Promote Your Insurance Agency Website

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.

Recently married, I was ready to combine my financials with my new wife’s. Her auto and homeowner policy were with a captive agent; someone whom she had been with since she was 16 years old and mine were with an out-of-sate agent. Working in the insurance industry for over 8 years (company side and now agency side) I had plenty of questions about her existing policy and was ready to combine our policies hoping to save some money. My actions are pretty typical for this turning point in my life.

My job working with independent agents and designing their websites I was ready to shop with an independent agent. I found a local agent and long story short I transferred all of our policies to them. Throughout this process, I thought to myself where did her old agent go wrong? Why did he loose our business? There are a couple key points where he easily could have made contact with us and possibly kept our business.

Each premium increase (A letter from the company does not count as a contact)

When I was added to her existing insurance policy (A great time to discuss insurance options)

When I called to ask about her existing policy prior to shopping for new insurance (I called her agent up to find out what her premium, expiration date and coverage A was)

Annual Reviews – She has yet to receive an annual review

What web resources could have used to save this account?

Annual Review Wizard – With the click of a button agents can send an Annual Review to a customer. No paper needed!
More Information on annual reviews http://demo2.cfluent.com/annual-insurance-reviews-tutorial

Simple Email – When I called her prior agent to request her policy information the agent could have easily got my email address and sent me an email. Even something as simple and quick as: “Thanks for calling us today, if you would like to review your insurance needs just let us know…”

Sorry we lost your business form – We’re sorry to have lost you as a customer, and would like to learn if there are improvements we can make that will help us not to lose excellent customers like you in the future. Please take a few moments to answer the five questions below, or feel free to call or email me with comments or questions, my contact information is below. Try out the form.

Much like Google Local, Yahoo also has a very impressive and important local search. Signing up for Yahoo Local search is simple.

Go to: http://listings.local.yahoo.com/csubmit/index.php and complete the necessary information. It is important to complete the information to the best of your ability, use descriptive words that include your location or a major metropolitan area near your agency.

See also:

Google Local Search
Local Search – MSN (Live.com)

Next week: MSN Live local search