Promote Your Insurance Agency Website

I would like to congratulate our customer Midwest Agency on their creative marketing with a minor league baseball team:

“Tough times have forced even the most creative to be even more creative. For the River City Rascals, an independent Frontier League team based in O’Fallon, Mo., that means selling win insurance for the upcoming season. When sponsorship talks heated up with the Midwest Agency, a locally based insurance company, the talk focused on bringing more customers into the agency. So the team came up with the idea of selling win insurance.”

http://www.cnbc.com/id/34572754/

It is important to be selective about which websites you link to on your insurance website. For instance, what value does this link have for your customers? Does this website also offer insurance products? Or do they have an agency locator?

Every link that you add to your website is one more chance to lose a site visitor. Is it worth loosing a site visitor to this link?

When linking to sites it is always good to type out a sentence or two explaining where the link goes. FAQs are an excellent resource for external links.

Example of a valuable FAQ with a link to an external site:

Question: How do I find out about state insurance laws?

Answer: Washington State has valuable resources located at: http://www.insurance.wa.gov/

Replace Washington State with a state that you write business in and you are set.

The following screenshot (located here) illustrates how you can have a page that is specific to an external site. In this example we are linking to the Trusted Choice website; but instead of just putting a link we created a page with the Trusted Choice^® Pledge of Performance.

Why is Linking to external websites this way so Effective?

We are explaining to the user what the site is and why we are members of the site.

The page is content rich providing us a great SEO page.

We are able to link to the website, include a logo, and still keep the visitor on our website.

It has been a while since I have had a free moment to write a post. Things have been busy here at Confluency Solutions but we have been developing some really great tools for insurance agent websites. I’ll cover some of those in the coming weeks…

Today I want to talk about email hosting and hosting in-house vs paying for someone else to manage your email.

Many insurance agencies have gone the route of paying to have an Exchange server hosted in-house. There are some good reasons in doing this such as full control of the email server and some of the other great functionality that Exchange Server can bring to your agency. There are also some cons, someone in the agency has to be familiar with Exchange server, Exchange server is expensive. (Up to 35k first year costs if you include, new server, backup server, additional networking, Exchange server licensing, battery backup, etc.) Another thing to consider is:

What happens when the server goes down?
What if it goes down at 2:00 am?
What happens if your agency gets struck by lightning or a natural disaster hits?

Hosting email in-house may be more of a pain and more expensive then it is worth.

What if you could have the following for your insurance agency:

10 gig email accounts (Thats enough to last a life time)
50 megabyte attachments (That is over 500 JPEG images)
Top Notch Spam Filtering
Triple Redundancy Back-Ups (Email backed up in 3 physical locations throughout the US)
Virus Protection
Company Directory
Shared Calendars
100% Uptime Guarantee!!!
Tasks (Assign tasks to agency users)
Email that is managed by professionals who specialize in email
And Much more.

Now, what if I told you that you can have this for your agency VERY inexpensively?

Feel free to contact me if you have any questions.

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

Collecting Customer’s Emails

On average, insurance agencies have about 10% of their customer’s email addresses*. This low number can be attributed to a number of items. Some customers have been around longer than 10 years or so where collecting emails wasn’t anything to think about. Many of the older agency management systems have never had a place to store email addresses or the agency never took the time to collect the email addresses.

Collecting email addresses can be very simple, but it may take some time.

When a customer is on the phone, submits something online or walks into your agency ask them for their email address. It will take a few extra minutes but over a couple months that 10% can easily jump to 20% or 30%.

Run a postcard promotion or contest (Requiring customers to give you their email address of course)

Privacy matters

When asking customers for email addresses explain to them how you plan on using their emails. (Email best practices)

Don’t spam!

