Marketing Automation Advantages for Insurance Agents

In this era of digital ubiquity, businesses expect personalized relationships with insurance agents. Both prospects and customers require brokers to deliver a more meaningful benefits experience. Yet, many agencies are lacking in the adoption of holistic digital marketing strategies. As an insurance agency grows, the number of marketing tasks also grows. Moreover, how can you allocate efforts to marketing during the open enrollment season? Fortunately, technology has brought us marketing automation—in other words, software to automatically deliver personalized marketing messages. In this week’s Broker Tool Belt, we highlight marketing automation advantages for brokers and how this technology provides the speed, insight, and outreach required to succeed in an increasingly digital world.

1. Increase Productivity

There are many marketing automation advantages for brokers, but the most notable is the increase in productivity. Automation will simplify your routine and cut down on manual tasks. Marketing campaigns have a large number of moving parts, including emails, sign-up forms, landing pages, and CTAs. Insurance marketing automation assembles these elements in one place, streamlining your workflow and reducing the chance of human error.

In addition to simplifying the setup process for a marketing campaign, automation can be useful at all stages of your internal processes: review and approval flows, collaboration between teams, keeping your communications calendar up to date, or even budgeting and planning. For instance, you can set up internal alerts to identify when prospects interact with one of your marketing materials. This simple step will let you know which groups you need to focus your attention on. Since you won’t need to spend time deciding who to reach out to, you’ll have extra time to focus on more complex tasks.

Marketing automation software will handle your email programs, sending different campaigns to different audiences depending on how you categorize them. It will also manage your social media posting, and it will even make creating landing pages a breeze. This level of automation will result in a significant increase in your agency’s productivity.

2. Helps With Lead Management

One of the key marketing automation advantages for brokers is lead management. As you grow your agency and build your database, managing leads will become increasingly more complex. By embracing marketing automation, you can access records detailing each lead’s interactions with your marketing materials, such as email opens and content downloads. Automation software will give you complete visibility into every prospect’s journey, allowing you to leverage key touchpoints, send your prospects more relevant marketing messages, and have more meaningful conversations with them. In more detail:

• • • Marketing automation can sort and score your prospects automatically. Based on their behavior and actions, the software can assign a score to each lead to represent their likelihood to buy.
    • How many times have you wondered how prospects found your website or what they look at when they get to it? One of the most insightful marketing automation advantages for insurance brokers is the availability to track on-page behavior. The actions taken on your website will help with lead scoring and will allow you to send prospects targeted marketing messages.

To illustrate, imagine an HR administrator clicked on one of your Google ads for supplemental accident insurance. She got to your landing page and downloaded the flyer outlining the benefits. Five days later, she visited your website and, after browsing a bit, requested a quote. But you haven’t heard anything since and three weeks have passed.

At this point, you might think that a great opportunity slipped away. However, with marketing automation you can follow-up with this type of stagnant opportunity. Have you ever abandoned a shopping cart only to get a reminder email a few days later? You can do the same with marketing automation to engage open opportunities. For example, you could create a drip campaign for all prospects who requested a quote but didn’t make a purchase. Follow-up emails are a great tool to keep leads interested. You don’t want to overwhelm them, but you want to remind them of everything you have to offer and how you can satisfy their needs.

3. Boost Personalization

If you are not personalizing your marketing messages, you are already falling behind your competition. You are probably tired of hearing it, but customers do crave customized content and product recommendations. 71% of consumers feel frustrated when a shopping experience is impersonal, decreasing their purchase intent as a result. While you might think this strategy requires a heavy lift, one of the most fundamental marketing automation advantages is the ability to effortlessly reach prospects at a scale with personalized experiences.

Personalization with a marketing automation platform is accomplished through segmentation. Most insurance agencies offer different types of insurance products with multiple policies. Each type will fit the unique needs of a specific set of customers. Therefore, you can’t deliver the same messaging highlighting the same product to all of your prospects. Segmentation is the process of dividing your prospects into different groups based on their characteristics and behavior. The idea being that a specific segment of prospects who share the same traits will respond similarly to marketing initiatives.

The software makes it easy to build customized campaigns that automatically trigger based on behavior, demographics, or interests, allowing you to nurture your prospects throughout the customer journey. With marketing automation, you can build an all-around personalized digital experience. For example, you not only can adapt the content to each prospect, but you can also utilize progressive profiling to select which form fields appear based on the information you already have about a particular lead.

Final Thoughts About Marketing Automation Software for Insurance Agents

There are many marketing automation advantages for insurance agents, but, to put it briefly, automation will take your marketing activities to the next level. There are a variety of marketing automation strategies you can use depending on where your leads are in the sales funnel. You might need to spend some time in the planning phase, but the software will empower you to succeed with fewer resources and less time spent on manual tasks and processes. While automation tools were reserved for enterprise organizations that could afford the price, today, small and independent insurers can easily access this technology to streamline their workflow and boost efficiency. By sending consistent messages to each audience segment, you’ll stay top of mind with your prospects and you’ll be positioned to lead them toward more informed decisions.