Promote Your Insurance Agency Website

This week we are going to talk about your insurance agency website and whether or not to have audio and video on your insurance website. My general rule of thumb is audio and video is okay as long as you are not forcing the user to listen to it.

Why forcing the user to listen to audio is a negative thing.

With the advent of internet radio such as Pandora, last.fm and iTunes many users are constantly listening to music while they are surfing the web. These users are choosing to listen to music. Imagine a customer or prospect surfing the web while listening to their favorite song and they come across your insurance website. All the sudden they are inundated with sounds coming from your website. Do you think the users is more likely to turn off their favorite song or to just close your website? I think it is obvious that your website will come second to someone’s music. However, if your insurance website didn’t have any forced audio the user would probably still be surfing your website.

One of the things I’m constantly talking to my customers about is selling your website every chance you can. If you have a customer on the phone make sure you point out the FAQ section of your website or some other selling point to get the customer or prospect to use your website. However, your website has audio and now your CSR is forced to listen to an audio or video track while on the phone talking to a customer. Times that by 6 CSR and you have quite an orchestra of music in your office.

Types of audio you may find on a website:

Navigation Links – Typically a feature with sites using Flash. You mouse over a link and some type of noise or sound bite happens.
Pros – None.
Cons – Users are forced to hear a sound bite every time they click on a link in your website.

Characters – In an attempt to bring a more personal or “human presence” to a website, many website have purchased audio and visual characters to talk to their users.
Pros – Can add a personal touch to your website.
Cons – As good as the character may sound it is still a computer talking and not a person.

Animations – A flashy way to add pizzazz to your website.
Pros – Can add some flavor to your website.

Cons – Users may be required to see/hear it every time they visit your website. In general, users are going to insurance websites for research or to accomplish something like a quote or change request, not to watch an animation over and over again.

Videos – Anything from forced Flash videos to downloadable videos.
Pros – Can greatly benefit your website as long as it doesn’t automatically play.
Cons – If the video auto plays users will be forced to listen to it every time a page loads. Listening to the same message over and over again is extremely annoying. It can also be very costly to add custom video to your site.

Background Music – The Elevator music of websites. Not as common as today as it was back in the early 90’s but it is still an option.
Pros – Allows you to force old Billy Idol records into the minds of your website viewers.
Cons – No way to turn music off; continuous looping music on your website may cause users to have nightmares.

At the end of the day, I would say that spending $500 on pay-per-click advertising on a local news site is more beneficial than spending $500 on a video. This of course is only my opinion, I encourage users to comment below if you agree or disagree.

I just read a very good article from our friends at “Poor Man’s Playground” about getting feedback for your insurance agency.

I have long encouraged agents to take control of their online reputation. Monitoring feedback left by others at various online rating and search services is a must. Encouraging positive feedback is even better.

I recently concluded a purchase on eBay (where buyers and sellers are sometimes referred to as the ‘EBay community) and received an email soliciting not just my direct feedback, but also a request to rate my experience via the eBay seller rating function. Here’s the email (names omitted to protect the innocent:

Read More: http://poormansplayground.blogspot.com/2009/01/your-insurance-agencys-community.html

Part 2 of a 2 part posting talking about spam protection for your insurance agency.

Part 1

On average I receive about one spam email a week. This is how I combat spam:

For the last couple years I have successfully kept spam out of my inbox. I purchased a domain name for about $10/year. I then signed up for Google Apps. Free email account. http://www.google.com/a/ Doing this allows me to use Google’s Gmail service for my domain. Also included with this is their state-of-the-art spam filter. I setup an email address called a “Catchall” account. This account will accept all emails from my domain. Ex: If my domain was example.com and you sent and email to james@example.com or abc343@example.com then I would receive both emails.

Anytime I am required to enter my email address I use a false (but true) email address. For instance this weekend I purchased 3 sets of cotter pins from Sears online. Sears required me to enter an email address to complete my purchase. I gave them sears@example.com as my email address. I now know that any email sent to sears@example.com is an email from Sears. If I start receiving other email to that email address then I know that Sears either sold my email address or someone got lucky spamming me. (To date Sears has not sold my email address; this is only an example)

Later on if I decide that I want to receive emails from Sears, I will login to my Google account and create a filter to forward emails sent to sears@example.com to my email address.

I tend to check my Catchall email account weekly. Anytime I receive an email that is spam the first thing I do is flag the email as spam. This is why Google’s spam service is so effective. Google knows that if 1,000 people all marked a similar email as spam chances are it is spam; evolving daily into a very powerful spam filter.