How Marketing Automation Can Drive Insurance Agency Growth and Revenue 

InsuredMine | Posted: 6/3/2021


The life of an insurance agent is never dull. From running the back-office functions of an agency, to selling new policies, to keeping on top of licensing and compliance, there just aren’t enough hours in the day!

Think about your own agency. How much time do you and each one of your producers, account managers, and customer service representative spend reaching out to clients and prospects? Whether it’s following up on a quote, checking in on an upcoming renewal, or just wishing them a happy birthday, chances are the hours add up fast.

This challenge only multiplies as your agency grows. While you may have been able to personally touch all your clients when there were only 20 of them, what happens when there are 100, or 1,000? Some agents respond by focusing only on their most demanding clients and letting everyone else run-on autopilot until they need something. This strategy actually puts accounts at risk, since clients don’t feel the agent keeping up a personal relationship and it leaves room for a more attentive agent to swoop in.

Luckily, there’s a solution. Marketing automation can help your agency maintain ongoing communication with leads and clients without hours of manual effort. Using automation in your sales process can reduce the time you and your producers spend nurturing leads without sacrificing ongoing communication with those leads throughout the process.

Sound too good to be true? Take a look at these numbers:
•    A study by Nucleus Research found that marketing automation improved business productivity by 20%.
•    Automation can shorten the sales cycle by driving faster lead conversions.
•    A report by Annuitas Group found that businesses who used marketing automation to nurture prospects saw 451% growth in qualified leads and 47% growth in lead conversion.
 
If you’re sold on the idea, let’s dive into how exactly using marketing automation in your insurance agency can produce results. There are four primary areas in which using a technology solution to automate your communications can really impact productivity and sales.
1.    Lead generation
2.    Lead nurturing
3.    Client engagement
4.    Cross-selling

We will explore how using automation can enhance your current practices in each of these areas.

Marketing Automation for Lead Generation
Lead generation is a crucial step in any business’ growth. Specifically in the insurance industry, the leads are the “seeds” of your business. The more leads you generate (in theory) the more clients you should have. Assuming you have an effective sales strategy and a great insurance product to sell, generating leads may be the most difficult step in your sales pipeline.

Consider how your agency currently generates leads: are they primarily from word-of-mouth referrals? Digital advertising? Organic search results? Or are leads provided to you by the insurance carriers you work with? For most agents, it’s a combination of all these avenues, and more.

By implementing a marketing automation system, you can spend less time following up on leads one by one, and instead gain insight into which ones are most interested in your services. You can focus your attention on the leads that have opened your emails and clicked on your links – all data you have access to within marketing automation software. In this way, you are able to spend less time, money, and effort on leads that aren’t likely to pan out.   

Marketing Automation for Lead Nurturing
Nurturing refers to the interactions you have with any potential clients once they have become aware of your agency. Back to the seed analogy, if leads are the seeds of your business, you can create accounts that will bear fruit for many years to come by investing some time to nurture them early on.

While lead nurturing is important, it can also be time consuming. According to Gleanstar Research, nearly 50% of qualified leads you receive will not convert to a sale because they just aren’t ready to buy right away. When this happens, the sales cycle may go on for months or even years. That’s a lot of time to invest into something without earning anything in return!

This is where using marketing automation to remove some of the manual work from this process helps you and your team save time, focus energy on the most promising leads, and ultimately convert more leads to clients. When you use marketing automation to nurture leads, you can gain insight into which messages work and which don’t. You can also track how each lead responds to the communications you send and reach out to them personally based on their behavior (i.e. opening an email or clicking a link you send them).  

Based on the status of the prospect, you can customize the follow-ups. Driving information from the touchpoints, will help you to rank your leads. This in turn can also help you to drive wider marketing automated campaigns.

Marketing Automation for Client Engagement
Once a lead has converted to a sold client, it might be tempting to just let them sit until the policy renews. Unfortunately, doing this provides the opportunity for a more attentive agent to woo your client away. Keeping in touch with your current clients is an important part of retaining them but it’s still time consuming, even if you believe in the value of it.

This is where using marketing automation to engage your current clients can come in. By setting up periodic check-ins by email or text, or even setting tasks to remind you to give those clients a call at a certain point in the future, you can make it easy to provide a personal touch on a regular basis.

If you’re wondering what this looks like in practice, we often see automations based around the number of weeks or months since a policy began. For example, asking how the client is doing and if they would provide an online review six weeks after their policy became active. Clients’ birthdays are another touchpoint that can easily be automated based on the information you already have about them in your system.

No matter how you choose to implement it, automating some periodic communication with your current clients allows you to effortlessly reach out to them, opening the door for them to engage with you early and often. Building and maintaining these relationships is crucial to retaining business.  

Marketing Automation for Cross-Selling Opportunities
Most insurance agents agree that cross-selling and account-rounding are major strategies for success. It becomes more difficult for another agent to lure away your client if they have multiple policies placed with your agency.

This is just one more area where the power of data combined with a marketing automation system becomes an asset. By using a marketing automation system that’s purpose-built for insurance agencies, you can use the data you already have access to (like who has homeowners insurance but not auto insurance with you) to create personalized and targeted messages that appeal to those specific clients.

InsuredMine is a CRM built for Insurance Agents
As you can see, marketing automation within an insurance agency has the potential to reduce the manual hours it takes to generate and nurture leads as well as engage your current clients and round out their accounts. To do this, you need a full-fledged sales, marketing, communication, and engagement system that’s built for the way insurance agents work.

InsuredMine is the only platform that offers a full 360-degree customer management experience solution and integrates with your current agency management system to harness the power of all that data you have on your clients and prospects.

From the time a lead comes to you, to writing the business, to annual renewals, to cross-selling, and referrals, InsuredMine creates a smooth and effortless process for your agents and your clients. If you’re ready to harness the power of marketing automation for your agency, sign up for a free trial of InsuredMine and see for yourself.