Newsletters can be a very simple way to promote your insurance agency and to build your web presence. However, if a customer gives you their email address don’t assume that they are also interested in receiving your monthly newsletter. If you add them without asking first, they may opt-out, black list you or report your newsletter as spam. If they opt-out you should definitely respect their wishes and not send them anymore unsolicited emails. If they black list your email address then you will be unable to send them any more emails. (Even legitimate emails) If they report your newsletter as spam (All major web based email providers have this feature) your email address may be flagged as a spammer… (This is something that is very hard, if not impossible to correct).

Best practices – How to use email addresses

Now that you have your customer’s email addresses what should you do? There are many legitimate reasons to email customers. When you first receive an email address from a customer send them an email talking about ways your insurance agency uses emails and your website to communicate with their customers. (This is a good place to promote your monthly newsletter and let them opt-in)

Legitimate Reasons to contact your customers:

Catastrophe or claims updates – A good example of this is during hurricane season in the south or ice storms in the north. Email your customers before and right after the natural disaster happens to remind them that there is valuable claims information for them on your website and to get it now before the power goes out.

Financial Times – As we know, even the largest of companies can fall or be bought out by another company. In times like these, it is a good idea to inform your customers that one of the reasons you are an independent agency is that you represent multiple carriers and that their insurance policy is safe.

Significant Changes – New service offered, new company or an office move.

Confirmation emails – Confirm policy changes, annual reviews or quote requests.

Follow ups – After a service was provided follow up and make sure your service level was satisfactory.

*10% is based off of conversations I have had with various insurance agencies located throughout the country.

Last week I talked about the importance of customer reviews on major search engines. This week I will be talking about ways you can increase the amount of positive feedback your insurance agency has online. Everyday your agency is receiving phone calls, emails, walk-ins ranging from quote requests, change requests, typical insurance questions and more. These are all opportunities to write a policy, up sell a policy or just maintain good relations with your clients. When a customer gives your agency or staff a complement, ask them if they mind posting a comment about your agency on one of the search engines. Generally most of the customers will either have an MSN, Yahoo or Google account already so adding a comment should be very simple for them.

Don’t expect them to do too much work…

Have a template email ready to send them. In your email thank them for their complement and include links to where they can write a review about your agency.

Sample Email: (Feel free to copy or modify this email for your own use)

Dear Joe Smith,

Thank you very much for your kind words earlier today. We greatly appreciate it and strive to do our best to satisfy our clients. If you don’t mind can you please post a comment about us on one of the major search engines; Google, Yahoo or MSN? Doing so will only talk a few moments and will greatly help us out.

You can access any our online listings by using the links below.

Google (Insert link to your local listing on Google here)

Yahoo (Insert link to your local listing on Yahoo here)

MSN (Insert link to your local listing on MSN here)

Once again, thank you very much. Don’t hesitate to contact us if you have any questions.

Your agency name,
Your agency website address
Your email.

Once you have that email template ready to use forward it to your staff and inform them about the benefit of sending the email to your customers. Some agencies will even have contests for the person who gets the most reviews posted. A $20 Starbucks gift card can be very persuasive…

Now that you have the template email ready, send the email to your friends and family and have your staff do the same. This is a very good way to kick start your local listings reviews.

Everyone knows how beneficial word of mouth advertising can be for your insurance agency. It is no surprise that potential customers will go to Google or another search engine and research a company or a product before making a buying decision. What is the best way to take advantage of customer reviews? Some agencies have a testimonial page on their website. Having a testimonials page on your site is a good practice and the amount of effort required to add the testimonials is very little. I talked a few weeks ago about claiming your business with Google. If you have not done this; stop reading this post and claim your business. 

Google, Yahoo and MSN Live all have local search functionality. All of them also have an area where they allow users to write reviews about a company. Customer reviews can easily put your insurance agency website above the competition all of which can be done easily and for free. In my example to day, I’m going to use one of my favorite pizza restaurants; David’s Pizza located in Spokane Washington. 

