4 Ways to Encourage Conversions and Grow Your Insurance Agency

The success of your insurance agency depends on a number of factors, and as you're looking for ways to grow your business, you're probably putting a fair amount of thought into each of them. Successful growth is fueled by everything from the quality of customer care you provide to the competitiveness of pricing offered by your insurance carriers. No matter what your strategy for sparking some upward movement for your agency, there's one thing that is absolutely essential - a continuous stream of new customers.

Attracting new customers is one of the biggest challenges for insurance agencies. Why? (And this doesn't come as news to anyone in the business) Because the insurance industry is competitive and standing out in the crowd can be a challenge - especially if you lack a strategic marketing plan. What insurance agencies really need is a way to attract potential customers and introduce them to their sales funnel.

The marketing world, as well as the insurance world, calls these potential customers "leads".

When a lead expresses interest in your insurance business, it opens up the opportunity for you to nurture the relationship and welcome a new customer to your agency. So, how do you successfully nurture this relationship along? Let's talk about four insurance marketing ideas that are strong performers when it comes to converting leads into customers.

Start with a Solid Foundation

Today's insurance customer isn't looking through the Yellow Pages and cold-calling insurance agencies for quotes. Although they may reach the point where they want to reach out to you directly, chances are that this won't happen until they've spent some time becoming acquainted their insurance needs and options, and hopefully, with your agency online. In a world of digital consumerism, you need a solid search optimization and reputation management strategy and a professional insurance agency website design to meet your future customers online.

As an insurance agency, the quality of your web design is paramount. Leveraging your website to establish trust, respectability, authority and an emotional connection all at the same is crucial to your insurance agency's ability to convert insurance leads.

Let's look at the average insurance customer. They know that they'll need to contact an agency directly at some point, but they don't want to waste their time speaking with agencies that are going to be overpriced or fall flat in terms of perks or customer service. They head to your website to see how you compare to your competitors.

What happens if they encounter a website that doesn't want to load on their mobile device or fails to deliver any valuable information about your agency? What if it's too cluttered or finding their way around takes more effort than they want to invest? The answer is easy - they're going to back out of your website and not give it a second thought.

A well built, fully optimized insurance agency website is the foundation that first impressions are built on. A great web design encourages visitors to linger and return, while giving you the opportunity to nurture them to conversion.

Building Relationships with Email Marketing

The customer journey, meaning the path a lead takes from the first moment they're introduced to your agency that leads them to the point of conversion and beyond, is highly dependent on customer touch points. When you don't have a strategy in place to initiate contact with your leads along these touch points, you're essentially leaving it up to them to reach out to you - a move that's incredibly risky.

Email marketing is insanely effective at helping you reach out to your leads at exactly the right moment. Unfortunately, email marketing isn't always on the radar of insurance agencies. There seems to be a misconception that email marketing is a tremendous hassle and that the results aren't worth it. Nothing could be further from the truth.

As a marketing strategy, email campaigns generally produce one of the best ROIs. For every $1 spent, email marketing produces an average return of $38. This number is great, but to get maximum impact for conversions, your email strategy needs to be compelling, personal and value minded. Think along the lines of compelling call to actions, personalized discount incentives and emails that show the lead that you're paying attention to them as an individual.

Social Media with a Focus on Solutions

There's no question that social media is a powerful tool for connecting and engaging with your audience. While many insurance agencies realize that social media is great for introductions and increasing visibility, many aren't aware of how to leverage social media to produce a substantial boost in conversion rates.

There's one simple way to use social media to convert leads into customers and it's all about demonstrating your ability to provide real, actionable solutions through your content strategy.

Insurance customers are depending on you to solve a problem for them. They recognize insurance as a means to protect them, loved ones, and sometimes business interests from a variety of financially damaging losses. By promoting social media content that is focused on customer solutions, rather than generalized or brand focused content, you're demonstrating your expertise and customer problem solving capabilities.

For instance, you might start by sharing a blog about the 5 ways to avoid a nighttime driving accident. This topic is both relatable and specific enough to inspire interest. The next step would be to include a link to a report or newsletter on tips for determining what insurance plan is best for their individual needs.

Get as Specific As Possible

Finally, it's important to view each of your leads as an individual. With something as important as insurance, they're not looking for an agency that provides the same generic approach to customer service and communication to each person. They want to know that you understand their needs, and this means narrowing down your primary market into groups of smaller targets.

For instance, if you sell homeowners insurance, you might narrow your target audiences into smaller groups. This might include first time homebuyers, retirees who are looking to downsize or relocate and segmenting homebuyers by neighborhood.

If you're an independent insurance agency that wants to convert more leads into customers, we're the insurance marketing agency that can help. We provide a full scope of digital marketing and web design services to help your agency grow. Connect with Confluency Solutions today and discover how to boost your conversion rate.