Best Practices for Life Insurance Marketing
A blend of old-world sales techniques and new-age tools and strategies informs the best practices for life insurance marketing today.
Without a doubt, modern sales strategies assist with every part of the sales process including lead generation, data collection, nurturing leads, and closing sales. While today’s consumers appreciate the speed and convenience technology provides, they also give merit to the human touch.
The demand from life insurance consumers forces salespeople to shift the gears from a focus on life insurance products to improving their entire customer experience.
We’re highlighting the best practices to help you meet customer expectations and improve the customer journey which will lead to higher sales and commissions.
Shortcuts:
The Importance of Relationship Building in Life Insurance Marketing
6 Best Practices for Life Insurance Marketing
1. Modernize Your Communication Strategies
2. Create a Hybrid Customer Experience
3. Provide an Omnichannel Experience
4. Foster Interaction to Cultivate Valuable Relationships
5. Listen to Customer Feedback
6. Leverage Data When Building Customer Relationships
The Value of Digitalization in Life Insurance Sales
In the not-too-distant past, the tools that were available to life insurance salespeople were siloed in disparate systems. Life agents had to connect the dots on their own. To its credit, technology opens the silo walls and connects data in meaningful ways.
As a life insurance agent, you have thousands of apps and digital tools to choose from to assist you in bumping up your sales. It can be difficult to know which ones get the best results and provide the best ROI.
Just when you think you’ve found the perfect combination, new apps and tools emerge causing you to rethink your sales strategy.
Digital marketing improves visibility, drives inbound leads, increases speed, and enhances engagement with prospects. Each of these issues contributes to improving the customer lifetime value, commonly known as CLV.
While sales managers recognize the importance of virtual sales tools, they’re also concerned with the value insurance agents get from the investment in digitalization.
Fortunately, advanced sales analytics help quantify and support the relationship between digitalization and improved sales. Data related to each step of the sales funnel yields information that can help salespeople fine-tune their sales presentations and sell more life insurance.
For example, you may be targeting final expense seniors or life insurance for homeowners, or young married couples starting a family. The right data will inform your messaging to ensure you hit your target audience.
The Importance of Relationship Building in Life Insurance Marketing
There’s no substitute for having expertise in product knowledge, yet it’s essential for salespeople to also be skilled in relationship building.
Why?
Because, for better or worse, the relationship you have with your customers connects them to your agency. As with any other industry today, the customer experience has a major bearing on consumers’ buying decisions.
Prospects rely on you to be credible, reliable, and truthful. When they learn they can trust you, they know you have their best interests in mind. In having a sense of trust in you, they’re more apt to engage with you freely which will enhance the relationship even more.
Just how important is trust-building in life insurance sales? According to a Qualtrics report, 80% of customers consider their level of trust before making a purchase decision (such as buying life insurance). Today’s consumers are likely to check out reviews and testimonials before buying. The report shows that customers are twice as likely to buy life insurance from a company with a 5-star rating than one that has 1-2 stars.
Anyone who has spent time in insurance sales knows that the industry goes through a regular cycle. During the soft market, underwriting is lenient, premiums are low, and selling is profitable.
Unfortunately, the hard market follows the soft market.
During this part of the cycle, it’s much harder to make sales due to stringent underwriting, higher premiums, and less competition among carriers. It’s important to maintain good customers during turbulent markets and harsh economic times as it costs more time and money to acquire new customers than to retain existing ones.
Today’s customers want salespeople to listen to them, hear them, and do everything possible to meet their needs. For these reasons, you need to go further than meeting your customers’ expectations, you need to exceed them.
The experience customers have with you serves as a premise for future interactions they may have with sales and service.
When you can provide a consistent customer experience starting on the first day, you can reduce churn, lower customer acquisition costs, and increase the CLV.
The best practices for life insurance marketing will help you accomplish that.
6 Best Practices for Life Insurance Marketing
Effective communication lies at the foundation of every sales presentation. You may have great products to sell, but sales are bound to suffer when there are missteps in the communication process.
The following 6 best practices for life insurance marketing will help you maintain peak performance regardless of the hard and soft market cycle.
1. Modernize Your Communication Strategies
Communication is more than just making a sales presentation.
Your Communication with customers involves:
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Verbal communication which refers to articulation, tone of voice, the message, and the ability to persuade customers.
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Non-verbal communication which refers to facial expressions, gestures, and body language used to convey a message.
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Written communication which refers to presentation slides, written quotes, emails, website content, social media messages, and more.
Screen sharing complements all forms of written communication as it enables visual aids to clarify and place an emphasis on verbal and non-verbal communication.
The University of Texas cites the 55/38/7 formula which states that communication is 55% nonverbal, 38% oral and 7% words on a page. What we can learn from this is that every form of communication matters in sales.
