In today's marketplace, fierce competition over pricing and products turns agents into commodities. How do we reverse this trend? By doubling down on what we're good at, and using technology to back up those skills.
As an agent, what's your greatest skill? You communicate. You explain how life insurance works. How it fits into an overall plan for your prospect’s financial future. You’re the real-live person they can call when they have a question. You’re the familiar face and voice they reach out to when they need help filing a claim, or interpreting the insurance-speak in a letter or email from the carrier.
These are your strengths. And guess what? No machine or bot can do your job effectively.
There’s a lot of talk about disruption in our industry. But this isn’t anything new. Remember when the direct-to-consumer model was new and pundits told us consumers wouldn’t need agents anymore?
That was years ago, and we’re all still here, helping our clients over the phone and face-to-face. The key to surviving and thriving over the next decade is to combine what we do best with what direct-to-consumer models do best. We need to reach consumers where they shop (like the direct models do). Then we need to wow them with our personal attention, educational materials, and long-term commitment to the relationship.
The catch? We need technology to help us show our clients how good at this job we really are.
The Challenge: Acquisition or Retention?
We ask a lot of agents how we can help them, and the answer is always the same: I need leads...how can I get more leads?
But there are two very different models you can use to find those leads. For a little explanation, let’s look at Bain’s report, Customer loyalty in P&C insurance: US edition 2014. The gist? Customer loyalty is hard to earn – and hard to keep. The report makes a clear distinction between two models: those who acquire customers, and those who retain them. They found that it’s very hard to do both.
Success hinges on selecting the right customer segments, offering them a tailored proposition, then delighting them with innovative products and superior service at the key moments of truth.
The acquisition model usually attracts consumers who focus on price, using ads to bring in customers and serving them through direct distribution channels. In contrast, the retention model usually attracts consumers who focus on peace of mind and are less price-sensitive.
Does this sound familiar yet?
While direct-to-consumer marketers and lead-gen sites may be great at delivering prospects, they’re not great at building a long-term relationship. This is a problem because, according to Bain, loyal customers who promote their carrier are worth 3 times more in lifetime value than those who don’t - and 7 times more than those who actively complain about their carrier.
Although this report is talking about the customer/carrier relationship, the same holds true for the customer/agent relationship. If you work to build a lasting relationship with your new prospects and clients, you stand to gain 7 times the return you’d get by seeking out a new prospect and starting from scratch.
The Strategy: Technology Builds Retention
Okay, so we know retention can pay off, big time. We've talked before on this blog about the lifetime value of a client. Ideally, once you earn their trust, you can bring them additional ideas and solutions. You can continue helping them protect their assets with additional coverage types, from disability to long-term care. As Bain researchers reported, this model offers 7 times the return of working with a client only once.
But how do we achieve it?
This is where technology comes in. The acquisition model has already figured out how to use technology to its advantage, with SEO, web quoters, lead capture, text messaging, and more. We can use those same tools in different ways to build relationships, not just prompt an instant purchase. Let’s go over some use cases, then we’ll go over how to make them happen.
Proficiency in cross-selling offers other routes to growth: directly, by selling more products per customer, and indirectly, as customers with more products stay longer.
Use Cases
Your best source of new leads is already at your fingertips: your existing book of business. The retention model means you need to do more to engage them from the moment they become prospects. Here are just a few ways you can do that.
Build a relationship with prospects:
- Introduce yourself and point them toward your best resources.
- Provide educational drip content on relevant concepts (not products).
- Check-in after delivering this content: did it bring up questions?
- Prompt them to take action: get a quote, ask more questions, or make a purchase.
Build a relationship with clients:
- Provide a client onboarding kit, with handy contact info, links, or documentation they’ll need about their policy and your agency.
- Send birthday greetings and holiday messages. This reinforces the idea that you’re a part of their life, not just on the day they bought their policy.
- Check in every year for a review.
Actively prospect within your book of business:
- Look for relevant dates and ages. For example, you could reach out to every client at age 64.5 to talk about Medicare and a MedSupp policy. Talk to clients at age 65 about the financial ramifications of taking Social Security at age 66 versus 70.
- Talk about retirement. You could also set up an age-related trigger – talk to clients at age 40 about getting serious about saving for retirement, if they haven’t already.
