Next Generation Insurance Websites

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Next GenerationInsurance Websites

A series of 2 webinars

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Next Generation Insurance Websites

PART 1 – Increasing Acquisition onInsurance Websites

PART 2 – Increasing Engagement & Retention onInsurance Websites and Portals

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General state of Insurance websites – areas of opportunity

Key elements of acquisition strategy

Content strategy

Search Engine Optimization

Microsites

Online video streaming

Multi-channel engagement

Digital technologies that enable acquisition

Agenda

PART 1: Increasing acquisition on Insurance websites

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General state of Insurance websites – areas of opportunity

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Company-centric websites make browsing difficult Sites are often designed around

internal departments/teams of insurers

Consumers are compelled to understand how the company is organized

Content is missing, repeated, and poorly worded

Inconsistency in content

structure/presentation

Key/logical content missing

A study on Insurance websites

Self-service on industry websites is poor overall despite the growing preference of consumers to use online resources to manage their accounts

Site Search just doesn’t work for typical tasks

Many sites have no search option Too much information presented in

search results, not all is relevant Search scored lowest in the study with

an industry average of just 3.6 on a 10-point scale.

“The average rating for the industry was 5.2 on a 10 point scale”

Source : The Customer Respect Group June 11, 2012

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The eight most common features present on the websites were all items of information

Most websites could not give customers specific price information, a feature present only in those sites that had the ability to generate instant quotes

Many insurance companies choose to cater to all their customers through the same global website

A study on digital adoption

The Insurance industry has not kept pace with digital features and functions that can elevate customer acquisition

Source: University of Regina Regina, CANADA

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Digital adoption by Insurance companies

The Insurance industry, in general, regards their websites as a medium for one-way communication of product information and company image

Websites contained static web pages with little or no interactive or dynamic functionality

Largely, insurance companies do not include a statement explaining why customers should have or need insurance

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Dominance of traditional marketing

Source: Survey by JasonHoeppner @B.H.Burke&Co

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Marketing ROI

62 % of respondents said they do not measure the Marketing ROISource: Survey by JasonHoeppner @B.H.Burke&Co

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Changes in buyer behaviour

Buyers have choices and options—they look for the most convenient, lowest risk and highest comfort options

111995Informational•Brochure-ware•Webmaster bottleneck

2000Transactional•IT-driven•Commerce•Portals•Personalization

2007Persuasive•Marketing-driven•Focus on business solution

2011+Contextual & Collaborative•Social•Personal•Interactive •Mobile

Changes in the direction of websites

The content and experience of next generation websites is driven by visitor context

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Focus

• Presence• Brochure-ware• KPI’s are traffic

related

• Use web to grow revenues

• KPI’s are related to business objectives

• Social media is about listening

• Optimize digital presence to get higher engagement

• Optimize marketing spend

• KPI’s have monthly targets

• Social is optimized to enhance the brand and drive leads

• Nurture prospects and customers

• Support is automated through peer-to-peer and self help communities

• KPI’s are tied with lead generation and revenue

• Social is automated & integrated w CRM

• Relevant 1-to-1 conversations with customers, blending offline and online behavior

• Building Customer profile with relevant data

• KPI’s are linked to CRM and measure wins, revenue & loss through integrated online / offline cross-channels

• Deep relationships are formed with advocates

Goals

• Basic website for branding

• Newsletter • Web analytics

• Multichannel with mobile presence

• Cross-channel engagement analytics

• Sales Enablement (B2B)

• Segmented e-mail campaigns

• Campaign management

• Rules based personalization

• Optimization

• Personas & Profiling • Predictive

personalization • Cross digital channel

automation • Trigger based e-mail

dialogue• Reduced cost

• Bridging the online and offline - one view of customer

• Integration to CRM• Online and offline

automation• Up/cross sell• Effective onboarding• Increased LTV

Where are you on the Curve?

By preparing a plan to move up the digital maturity curve, marketers can create truly engaging experience

Static Tactical Optimizing Automation Engaging

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DOES YOUR WEBSITE CONVERT VISITORS INTO PROSPECTS?

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YOU NEED A STRATEGIC ROADMAP!

