How data-driven marketing insights help sell insurance
Create more meaningful customer engagement by understanding insurance shopping patterns and behaviors.
When insurance consumers set out to make a major-life purchase decision (MLP), which is a complex buying decision with a high degree of financial and emotional complexity, most invest a significant amount of time researching prior to buying. During the consideration process, MLP marketers rely on effective data to serve timely and relevant content to build awareness and deliver a great consumer experience.
Consumers evaluate cost and quality with the end goal of securing the product that they feel good about emotionally and financially. But, the path to purchase is drastically different.
So, too, is the marketing approach.
The insurance customer’s journey
As an MLP industry, insurance is unique. Shopping journeys are long, consumers are picky, and not every consumer is a fit or qualified for a particular insurer’s product. In addition, the consumer journey varies dramatically by consumer segment in terms of how early they begin, how frequently they interact online, and what type of device they use.
For example:
- Boomers looking for auto or life insurance are much more active online during the shopping journey compared to any other generation (including millennials).
- Life insurance consumers consider their purchase earlier and more often than auto insurance consumers.
- Auto insurance consumers with a college degree (or some college experience) are less active online during their journey compared to consumers with no college experience.
- Auto insurance consumers with poor credit are much more active online during their journey than consumers with good/better credit. (This also holds true for other MLP products as well.)
- Millennials are more likely to shop on a mobile device compared to Boomers and poor credit consumers use mobile devices much more than good/better credit consumers
Ensuring lasting value
According to Salesforce, 80% of consumers say the experience a company provides is as important as its products and services. So the best or most competitively priced product doesn’t always win, the best marketers do, especially in an industry like insurance, where most products are seen as commodities.
The marketer’s job now is to meet the consumer when and how they need you to meet them. And with consumer expectations hitting an all-time high, shoppers are more than willing to take their spend elsewhere. Meeting consumers’ rising expectations requires new capabilities. A simple, yet effective, framework will help ensure high customer lifetime value for your business.
This includes…
Targeting people, not devices
Major-life purchases require a deep understanding of the customer to inform quality segmentation, targeting, content, and execution strategies over the course of the long shopping journey. A core foundation of an MLP is focusing specifically on the individual and their preferences rather than broad audiences.
In contrast to many impulse purchases, MLPs typically award business to one provider in a given category. Once someone has picked a car insurance company, they tend to insure their property with that provider. Contrast that with retail where customers purchase from multiple brands on a daily basis. So it’s essential to target individual people rather than cookies or sessions — or people-based marketing.
Concentrating on behaviors, not just demographics
Demographics help define the target audience for a given agent or carrier. But, it’s essential to concentrate on consumer behaviors as signals of where consumers are in their buying process, if at all.
For example, the length of the shopping and decision process for insurance has a significant impact on how companies market and sell their products. In impulse purchases, the process tends to revolve around driving traffic to offers and incentivizing immediate sales. Insurance almost always involves multiple interactions, usually with multiple providers, on the way to a decision.
Many companies have started to create customer journey maps in order to better understand the phases of making a major-life purchase. The maps include each of the phases—from initial category and brand awareness through research, agent interactions, quote gathering, competitive sales processes, and ultimately new-customer onboarding.
Be helpful, not spammy
The key difficulty across MLP markets, including insurance, is that responsibility for the customer experience is typically spread across teams inside an organization as well as external agencies. One common example is where a customer does research on a few insurance sites, fills out a form or inquiry while comparison shopping, has their information sold to an aggregator, is called by a third-party call center where they are warm-transferred to a brand that ultimately ends up routing them to an agent. Through the process, multiple parties are retargeting, emailing, or otherwise continuing to market to them. Even after the customer ends up buying a policy, the marketing can continue for months. It’s no wonder customers frequently find the experience frustrating, annoying, and intrusive.
Avoiding risky interactions
An often overlooked part of insurance shopping is the risk implication of very long purchase cycles. In the case of impulse purchases, gross business demand might be affected by high-level risks like business cycles or interest rates but individual purchases are rarely impacted on a day to day or week to week basis. Additionally, because the purchase processes are generally quick, legal risks are often lower.
Though it can be extremely hard to protect against natural disasters, interest rate changes, and other external factors, other areas of risk can be managed easily. In the case of regulations like the Telephone Consumer Privacy Act (TCPA), operating in safe spaces and staying within legislated guidelines is entirely within the control of the marketers involved. It often takes good due diligence and internal processes to ensure your actions, as well as those from your third-party vendors, partners and others involved in servicing a customer – are compliant and help your business stay compliant.
The right message at the right time
The customer’s engagement involves research ahead of the quote request, and more research after, ultimately leading up to the conversion event. All of the breadcrumbs along the journey tend to be inaccessible to marketers or the media partners who are creating this behavioral data.
In a time when roughly 9 out of 10 marketers say customer data is essential to making decisions, behavioral data clearly makes or breaks marketing strategies. Actionable data about your customers’ shopping journeys is crucial so you can find and appropriately engage with customers who are ready to buy. Staying competitive and delivering a great consumer experience requires proactive engagement with potential customers at the right time with the right message.
Jaimie Pickles (jpickles@jornaya.com) is the general manager of Insurance at Jornaya, a data-as-a-service (DaaS) company specializing in consumer insights and behaviors. These opinions are his own.
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