What is Marketing Automation in the Insurance Industry?

by Chris Mustakas, Director of Marketing, Ai Insurance Organization Inc. —

The insurance industry is notoriously complex. This complexity makes marketing automation in the insurance industry essential for long-term success. In this blog post, I will explore what marketing automation is, its importance to the insurance industry, how it has helped Ai Insurance Organization succeed, and more! I’ll start off by saying that we are a very small team. Therefore, efficiency is key to get as much output as we can using the least number of resources possible. This is where marketing automation comes in.

Read on to learn more about what marketing automation is and its importance in the insurance sector.

How does marketing automation work?

Marketing automation is a process that’s used to identify the best way to market and target customers. The goal of using marketing automation is to essentially optimize your marketing efforts so you can increase your customer base and sales.

By automating tasks, our producers (brokers), marketing staff, and have more time to focus on other important aspects of their business. Automating tasks like emails, reports, even scheduling calls all help get the results we are looking for.

What are the benefits of an integrated CRM and marketing automation platform?

At Ai Insurance Organization, web generated leads are tracked in real time by campaign, target class, and landing page to measure ROI. When a lead enters their information via our lead generation forms, the CRM automatically signals our outbound communication system to send out a thank you email while at the same time, the CRM cycles leads through customizable, and pre-defined routing queues based on target class. This ensures leads are assigned to our producers according to their area of expertise. Once the lead is accepted, the producer must respond to the request within 60 seconds before the lead moves to the next producer, thus creating a sense of urgency for immediate action and a timely response for all leads.

Our CRM also triggers a follow up email if the producer is unable to immediately call back. This is to keep the lead engaged and respected by allowing the lead to book a call back at their convenience. This email has saved leads from going elsewhere by booking a follow up and closing more business.

Thanks to cross-pollinated data to our outbound communication platform from the CRM, we can customize cross-sell emails by class and industry, and emails are also sent to lapsed customers weeks and months in advance of their X-date to restart the conversation and try to win back their business. More on cross-selling emails later.

How can you put a strategic focus on lead generation, prospect management, and client education/nurturing?

In today’s world, businesses must be able to generate leads and convert them into sales, without relying on expensive advertising campaigns. In the insurance industry, marketing automation is a solution that can help you do just that. Marketing automation can help you focus your efforts, in a strategic way, on lead generation, prospect management, and client education/nurturing.

By automating your marketing efforts in this way, you can spend less time on administrative tasks like scheduling calls for appointments or sending follow-up emails. By focusing more of your time on lead generation and customer service, you will have more opportunities to meet with customers and sell them products they need or want.

Marketing automation also allows you to know what works and what doesn’t work in the process of generating leads. This can help you discover new ways to attract prospective customers and increase their interest in your company.

How do you make data-driven decisions?

As digital marketing becomes more popular, it’s important to be able to measure the effectiveness of digital marketing campaigns. This includes the ability to measure how many people saw or clicked through your ad, how many impressions you received, what the click-through rates were for each ad, and more. Google Analytics, Data Studio, Hot Jar and other software allows companies to learn how their prospects and clients interact with their websites, and advertisements.

Marketing automation is a process in which technology systems collect and analyze data about your customers, prospects, and other contacts to make data-driven decisions. These systems can be used to automate the complete lifecycle of marketing activities and improve customer acquisition, conversion rates, performance, or retention. Marketing automation is typically implemented on marketing websites (i.e., landing pages) but can also be applied across all digital channels such as email marketing. For example, like most, our marketing communication platform gives us valuable insights into who has opened our emails, how many times they’ve opened them, what links they’ve clicked, and inversely, who has not opened our emails, so we can then send them follow up emails.

With our marketing communication platform, we can also assign points to each actionable result. For example, a client or prospect opening an email would get 2 points, clicking on a link in the email would give another 2 points, and filling out a form would yield 10 points.  As the client (or prospect completes more actions) their points are tallied and listed in a dashboard within our CRM. This ‘hot prospects’ leaderboard allows our producers to determine who is more interested or engaged with the content, and therefore, should be contacted first.