Understand how clients buy and get organized Be multi-channel

Get your strategies right - content strategy, exceptional website, acquisition strategy, SEM/SEO and social

Get the insight you need

Join the dots with your technology

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Key Elements of an Acquisition Strategy

Your assets and strategies across the acquisition process need to be aligned

Driving Traffic Conversion Nurturing Sales

Acquisition Process

• Listening to the customer

• Drive traffic• Social media marketing

• Thought Leadership

• Lead management

• Dynamic experiences

• Analytics• Lead scoring• Personalization

• Lead nurturing tactics

• Email and marketing automation

• Marketing and sales enablement

• Sales force automation

Website

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DIGITAL MARKETING NEEDS TO WRAP AROUND THE BUYING LIFECYCLE TO IMPROVE ACQUISITION

If your marketing efforts are able to influence the buying lifecycle, you will have a large influence on acquisition

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Execute initiatives across thebuying lifecycleThe buying lifecycle provides direction to your digital marketing initiatives

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Segment your audience

Who is buying from you? Understand the distinct buying groups within your prospect population

Understand your Buying Cycle


Map the Messages

Implement the Platforms

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Understand your buying cycle Understand your customer’s mindset through the buying cycle journey

Segment your audience Determine the target groups within your audience

Map the messages Understand and align the messages with the segment and their objections

Implement the platforms Implement the multi-channel platforms

Using buying cycle to define engagement

Use the buying cycle to understand how, when and with what to engage prospects at each step of buying process



Map the Messages


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COMPANIES WITH IMPROVED CONVERSION ARE USING 90% MORE WAYS TO SEGMENT THEIR VISITORS AND CUSTOMERS VS. THE COMPANIES WITH LOWER CONVERSION RATES.

Source: eConsultancy and RedEye Report

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Align content to the segmentation

Identify content that address customer expectations. Consider buying cycle, segmentation, pain points and motivators



Map the Messages


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Mapping content Per stage in the buying cycle Per segment

Put yourself in their shoes What questions would they

have at this stage? What information would they

need to move forward? What fear, uncertainty and

doubt (FUD) must be overcome?

Map the messaging

Objective: Understand prospect needs and motivations per segment per stage, walk the buying cycle like they would

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CONTENT STRATEGY

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The challenges with content

According to a poll of 103 marketers across various industries including insurance:

Source: Brafton Poll

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Define your business goals and objectives Evaluate your customers Become a one-stop resource for local community information,

advice about insurance, including ways to cut insurance costs, and provide useful tips for preventing accidents from happening.

Add value – create a whitepaper, video, or a fun contest to keep visitors engaged while also providing value.

Measure – last, but not least, it’s important to measure the impact of your content strategy.

Content strategy for Insurance companies

Insurance can be complicated. When creating content, especially for your blog and emails, think about disseminating information in small, digestible chunks

5 steps to a successful content strategy

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Provide an incentive to fill out forms

Create whitepapers with landing pages

Drive traffic to your blog

Look at engagement metrics such as entrances, page views, bounce

rate, and average time on page

Don’t skip over looking at goal completions and traffic sources

Content strategy for Insurance companies

The goal of your content strategy should be to be able to generate quality leads

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Show them what you know

Thought Leadership Marketing (TLM)

The principle of TLM is simple enough: You give away a little valuable intellectual property to establish your potential usefulness to the client, in the expectation that the client will use your expertise and services

Rolf Jester, VP, Gartner, 2010

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Content marketing example

Source: http://knowledge.allianz.com/

The site targets individuals who recognize and

support the need to improve social, economic, and

environmental living conditions worldwide. This target audience

is likely to be influenced by the

insurer’s well-documented

alignment of its business activities with sustainability

criteria

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The content strategy focused on key concepts like Demography, Mobility, Environment, Finance

FinanceEnvironment

Demography Mobility

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Blog (the posts are really like mini whitepapers)

Facebook Twitter Newsletters eCards and other unique

digital media YouTube


Some of the key content delivery channels

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Timely content

Compelling content

Customer need centric

content

Well-organized content

Sales-neutral content

Five key content characteristicsfor success

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Employ a closed-loop engagement cycle Build the profile, analyze the profile and

respond to the prospect

Characterize prospect Properties include buying cycle state and

segmentation parameters

Develop content to align with the prospect expectations

Content will speak directly to a prospect profile

Automate the closed-loop prospect engagement

Use web CMS and marketing automation platforms to automate the engagement cycle

Understanding context

Context is about leveraging information about the visitor to optimize the interaction and engagement across all channels

Here is how

Visitor generated: Implicit information captured from the website journey—the “digital footprints” left by the visitor

Indicators of preference, predispositions, lead maturity

Visitor supplied: Explicit information supplied by the visitor as they complete questionnaires, quizzes and other facilities

Common demographics—name, age, gender, interests

Externally supplied: Information captured by external service providers, emerging context-enriched services

Location, presence, social attributes, cross-vendor buying habits

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Delivering personalized messages across channels to customers requires a common understanding of the customer

Challenges Customer information—both

behavioral and profile—is stored in “siloed” systems

Integrated or third-party analytics platforms, along with the CRM platform, are typically disparate systems

Context requires a common view

Consistent personalization across multiple channels requires that each channel has the same customer view

Coremetrics and Bloomberg BusinessWeek Report on Optimizing Online Marketing 2009

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Deliver the messages and capture the reaction

Use analytics and forms to capture behavior and profile

Understand the customer context

Analyze the customer context

Align the content to customer expectations

Package the content to align with the customer context

Closed-loop engagement cycle

The closed loop engagement cycle is the model used to gain customer understanding, adjust and communicate the message

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COMPANIES THAT ADOPT A STRUCTURED APPROACH ARE NEARLY TWICE AS LIKELY TO HAVE SEEN A LARGE INCREASE IN SALES.

