* This article is part of a White Paper called: “What Insurance Customers Expect from Your Online Services and How to Exceed Their Expectations.”
Secret 1 – Offer Clear Online Guidance
When customers buy insurance through your website, they’re doing it without the help of an agent. This can be a little scary for people without an insurance background.
Make sure your website guides them through every step along the process. Offer context specific onscreen guidance to walk your customers, step-by-step through the process so they don’t “miss” having a real-life agent beside them.
Online guidance, like that offered by WalkMe, can dramatically lower customer support costs and increase user accuracy and productivity.
Pacific Life has put together a solid library of educational content. They have articles, videos, and calculators for all their products so customers have all the information they need to make a decision. Since they’ve put in this investment, they may want to make this section a little more obvious on their front page so visitors don’t miss out on this information.
Secret 2 – Provide Solid Customer Service
A well designed website should help your customers handle nearly everything on their own. But this isn’t always possible. Your company still needs to provide a solid level of customer service to help prospects through the buying process and to help existing customers with any issues that may come up.
It makes sense to have phone, email, and online support. While this is an investment, it’ll pay for itself by keeping your customers happy and avoiding lost business.
Protective Life offers a solid variety of options for customer service. If they’re going to expand their online business, they may want to add live online customer service as well as email support.
Secret 3 – Ask Customers to Register for Future Updates
It’s much easier to sell to an existing client than to a brand-new one. If someone buys from you, you’ve already done most of the hard work so make sure not to waste this effort.
Ask customers to register with their contact info so you can keep in touch both with information about their policy and with future sales offers.
Allstate clients can sign up for an online account to manage their bills and policies. Allstate is likely using this setup to contact clients about new offers as well.
Secret 4 – Personalize Future Offers
When a customer buys life insurance from you, you end up learning a lot about their personal situation from the application.
You’ll learn their age, family situation, income, and financial goals. With this information, you can get a pretty good idea when an existing client will want more life insurance and the types of products they might be interested in.
Take the time to build lists for different categories of clients so you can personalize future offers. This will increase your chances of sales later on.
Secret 5 – Use a Variety of Platforms to Stay in Touch
There is a whole range of ways to stay in touch with prospects and existing customers: email, phone, Facebook, Twitter, direct mail, etc. Your marketing should use a combination of these tactics.
Also, when customers buy ask them what type of contact they prefer. This way you’ll reach them the way they like which is the most effective.
MassMutual has done a great job adapting new platforms by creating a very active Twitter account. They Tweet daily with helpful financial advice and have built up a solid following of over 12,000.
Secret 6 – Ask for Referrals
While this is a key tactic for agents, it’s just as effective for online services. After a customer buys, give them a short survey asking for referrals.
You can prompt them asking them if they know people who have gone through life events that need life insurance, like if they have friends who just got married or had children. This will help you find new clients but can also build loyalty.
If a large social circle works with your company, you’ll build trust throughout the group.
Secret 7 – Update Your Website with Regular Content
Adding regular content to your website is a great way to build brand loyalty.
An effective way to do this is setting up a blog with updates on financial advice, insurance news, and other pieces of information customers would appreciate.
This will keep them regularly visiting your website so when they do want to buy more insurance, they’ll think of you.
Jackson National wants visitors to know that they have regular updates by announcing new articles at the front page of their educational center. This lets visitors know they should check back in the future for more content. Jackson could do a better job organizing their web content though since most of it isn’t dated. However, they’ve made a good commitment to developing regular content.
This article is part of a White Paper called “What Insurance Customers Expect from Your Online Services and How to Exceed Their Expectations.”
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Chapter 1: 5 Online Insurance Challenges that are Detrimental to Your Online Customer Experience Efforts.
Chapter 2: 7 Customer Experience Secrets to Guarantee Customer Retention for Your Online Insurance Services.
Chapter 3: 5 Tools You Must Know About to Improve Your Customer’s Online Insurance Experience.