How to identify and react to new insurance shopping behaviors
In the current COVID-19 environment, it's even more important to understand where insurance consumers are in their buying journey.
Almost overnight, COVID-19 changed how carriers and agents are engaging with insurance prospects and customers. They’ve accelerated their reliance on digital capabilities and advanced the importance of the digital experience more in five months than in the past several decades. There’s also a noticeable change in both the consumer journey, in which customers are the sole owners of their experiences and insurance provider behavior.
These behaviors are something we track here at Jornaya because we have a unique view of consumer shopping behaviors. With over 35,000 comparison shopping websites in our partner network, we witness each shopping event and can tie the actual consumer behind the shopping event to our customers’ databases, enabling them to stitch together the consumer shopping journey. We can also distinguish between the different insurance types those consumers are researching, so our insurance customers can be informed as to which consumers are interested in auto, home, health, and/or life insurance.
Emerged patterns
In the current COVID-19 environment, it’s even more important to understand where consumers are in their buying journey. The following patterns have emerged from our data:
- Increased overall shopping activity: In the price comparison shopping ecosystem, we witnessed a meaningful increase in insurance shopping activity beginning mid-March. The trend persisted through May for all lines but life insurance. While auto insurance shopping activity ended the month of May slightly lower than early March, activity in May was 41% higher than May 2019. For homeowners insurance, not only was shopping activity well above normal, but we witnessed more homeowners insurance shoppers as a percent of total auto/homeowners shoppers (approximately 12%) than usual (7%). Therefore, we believe there were more preferred and standard risks seeking insurance from price comparison shopping websites than ever before.
- Drivers of increased shopping: From March through May, most individual carriers reduced their advertising spend and, consequently, saw an overall decrease in prospective customers on their brand websites and call center activity. In the industry, there was significant excess capacity and overall sales softened. Many carriers and individual local agents — who, like consumers, were stuck at home — shifted unspent advertising dollars to the price comparison website operators to buy leads and calls. This phenomenon, combined with increased demand from consumers seeking ways to reduce household expenditures, fueled the performance marketing ecosystem to attract many more consumers than usual to their price comparison shopping websites. Other undercurrents causing increased shopping activity included: two interest rate drops in March (more mortgage refinancing led to more homeowners insurance shopping), massive layoffs and stay-at-home orders (more financially sensitive consumers at home with ample time to seek ways to save money) and auto insurance premium rebates (awakening some consumers to find out if they paying too much).
- A lasting impact: Carriers and agents we speak with predict there will be a continued reliance on performance marketers for high quality leads and calls for at least the remainder of 2020. That, combined with more consumers seeking choice, means we are likely to see sustained growth in activity on comparison shopping websites.
How carriers are adapting
Identifying these shifts in consumer preference and behavior can save carriers and agents significant time and resources in the COVID-19 landscape as they adapt to being even more thoughtful in their outreach to both prospective and existing customers. Behavioral data — such as time spent on websites, frequency of visits, and which web pages were visited — delivers these valuable insights.
Being able to tap into actionable behavioral data enables insurance providers to more appropriately provide consumers with the information they are seeking when they prefer to receive it, delivering an improved consumer experience and a higher level of engagement.
The end goal: Exceptional customer experiences
Now more than ever, it’s critical to have access to behavioral data that will provide the insights to help you better acquire, retain, and grow your customer base.
When you’re able to determine patterns in behavior at the individual consumer level, you can then use those characteristics to create better customer experiences. Actionable data about shopping journeys can help carriers and agents find customers who are ready to engage and exceed their expectations.
Jaimie Pickles (jpickles@jornaya.com) is the general manager of insurance at Jornaya. Jeff Piotrowski is director at Jornaya. These opinions are their own.
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