Technology is capable of producing lots of data on how customers want to communicate with you. Sometimes customers prefer an answer via a quick text. Some consumers are constantly tuned into social media. Some people will read every bit of content you produce on the web while others prefer interacting with an online community.
Whatever their preferences, you can get ahead of the curve when you review customer data regularly and use your CRM to offer personalized messages and recommendations to make prospects feel seen and heard.
If you’re still struggling with communication skills, it may be worthwhile to invest in a good sales training program.
2. Create a Hybrid Customer Experience
A hybrid customer experience means interacting with customers on- and offline. This type of communication ensures that customers will have an integrated, seamless customer journey. Think of it this way – a hybrid experience isn’t all-human or all-digital.
Smart bots leverage lots of data including a customer’s tone of voice, inflection, words, and more to detect the customer’s intent. Often, bots can produce a quick answer for customers.
When bots don’t produce the desired results, be sure the digital tools you use have a way for them to exit and get to a person quickly when they need it. It’s not a seamless customer journey when someone is shouting, “Let me talk to a person!” The system should also be able to get them to the right person who can answer their question without being repeatedly transferred.
Be sure to respect the choices of those who aren’t digitally savvy and prefer to speak only by phone. You may also have customers who can’t or won’t spare the time to talk to you. Respect that too. In general, it’s best to find a nice balance between using a machine to communicate and speaking or writing something yourself.
Customers may have a communication preference based on where they are in the sales process, and a hybrid customer experience offers flexibility.
3. Provide an Omnichannel Experience
Some people use the terms omnichannel experience and hybrid experience interchangeably. That may be because these two terms overlap somewhat.
An omnichannel customer experience refers to creating consistent messaging and a consistent customer experience across all communication channels. The transition between communication channels should be seamless and cohesive.
For example, do your messages refer to Robert on a chat message and Bob on email chains? He may have a preference for using his legal name or nickname. You may not notice the difference, but the customer will.
An omnichannel experience puts the customer first and recognizes that a customer may switch channels in the same interaction. For example, the conversation may start on chat and switch to a phone call or social media message. With a customer-centric approach, the customer focuses more on the content than the channel they’re using.
4. Foster Interaction to Cultivate Valuable Relationships
Sales would be easy if prospects called you at regular intervals to ask you questions about life insurance.
Since that rarely happens in the business world, it’s up to you to foster interactions and cultivate relationships until the point of sale.
Cultivating relationships requires you to create empathy and a human connection.
It also requires you to understand the prospect’s needs early in the conversation and deliver on what you promise.
If you need to follow up on a task, don’t delay. Get back to customers at the earliest opportunity. If you don’t have an answer in a timely manner, let them know that too. Don’t forget to let them know how much it means to you to have their business.
Timely responses could also yield referrals to help you increase sales.
5. Listen to Customer Feedback
Most insurance salespeople could probably relate a story of how they blew a sale (or nearly did). As prepared as you may be going into a sale, you may have missed the mark for one reason or another. Perhaps you overlooked or misread a cue from the customer.
You can learn a lot from customer feedback after a sales appointment. Digital tools such as online or text surveys can be effective immediately after a sale while the customer experience is fresh in their minds.
Take the time to review chat and phone transcripts to better understand customer behavior and how you or another person in your agency responded.
Some of the feedback may be good, and some may be bad. Either way, chalk it up to a learning experience. Use it to revise your sales strategy and presentation to improve your selling skills.
Be sure to acknowledge that you received their feedback. Thank customers for taking the time to offer feedback, even if it’s not complimentary.
According to the Qualtrics report, 63% of customers believe that businesses could do a better job of listening to how they feel after a sale. Showing you value customers’ feedback, strengthens the relationship between you and your customers which is a good position to be in.
6. Leverage Data When Building Customer Relationships
The emergence of data analytics has been a game-changer for insurance agents as it provides insight into all aspects of the sales process.
Access to extensive data enables you to do the following:
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Gain information about where to find the best life insurance leads
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Understand customer behavior at all phases of the sales cycle
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Develop target personas and segment them
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Recommend the most appropriate products
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Provide insight into the best customers for upselling or cross-selling
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Spot inefficiencies in the sales process and streamline them
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Give actionable insights into decision-making
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Identify lackluster customer experiences and fix your workflows
Your CRM is a central tool that brings a wealth of data together into one central location. It’s a one-stop location to uncover what makes the customer journey better and what may be hindering it.
Best Practices for Elevate Life Insurance Sales
Overall, it’s essential to follow the best practices for digital marketing to adapt to the changing behaviors and expectations of consumers. To stay ahead of the curve, you must leverage technology, improve your relationship-building skills, establish trust, and foster long-term relationships with customers.
It’s essential to look beyond transactional interactions and dig deeper into the unique needs and concerns of today’s customers. By showing customers you have empathy for their situations and personalizing communications, you will surely build a solid foundation of loyalty and referrals for years to come.