The insurance industry, which was previously steady and predictable, is no longer so. Growth without losing profitability is difficult, climate change is affecting certain risk profiles irreversibly, distribution needs have become genuinely multichannel, and customers expect items tailored specifically to them.
Meanwhile, technology has continued to evolve at a breakneck pace, and a new player environment threatens to disrupt consumer acquisition. Private equity firms, asset managers, and other newcomers are moving swiftly to profit on sector change, with considerable focus and discipline.
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Furthermore, when consumers are deciding on an insurance choice, they go through a lengthy process of obtaining information from websites, getting comments from user forums and opinion sites, and searching social media for other people’s experiences with a company. In today’s highly competitive purchasing environment, this represents a crowded and complicated path-to-purchase for insurance providers attempting to spark buyers’ interest.
How can insurance businesses stand out while focusing and maximizing marketing resources when consumers have more information and options at their fingertips than ever before? They must invest in digital marketing in a smart, efficient, and data-driven manner to remain competitive and avoid losing money by blindly following money-backed corporations with more flexible budgets.
They greatly boost their chances of closing a transaction if they can “divert” consumers’ attention at the correct time on their journey and invest in the proper places to assure ROI — positioning themselves front and center as the best choice over a competitor’s.
Here are three suggestions for for insurance businesses to achieve this:
Include all Shopper Data Sets
Some data sets are easy to come by. Insurance businesses, on the other hand, must verify that they are considering all options.
As a result, the insurance businesses should look for solutions that can assess all data sources, including unstructured data such as mobile and desktop browsing behavior, social activity, and so on. With this information, they’ll be able to get a complete picture of insurance shoppers, and they’ll be able to nurture leads in a more concentrated way, reducing the likelihood that they’ll interact – and ultimately convert – with a rival.
Tie Conversions to Early Funnel Activities
When consumers are just starting out on their search, one of the most effective ways to secure their interest is to do so before they decide where to get their insurance product. This needs an understanding of the first motivators that lead consumers along the path to purchase, as well as the capacity to link them to the final conversion and do so in a personalized manner for each segment. Insurance providers can intervene at the proper stage with information consumers seek by identifying the early funnel activities that generate sales, such as consumer behaviors, tendencies, and trigger points.
Use Prescriptive Analytics to Your Advantage
Marketers in the insurance industry must change their mindset — there is no more need for “throwing spaghetti on the wall.” This implies shifting from reactive monitoring of competitor and market data to proactively predicting outcomes and prescribing actions using tools like real-time AI-driven analytics. They may identify what they need to do to improve ROI by improving conversions and lowering acquisition expenses using these recommendations.
An insurance company can establish connections using analytics technologies that can address early-funnel activities connected to conversion and complete data sources. Here are a couple examples of this in action:
Home insurance
Consumers who are relocating to a different city or state due to a new job purchase home insurance over the course of a 1.5-week journey on average, with an average of 49 interactions across multiple touchpoints. Brands that are present on Valuepenguin.com, Moneyunder30.com, and Moneygeek.com, among other impactful trigger points as part of the consideration and comparison phases of the funnel, have a five times higher probability of converting consumers with home insurance in comparison to brands that aren’t present on these.
Also, there is a six-week period before purchasing home insurance, as part of moving to a new home, in which this segment is actively converting in adjacent categories such as taking a mortgage and investing in aspects around home improvements. There is an opportunity to meet this segment on the critical touch points including: Themortgagereports.com, Gobankingrates.com, and Upgradedhome.com, among others, as part of their pre-home insurance funnel activity. Meeting consumers in the funnels that are highly correlated to converting with home insurance in terms of time proximity, can increase conversion by 2.8 times on average.
Life insurance
There is a correlation between expecting a newborn and getting life insurance.
Parents that are in the pregnancy period are more likely to get life insurance before the birth of their newborn, a period of time when they are heavily interacting with other aspects of getting their home ready for their new child — purchasing products such as baby monitors, cribs, bassinets, strollers and more.
There is an opportunity to meet these consumers at the early stages of their path to purchase of life insurance on websites such as Money.com, Insurancequotes.com, Consumersadvocate.org and Thesavvycouple.com, among others. Brands that are active on these impactful trigger points have a 3.5 times higher probability of converting this segment of consumers.
In addition, there is the opportunity to meet this segment in the funnels of other products they are purchasing in close proximity with life insurance. This segment has 5.6 times more interactions with trigger points such as Fatherly.com, Cafemom.com, Familyeducation.com, and Todaysparent.com, among others, in comparison to the rest of the population. Therefore, this presents an opportunity to target this high intent segment in close proximity to when they are converting with life insurance but have not yet formulated their opinion or begun their extensive research.
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These are clearly very particular instances, but as the path to purchase becomes more complicated and consumer purchasing patterns become more difficult to follow, insurance providers need a means to grasp the nuances of customer journeys in order to influence buying decisions in their favor. With the removal of cookies, this becomes even more difficult.
Using the methods outlined above, insurance companies can determine how to segment consumers based on their online behaviors, fully comprehend their journey, and link specific behaviors to other product purchases, allowing them to nurture leads and target consumers in the most effective way possible – maximizing the ROI of marketing dollars rather than wasting resources and making guesses that aren’t backed up by conversions.
Taking Action
It may appear difficult, but with the right tools, it isn’t. While consumer data platforms (CDP) exist to provide insight into consumer behaviors, they only address part of the issue. Insurance businesses need “external” CDPs that can measure what customers do before, during, and after online transactions with them, as well as where they go to competitors.
Insurance providers can then act based on the information acquired from solutions like these to get the most out of their marketing investments. They may be able to do so while simultaneously adhering to increasingly strict privacy regulations, such as GDPR and the California Privacy Act.
If insurance businesses aren’t already using accessible tools to gain visibility into online consumer habits and trigger points, they’re missing out – and likely losing business to competitors.