Source: eConsultancy and RedEye Report

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SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION

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Direct insurers and insurance aggregators are increasing the pressure on the more traditional insurers to stay applicable in the modern era of insurance marketing

These new role players are focused on search engine “visibility and findability”

These new players are competent enough of taking away market share from those insurers who underestimate the power of direct and online marketing

SEO for Insurance companies

Any new content must meet minimum requirements for search optimization before it can go live on your website

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Don’t ignore the basics! Meta data , target

keywords, research, tags, on-page activities

Rich Snippets Adding a star rating that

links through to an independent review site can improve the click through rate of your listing


The insurance industry is hugely competitive. There are plenty of companies out there going for gold on Google

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On-Page Credibility Having all of the required legal

disclaimers, licensing information and company details within the footer of the website is very important

Checkout Process Always keep forms and

payments on a distinct section/page where possible or use a known trusted service like PayPal to complete transactions

Target the Long-tail Search in insurance is always

competitive and targeting these keywords will cost you big money on paid search advertising


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Set up rules that allow every page to exist with unique SEO elements

Customize these individual page elements as needed to optimize them against your competition for the search engines

Adding 301 redirect fields on every page within the CMS would allow sites to better manage their content and actively optimize for SEO


If your website already has a content management system (CMS), you can customize it for better search engine optimization (SEO) results

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MICROSITES / LANDING PAGES

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Example

A number of insurance companies use microsites for strategic branding and focused lead generation

Betterteendriving.com: 46K Visitors Allstateteendriver.com

Teensafedriver.comSource : comScore

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Example

Liberty Mutual Advertises (online and offline) two microsites – Responsibilityproject.com and Whatsyourpolicy.com

www.whatsyourpolicy.com Visitors:QE Aug 08 – 352KQE Aug 09 – 188K

www.responsibilityproject.com Visitors:QE Aug 08 – 526K

QE Aug 09 – 1,775K

96

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Responsibilityproject.com Whatsyourpolicy.com

Total Display Ads Viewed (in Millions)QE Aug 2009

Source : comScore

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The pages in the microsite should be kept to very few

The content on the pages should be meaty—more than a paragraph and a few bullets

There should be a strong, consistent visual theme binding these pages together

The microsite pages should be ‘readable’ - optimized Flash, optimized images/videos – good for SEO and enables A/B and multivariate testing

Best practices for microsites

The content should say its story with rich details

Simple tab navigation Each tab should focus on a

specific deep-dive subtopic There must be a clear call-

to-action form (replicated on all pages)

The user experience design of the microsite should be compelling, but not overwhelming

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Challenge: To generate leads for their compliance solutions for the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPPA).

Solution: A segmented landing page was created to direct respondents down conversion paths focused on the needs of their hospital based on size

Result: conversion rates still soared 556%, based in large part on the directed paths and audience-specific messaging. And further testing of the segmented landing page resulted in an almost 2,500% lift in conversions.

Case Study – impact of microsites

A B2B health insurance company

Source : b2bmarketinginsider

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Challenge: To increase lead volume and quality with a new campaign in order to increase conversions and revenue.

Solution: A microsite that responds in real time to visitor information and changes to fit the visitor, in terms of matching the right content with the visitor's profile and needs.

Result: The company's lead volume went from 700 per week to 1,332, generated on average $125,000 in additional revenue per month

Case Study – impact of microsites

A B2C auto insurance company

Source : marketingprofs

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ONLINE VIDEO STREAMING

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Video streaming on Insurance websites

Source : comScore

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People weren’t searching for videos using broad terms such as “life insurance” or “car insurance.” Instead, they were discovering, watching, and sharing videos about “Identity theft,” particularly on social networking sites

Creating video ads that spoke to the consumer concern connected to the audience

Impact of online video streaming - example

A fortune 300 insurance company - reached prospective customers earlier in the consideration cycle, video views increase 646%

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Multi – ChannelEngage with your audience where they spend their time—where they get their information.

