynamic initiatives (email programs, ad remarketing campaigns, personalized content, etc.). Marketing automation also allows you to track and engage prospects who have interacted with your brand but aren’t quite ready to make a purchasing decision, allowing you to always remain top-of-mind.

That’s the scope and power of marketing automation when it’s leveraged to its full potential.

Let’s take a look at how marketing automation can help solve

five major challenges and empower you to grow your insurance

brokerage at scale.

5 MARKETING CHALLENGES FACING INSURANCE BROKERAGES 5

Attracting and Acquiring New Policyholders

For decades, insurers have relied on pricing, prestige, word of mouth, and the sheer quality of their offerings to attract and acquire new policyholders. As consumers have moved online, however, many brokerages have struggled to develop the crucial customer journeys their prospects and policyholders have now come to expect — and even demand.

Sure, some firms have a decent website and others are doing their best to post on social once or twice a week, but very few brokerages have created holistic marketing plans coupling best practices and innovative techniques with proven software. Therefore, they’re not getting the most out of the available digital channels. As a result, consumers aren’t being educated about the best options for them and their families, and they’re certainly not being nurtured through a compelling customer experience.

CHALLENGE:0180% of marketing automation users report an increase in marketing leads.

Invespcro

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Drive More Traffic and Nurture Future PolicyholdersAdopting a multichannel approach that incorporates the following tactics will help increase your traffic, generate more leads, and put you in a position to build real relationships with your prospects and policyholders as you guide them through a comfortable and engaging customer journey.

SOLUTION:

Developing paid demand generation strategies that utilize engaging landing pages with content gated behind conversion-optimized forms.

Grouping your potential and existing policyholders into segments or buckets and then placing them in automated email nurture programs that address every stage of the funnel.

Optimizing your website to rank well for relevant keywords that reflect your customers’ pain points. (Recognized as SEO)

Creating great thought leadership content that helps educate your audience so they can make informed buying decisions.

Using marketing automation can help you develop, execute, and manage

all of these campaigns and tactics.

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Renewing and Upselling Existing Customers

Only 35% of insurance customers say they’re satisfied with their current providers, which translates to about $1.5 trillion in business that’s up for grabs globally (Bain). In such an incredibly competitive market, you need to be doing everything in your power to ensure your policyholders’ happiness and continued business.

Brokerages that use disconnected systems and ineffective processes struggle to communicate with current customers in a meaningful and effective way. This is especially true when it comes to manually monitoring and nurturing customers who are up for renewal, which often results in lost opportunities and business.

Furthermore, when insurance marketers aren’t coordinating and orchestrating campaigns for existing customers across digital channels and in conjunction with their agents, your brokerage isn’t able to get a comprehensive view of the customer journey, which means you’re left guessing at their needs and pain points rather than providing solutions to these obstacles.

CHALLENGE:02

Only 35% of insurance customers say they’re satisfied with their current providers.

Bain

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Create Customer Loyalty, Upsell, and Advocacy ProgramsTo keep your policyholders happy, you can use marketing automation software to build and implement educational onboarding and retention campaigns. For example, a customer who requests a quote for an auto policy might benefit from an informational email nurture program about long-term automobile care. Creating a base of content around this topic and setting up email drip campaigns will encourage consumers to engage more with your company and provide a strong foundation for a lengthy and lucrative relationship.

You can also use marketing automation to track user behavior and then assign value to those actions so you can better understand your future policyholders’ buying intent — a practice called “lead scoring.” This approach also helps you determine the health of your current accounts and more accurately forecast renewals when reviewing your brokerage’s annual budget. By using marketing automation software to assign points to customers based on their behaviors (or lack thereof), you can deliver vital content and communications to ensure their happiness and increase the likelihood of renewal.

Marketing automation also makes it easy to upsell existing clients on additional offerings by using all the data at your fingertips to anticipate their needs and deliver great product recommendations. Once you’ve made an initial sale, continue to monitor your customer engagement on your website, in your nurture campaigns, and through retargeting, and use these insights to place additional insurance products in front of your existing customers. For example, if you know that a new client purchased life insurance two years ago but recently had a child, send them a blog on the value of more comprehensive life insurance plans for young families as part of your email nurturing program or quarterly newsletter.

SOLUTION:

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Additionally, when you know that you have strong, mutually beneficial connections with loyal customers, you can leverage those relationships to evangelize your more enthusiastic audience segments.

As mentioned above, customer scoring is an excellent way to gauge how customers feel about your brand and pinpoint those who are particularly enthusiastic about what you do. You can also use forms and surveys to collect information and consent from customers who can serve as referrals for you when needed.

When it comes to establishing a referral and advocacy program, you can choose to be as formal or informal as you’d like — depending on your current capacity. If you’re crunched for time, start by giving customers a phone call or sending them an email asking if they would be willing to act as a reference in the future.

If you want to get more robust with your referral and advocacy program efforts, enter these individuals into an automated program where they’ll be the first to know about upcoming opportunities and events and also get exclusive previews to new features and services.