Additionally, with marketing automation, you can customize your digital experiences for your customers based on their preferences or needs. This is what is known as cross-selling.

What is Cross-Selling?

Cross-selling is the process of creating a product or service that your customer might not know they need but will find appealing, and persuading them to buy that product or service. Cross-selling is often used in conjunction with other marketing strategies like social media advertising, search engine optimization (SEO), pay per click (PPC), email marketing, and direct mail marketing just to name a few.

Why Is Cross-Selling Important for Insurance Agents and Brokers?

Cross-selling can also be used to provide additional information about your services in order to educate your customers and make them learn more about what you offer. This type of marketing strategy will help increase their trust in you as an agent or broker, which will lead to more sales in the future. It’s also an excellent opportunity for you to improve engagement with your existing clients by sending out personalized emails that share valuable content with them like industry news or updates on new products that have been added to your product line.

It’s important to remember that you’re not trying to sell to everyone; you’re just trying to get people who are already interested in your business.

With digital marketing and marketing automation, you can create a unique online experience for each individual person that is tailored to their needs. If someone is interested in buying a policy, it’s possible to create custom content that provides all the information they need but in an easy-to-read manner. This makes it easy for people to buy insurance from you and for them to feel like they’re getting the most out of their purchase rather than being bombarded with irrelevant content that doesn’t actually help them get what they want from your business.

The goal of marketing automation is to ensure that each customer interaction leads to an actionable result for your company. For example, if a customer has visited your website and shown interest in becoming a customer, your marketing automation system might automatically enroll them into a lead nurturing program that provides them with relevant content based on their preferences. Marketing automation systems are also able to use data science techniques to predict what customers might do next so that you can quickly prepare for their next move.

Conclusion

There are many ways in which marketing automation can benefit your company. Marketing automation can help you save time, cut costs, and provide a more personalized customer experience when compared to traditional methods. To learn more about the many benefits of marketing automation, and how Ai Insurance Organization has used it on our path to success, check out the webinar I did with Doug Grant from Insurance-Canada.ca

In short, marketing automation helps make your business more efficient by creating personalized experiences for people and boosting conversion rates at the same time! But unfortunately, that’s the only short thing about marketing automation.  In fact, marketing automation is a long-game. It requires a lot of trial and error, countless ROI reports and the patience to see the program through.

But, with proper patience and understanding, an integrated CRM and marketing automation platform will provide a company with an “end-to-end” suite of tools to help your company succeed in the industry. With an integrated CRM and marketing automation platform, we’ve managed to automate customer service activities, streamline sales processes, and offer more personalized content, especially for cross-sell/upsell opportunities.

On-Demand Webinar

Watch Chris present “Marketing Automation: Lessons Learned On The Path To Success” on behalf of Ai Insurance Organization Inc. – a Technology In Action webinar held Aug. 24, 2022.

About the Author

Chris Mustakas is the Director of Marketing at Ai Insurance Organization Inc.

He has a track record of success in the professional sports and insurance industries, with more than 15 years of experience in marketing, branding, communications, social media, and sales.

Connect with Chris on LinkedIn.

About Ai Insurance Organization Inc.

Ai Insurance Organization Inc. is an award-winning Canadian Insurance Brokerage located in Mississauga, Ontario. We proudly serve clients all over Canada (except for Quebec and the Territories). We are Canada’s leading surety bond broker and contractor insurance provider.

Our surety bonding programs service companies of all sizes; from start-ups to tenured companies, including Fortune 500. Our clients include contractors and construction companies from all industry sectors, transportation firms, estates, financial institutions and those with miscellaneous and hard-to-place bonding requirements. We also have international surety bonding capabilities.

Our surety partners are the best the industry has to offer, and are chosen specifically to meet your individual needs. Together, we are committed to provide sound counsel and deliver continuity of experience and consistency of service.

Our brokerage is committed to delivering the utmost in customer service and is well informed on changing risk appetites and industry trends. Together, we are in the best position to negotiate the most competitive rates, terms and limits on your behalf.

For more information, visit getcertain.ca.

Source: Ai Insurance Organization Inc.