David’s has customer reviews on all three major search engines:  

Google: 

Yahoo: 

MSN Live: 

(Click on any of the images above to view the actual listing) 

What does a pizza restaurant have to do with insurance? Search engines don’t care if you are a pizza restaurant or an insurance agency. They all have a local search area for local businesses within these listings there is an area where business owners can upload photos, post hours and update contact information. The more information Google has about your insurance agency the better. 

User reviews work the same way. If you have 10 of your best customers, friends and family write positive reviews about your agency on the three major search engines your insurance agency website value and position will increase. 

Try to think like a search engine. 

Your local listing has ten reviews and your competitor across the street has zero reviews who do you think the search engines will give more credit to? When a customer writes a review Google knows who they are (You are required to login first) they also know other reviews they have made and can score each user’s reviews based off of the quality of reviews they have made. The more reviews the better. 

What about bad reviews? 

Don’t think it has happened before. Upset customers, someone accidentally selecting one star instead of five stars, competitors giving bad reviews to make their own company look better… Since you have already followed my instructions for claiming your business on Google, Yahoo & MSN Live; you also have the ability to agree, disagree or mitigate your comments.

I cannot stress enough how beneficial this can be for promoting your insurance agency website. 

Next week: How to get more reviews about your agency website. 

All of this talk about search engines started making me think about search functionality inside of agency websites. How useful are they? Come to find out they are VERY USEFUL. I did a survey on insurance agency websites and a couple other non insurance sites and found that 30% of users went straight for the search box vs. trying to navigate for what they trying to find.

Some of the top searches included “Auto Quote”, “Business Insurance” & “Homeowners”

You could spend a lifetime analyzing search traffic only to find out that you pulled out all of your hair before you learned something worthwhile.

Interestingly, users who searched for “Homeowners” were not always looking for homeowners quotes. Many of the users were looking for homeowner FAQs such as “Do I have enough coverage for my possessions (Coverage C)”

Example Search for Homeowners:

http://demo.cfluent.com/search.php?search=homeowners

This goes to show that insurance agency websites need to be more than just quote forms. They need to have information for the user.

Building a search engine for a website is not easy. There are however, a couple free search engine APIs that you can install on your website that will work. The disadvantage of these free search engine APIs is they usually come with some type of advertising. (Hey there isn’t such a thing as a free lunch, right?)

Google’s Search API: http://www.google.com/coop/cse/

Yahoo’s Site Search (Requires your site to be hosted through Yahoo)
http://help.yahoo.com/l/us/yahoo/smallbusiness/webhosting/addons/psearch/psearch-02.html

Ask.com Search API: http://about.ask.com/en/docs/about/add_search_to_site.shtml

A recent newsletter put out by Confluency Solutions recommends adding a separate phone number to your website. Allowing you to track how many people go to your insurance agency website looking for your phone number. This is something that the phone book companies have been doing for years but the price is a lot cheaper if you do it yourself.

Google Grand Central – calls can be automatically rolled to any number (like your normal agency phone line). The service is free, but is not widely available. grandcentral.com

Vonage - Small Biz Basic from Vonage at $40/month (1500 minutes, $0.039 per min after), – You can also get area codes and exchanges for ads you might be running in different market areas. vonage.com

Skype - This service has been around as a computer-to-computer (Skype user) type of VOIP for a long time. More recently Skype added the ability to call land lines and cell phones, and to register a traditional phone number to your Sype account so you can receive calls from land lines and cells. The cost of a traditional phone number is $60 a year; calls can be automatically be forwarded to your regular phone line at the rate of $0.021 per minute. skype.com

There are some advantages to adding a separate phone number to your site however; you will want to be careful not to confuse customers who have been calling the same phone number for years.

You might be tempted to just use a separate phone number on your regular home page, but be careful. Customers will be used to seeing your phone number in other places, and your agency may have had the same phone number for years. Broadly displaying a different phone number on your website will confuse some customers, especially since a large number of your customers will look up your website just to get or verify your phone number before calling.

Quotes source