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Disconnected Technologies and Ineffective Processes

Many insurance brokerages use disconnected legacy software that hinders growth, prevents new policyholder acquisition, and actually promotes churn among existing policyholders. These disparate systems result in marketers and agents performing lots of repetitive and time-consuming manual tasks that keep them from more productive and effective campaigns and outreach.

Worst of all, when you don’t have a single source of truth to aggregate data and customer behavior insights to coordinate your strategy, you’re going to miss promising opportunities because you’re relying on inaccurate and incomplete information.

CHALLENGE:0339% of marketers cite disconnected technology platforms as their main challenge in trying to improve their digital marketing efforts.

State of Marketing Automation, 2019

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Streamline and Consolidate Data and ProcessesLeveraging an integrated marketing technology stack eliminates the burden of manual data transfer from multiple sources and enables conditional logic to usher prospects and policyholders through an automated customer experience and sales cycle from one central command station. This saves time and resources while ensuring accurate data and reporting for better visibility and interpretation.

A connected MarTech stack also helps you:

SOLUTION:

Develop holistic automatic demand generation initiatives

Identify and execute upsell nurturing strategies

Collect accurate demographic, firmographic, and behavioral data in one location

Share branded templates for more efficient campaigns and outreach

Identify, prioritize, and pass leads to your agents seamlessly

Generate actionable reports that focus on key performance metrics

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When all of these things come together, marketers and agents are able to collaborate to optimize business processes to improve efficiency and convert more prospects into policyholders, increasing revenue while eliminating time-consuming manual tasks.

CRM SystemBroker Management

System

Digital Advertising Website

Social

Webcasts

Marketing

Automation

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One-Size-Fits-None Messaging

Content is the lifeblood of any good marketing initiative, so companies that are lacking resources, strategy, and distribution methods are going to struggle to keep up with the competition. And since many insurance brokerages don’t have experienced in-house content creators or team up with a trusted agency that understands their business and their ideal audience segments, they usually aren’t regularly producing and leveraging relevant and informative content. This creates a disconnected content strategy that often leads to a disjointed customer experience.

CHALLENGE:0457% of marketers said that marketing automation helped them attract more leads.

Smart Insights

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Develop and Distribute Targeted ContentIf you’re not customizing your content and recommending offerings for your target audience, you’re already falling behind your competition. 78% of consumers say that personally relevant content increases their purchase intent for a brand’s products and services (OneSpot), and you should be taking these consumers at their word — because your competitors definitely are.

Most people think that engaging prospective policyholders effectively and at scale with personalized messaging requires a heavy lift. If they’re trying to do so without a marketing automation platform, they’re absolutely right. With the right software, however, you can build personalized campaigns that automatically trigger based on user behavior, demographics, and interests to nurture your prospects and policyholders throughout the customer journey with very little work for the marketer.

You can also use marketing automation to customize your lead capture forms to create a more personalized digital experience. Later in a prospect’s journey, you can use progressive profiling to select which form fields appear based on the information you already have about a particular lead. As you collect this valuable customer data, you can then deliver even more relevant information via dynamic content — an often overlooked method of creating personalized experiences.

Lastly, marketing automation can actually influence and improve your content strategy. By creating campaigns around content assets and then tracking those initiatives closely, you can learn more about what your target audience is looking for and adjust your content strategy accordingly. This might be as simple as A/B testing eBook titles or as advanced as performing an SEO audit to optimize key product pages for better organic search rankings and site traffic.

SOLUTION:

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Organizations that use marketing automation experience a 14.5% increase in sales productivity.

Invespcro

Overwhelmed Agents, Overloaded With Information

Many insurance agents are completely overwhelmed with the amount of seemingly random information at their disposal (from both carriers and their own brokerages) and confused by how to get an accurate, actionable view of the prospect or policyholder. It’s not their fault; it’s just that they don’t have the right tools to aggregate, synthesize, and simplify a lot of really complex data that’s coming at them from multiple sources.

Since they’re unable to wade through the clutter and interpret the information, they’re missing critical insights into what consumers are researching and interacting with online, which prevents these agents from scoring their leads. As a result, they’re not sure how to separate their cold and hot prospects and likewise unsure of how to prioritize everyone in their queue. This means that rather than targeting prime accounts who are ready to make a purchase, they’re simply reaching out to whoever happens to be next on their list.

CHALLENGE:05

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Empower Agent Success With Valuable InsightsAlthough they rarely do, insurance agents and marketing teams should function as a unified team. So when you consider marketing automation, it’s equally important to realize how this software influences your agents and their sales strategy. Marketing automation has a significant ripple effect that reaches far beyond the marketing department to enable agent success through valuable insights at every stage of the customer journey, as well as key data points and lead transfer capabilities.

SOLUTION:

Contact Report

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By implementing a marketing automation platform, your agents can access records detailing each future policyholder’s interactions with various marketing materials and initiatives

— such as email opens, website visits, and content downloads. This gives your entire team complete visibility into every prospect and policyholder’s customer journey from start to finish — allowing your agents to understand key touchpoints, jump in whenever necessary, and have more productive and meaningful discussions with their target prospects.