- Look for clients with elementary school-aged kids. Ask if they’re interested in learning how life insurance can help with college funding – if they start now, they can build cash value that will help those kids when they’re 18.
- No obvious dates or landmarks to talk about? Create drip campaigns for other types of insurance you can offer: disability, annuities, long-term care, and more.
The Technology: A CRM with Automated Marketing
But how do you make all that happen? That’s where a powerful CRM and automation technology come in. It would take hours (or days) to sort through your data if you had to do it manually. Yes, it can be done...but it's so burdensome you'll likely put it off until that magical far-off day when you have no appointments or calls scheduled.
It would also create a lot of work, cutting and pasting and sending a lot of one-off emails. It's not a productive use of your time. Cutting and pasting is not what you do best, after all. So why are so many agents still doing things the old-fashioned way, with spreadsheets and multiple carrier portal logins?
It's time to start using technology the way direct marketers do - to save time and make lead-generation not only easy, but automatic.
We use Insureio, the only CRM built by life insurance agents for life insurance agents. There is no other solution that stores your client data and their policy information, plus provides marketing capabilities and agency management solutions. We love it because it saves time and effort. But if it's not for you, there are ways to replicate what it can do by cobbling together a workaround with other systems.
Let's take a second look at those bullet-point lists of ways to reach out to clients and prospects. Here's how Insureio combines technology and insurance to make these tasks easy, if not effortless.
Build a relationship with prospects:
- Introduce yourself and point them toward your best resources. Insureio lets you create marketing campaigns that contain emails, text messages, and to-tasks for you, the agent. You can automatically assign all new leads to a certain status, then create a campaign that everyone in that status receives automatically. The result? You connect with every new lead instantly.
- Provide educational drip content on relevant concepts (not products). When a prospect doesn't convert, you can assign them to a status that automatically enrolls them in a drip-marketing campaign. Over time, with more education, they may re-engage, giving you a second chance.
- Check-in after delivering this content: did it bring up questions? Insureio's marketing campaigns can include text messages and tasks as well as emails. The more ways you reach out, the more likely it is you'll connect with your prospect.
- Prompt them to take action: get a quote, ask more questions, or make a purchase. Insureio's marketing package includes a pre-built educational website white-labeled for your agency. If a consumer isn't ready to buy, you can always send them to your InsuranceDivision site, with a built-in quoter and tons of educational content.
Build a relationship with clients:
- Provide a client onboarding kit, with handy contact info, links, or documentation they’ll need about their policy and your agency. You can do all this using an email or text message marketing campaign. Direct them to your social media profiles to connect with you. Or link to your business on Google or Yelp and ask for a review.
- Send birthday greetings and holiday messages. This reinforces the idea that you’re a part of their life, not just on the day they bought their policy. Insureio's reporting section lets you build and save reports to re-run any time you need the most current information. Need an easy way to send a Christmas greeting to every client? Two minutes to bundle all those clients into a single report in Insureio. Another minute to select a pre-loaded holiday message template and send everyone in that report a copy.
- Check in every year for a review. Need a reminder? No problem. Insureio's statuses let you add as many tasks, as far out in the calendar, as you like. Use the pre-built In Force status, and add a task with a delay of 1 year that reminds you to follow up at just the right time.
Actively prospect within your book of business:
- Look for relevant dates and ages. How do you know which clients are the right age? Insureio's reporting lets you specify an age or age range, then pull a complete list of clients (including their email addresses) who fit the criteria.
- Talk about retirement. Use the same reporting feature described above to pull a younger age range into your report.
- Look for clients with elementary school-aged kids. This is a great place to use tagging. As you learn about a client, add tags (saved keywords) that remind you about their needs or interests. Later, you can pull reports by tag to gather all clients with the tag "college-funding" or "school-aged-kids", for example.
- No obvious dates or landmarks to talk about? Get creative with your reporting! Create a report that gathers all your clients with term policies and talk to them about the possible benefits of converting. Or maybe a particular carrier has a new offering to market - run a report to gather all clients with a policy from that carrier, and tell them what's new.
That's our look at technology and insurance!
We hope this post made it easy to see that your skills are valued, now more than ever. It's time to use technology to highlight them rather than overshadow them. How are you using technology in your agency? How does it help you better communicate with clients? Tell us in the comments!