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Mobile media usage

Mobile browsers, application users and downloads are growing 20% year on year

200806 200807 200808 200809 200810 200811 200812 200901 200902 200903 200904 200905 20090620.0%

22.0%

24.0%

26.0%

28.0%

30.0%

32.0%

34.0%

36.0%

6.0%

7.0%

8.0%

9.0%

10.0%

11.0%

12.0%

13.0%

14.0%

% Mobile Media Users and % New Device Owners

Mobile Media UsersDevice < 2months old (one month snapshot data)

% D

evic

e <

2 M

onth

s O

ld

Source : comScore

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The iPhone craze

Source : comScore

7.8M iPhone users – only 10% of mobile users browse, use an application or download

14.2M Blackberry users, 6.9M Windows mobile users

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Mobile advertising - examples

Insurance mobile banner creatives on top publisher sites

mlb.com MobileYahoo! Mobile

abc.com Mobile411.com MobilePerez Hilton MobileUSA Today Mobile

ESPN Mobile NASCAR Mobile

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“We're just now starting to think about mobile first and desktop second for a lot of our products.”

Kate Aronowitz, Design Director Facebook

Adopting a mobile-first strategy

A mobile-first strategyThink about your website as MOBILE site first—start with mobile as the premise for your site

Why mobile-first?1. Opportunity: A growing use of

tablets and smartphones2. Constraints: Screen size,

Network speed, Modes of use3. Capabilities: Location (GPS),

Visual input, Gesturing

“We really need to shift now to start thinking about building mobile first. This is an even bigger shift than the PC revolution.”

Kevin Lynch, CTO Adobe

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Getting to a mobile-first strategy

Responsive design1. One website: Not a

separate mobile and desktop site

2. HTML5 & CSS3: New technologies to create sites that respond to screen sizes and orientation

3. Future proofing: Do you know what is next?

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TECHNOLOGY

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Which technologies impact conversion?

Several platforms engage to drive conversion

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1. Content Management (CMS): Supports personalized interactions on the web site

2. Marketing Automation Platform (MAP): Supports personalized interactions via outbound digital channels

3. Customer Relationship Management (CRM): Supports personalized interactions involving members of the sales team

4. Integration and Mapping: Integrating the three systems to create centralized buyer profiles that could then be mapped to a defined buying process

5. Measurement and Reporting: Implementing the dashboards and measurement tools necessary to support ongoing performance measurement and management

Leveraging digital platforms

CMS + MAP + CRM + Context = Increased acquisition. It takes both platforms and approach to drive improved acquisition

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Web content management systems

Web CMS can drive website conversions and acquisition for insurance companies

The content management system provides incredibly valuable data since it stores the history of the claims that the company has received

Expand online presence and serve customers by providing relevant content in convenient context

Create dynamic messaging and visual experiences across your websites, microsites and campaigns from a single, easy to use CMS platform that empowers all your marketing users

Improve customer satisfaction with existing clients with timely and accurate information with an engaging customer experience

Improve traceability, transparency and adherence to rules of compliance

All data you record, structure, archive and publish are protected against unauthorized access

Leverage online resources with seamless integration with member databases, transaction records, and legacy systems

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Analytics

Analytics implications for insurance companies

Highly sophisticated analytical and predictive modeling tools on insurance claim data to provide an automated approach to identifying claims with the greatest potential for fraud

Content analytics can help improve operational processes including customer care because it provides agents with a more complete view of the customer and with more accurate information about them.

Customer Intelligence data leads to continuous product improvement

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Empowering agents to send localized, customized campaigns without jeopardizing brand or regulatory standards, and allowing corporate marketing to send personalized “ On behalf of” campaigns

Each agent can access customizable media templates, extensive product information and materials, better lead distribution and reporting

Real time tracking and reporting across all channels

Marketing Automation Platforms

Marketing automation implications for insurance companies

Improving communications with channel partners (banks, credit unions)

Facilitating agent to agent sharing and communication

Improved tracking and reporting Personalized landing pages for

campaigns/microsites Matrices that show who is engaged

with provided content Automated policy related forms

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Customer Relation Management (CRM)

CRM implications for insurance companies

Insurance Process

Benefits

Product Definition • Reduces the time it takes to add or make product changes• Gives more control to business user

Distribution • Provides faster communication, reduces cost of distribution on paper

• Improves response time and customer satisfactionUnderwriting • Customers get answers more quickly about their insurance

applications

Issuance • Reduced printing and mailing time• Decreasing cost

Servicing • Provides policy holder more control over their insurance process

Claims • Can reduce the volume of call the service center receives

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The Trifecta for richer engagement

Unifying three technology platforms delivers an customer experience based on a common context

Web CMS

Marketing AutomationCRM

Common Customer Context

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