The principal benefit of marketing automation for your agents, however, is that it enables them to prioritize their leads — saving them valuable time and allowing them to focus on the accounts that matter. Marketing automation helps to generate more (and more qualified) leads who are serious about purchasing and renewing policies, while also uncovering those who should be dismissed.

As a result, your agents will spend less time with inefficient and unproductive cold calls and more time in front of prospects who’ve raised a qualified hand and expressed higher buyer intent, maximizing your ability to generate results.

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Key TakeawaysWe won’t sugarcoat it: The insurance industry is far behind when it comes to adopting sound digital marketing strategies using marketing automation to target, acquire, renew, and upsell policyholders.

If this sounds familiar, the good news is that you’re not alone. Your competitors are late to the party as well, which presents a golden opportunity for you to seize the moment and gain a serious advantage over rival brokerages. But you need to act fast to overcome the challenges listed above and implement solid strategies to grow your business.

Let’s quickly review those challenges and how you can move past them with a solid MarTech stack.

Attracting and Acquiring New Policyholders Create comprehensive demand generation strategies that engage and convert future policyholders.

Renewing and Upselling Existing Customers Develop automated programs and remarketing campaigns to improve customer relationships for more renewals, upsells, and advocates.

Disconnected Technologies and Ineffective Processes Integrate a full-service MarTech stack to improve marketing and sales alignment, share accurate and actionable data, and gain clear visibility into the entire customer journey.

One-Size-Fits-None Messaging Collect and analyze consumer information to segment your audiences and deliver targeted messages that resonate with your top prospects.

Overwhelmed Agents, Overloaded With Information Deliver the right information to the right agent at the right time to help them gain control of the sales cycle and have productive and targeted conversations to close the deal.

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Due to the challenges that insurance professionals are facing, Act-On is doubling down on our commitment to provide industry-leading marketing technology for insurance brokerages of all shapes and sizes.

Here are just a few ways in which Act-On can help you take your marketing and sales efforts to the next level:

Sell and Renew More Policies With

Act-On’s Solution for Insurance Brokerages

01 Integration with core insurance platforms

In addition to out-of-box integrations with leading CRMs like Salesforce, Microsoft Dynamics, and SugarCRM, Act-On is currently developing integrations with industry leading Broker Management Systems (BMS). These integrations allow for a holistic view of prospects and policyholders alike, tighter reporting and attribution, and improved lead generation/management — which will enable more meaningful communications across the entire customer journey. In addition, we anticipate developing similar integrations with other prominent insurance solutions this year.

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03 Rapid marketing automation implementation

In as little as six weeks, insurance providers can have a fully configured instance of Act-On’s marketing automation platform, combined with in-depth training and email deliverability seminars to ensure early and sustained success. Act-On’s commitment to a six-week implementation represents among the fastest time-to-value offering of any marketing automation platform. We want you to be able to execute effective marketing automation campaigns as soon as possible with our platform, and we’re committed to making that happen.

04 Increase your marketing velocity with Act-On Accelerate

Successful marketers don’t simply rely on technology; they also work hard to implement the right strategy, resources, personas, analytics, and marketing and sales alignment to achieve the greatest success. Act-On Accelerate — our end-to-end Marketing as a Service solution — is designed to increase your marketing velocity and equip your team with the tools they need to align their strategy with their software and improve the impact of their marketing campaigns. We offer an Accelerator for nearly any marketing challenge you might encounter on your path to marketing automation maturity, providing expert resources at a fraction of the cost of hiring additional full-time employees to execute your marketing automation campaigns.

02 Designated digital marketing subject matter experts

Act-On takes marketing automation to the next level by helping organizations overcome resource constraints and filling skills gaps with a dedicated team of experts and strategists that will ensure your success. Our subject matter experts have extensive experience leading digital transformations for insurance organizations using Act-On as the backbone of the technology infrastructure — which often integrates with BMS/CRM’s, phone and call center systems, data warehouses, website CMS, social media, and other third-party systems.

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This is just a short explanation of Act-On’s solution. We encourage you to reach out to schedule a discovery call and view a demo to learn more about our platform and services.

Let’s set aside some time to talk about your marketing challenges.

Physicians Insurance Achieves Open Rates of 31% With Act-On’s Email Marketing Functionality

Horizon Distributors Experiences a 200% Increase in Leads Since Switching to Act-On

Meyer and Associates Leverages Act-On to Market Their Insurance Products to Over 100 Alumni Associations

RSA Insurance Achieves Above Industry Open Rates and Click-Through Rates As High As 59% With Act-On

© 2019 Act-On Software. All rights reserved. | www.act-on.com

About Act-On SoftwareAct-On Software is the leader in Adaptive Marketing solutions that empower marketers to achieve the purposeful and personalized engagement that their business needs to thrive. Act-On makes customer data actionable, enabling marketers to strategize better business outcomes, drive more relevant multi-channel marketing, and generate higher customer lifetime value--all with the fastest time-to-value.