Coping With the Digital – Traditional Communication Dilemma

By | November 17, 2014

It’s a fatal mistake to disregard the massive impact of digital marketing and selling. Insurance shopping is diving headlong into this direction and every forward-thinking agency must accept it as inevitable.

But recognizing the inevitability of digital dominance does not require abandoning the communication skill set that still thrives within the independent agency universe. To sustain the system, agencies must accommodate the informational needs and wants of their insureds, prospects, and staff while constantly enhancing revenue and bottom line. This means using both electronic and tangible communication channels to write, retain and service accounts.

As important as digital communications are to your future, person-to-person and business-to-business relationships are equally vital to your present. Therefore, you must accept the inefficiencies of employing dual skill sets, while converging them whenever possible. Here are several approaches to consider.

Personal lines

Motivating insureds and prospects to interact with you digitally is a strategic decision.

Encourage auto and home policyholders to actively accept and participate in your digital communications. These interactions may include social media and such items as bill payments, policy delivery, renewal questionnaires, plus agency newsletters and blogs. But don’t demand that reluctant insureds interact digitally. Be patient. In time they’ll be willing to do so, as their phone carrier, credit card companies, banks, physicians, and other service-providers will simultaneously encourage them to make the switch as well. And once they do it for one, they’ll likely do it for all.

Commercial Lines

Agencies can and do sell business insurance online, yet most of it is sold old school. That’s because many small-to-medium sized operations want to insure with agents who will actually talk to them and willingly visit their premises, instead of sufficing with a digital drive-by, property tax data, or an outside inspector. Face-to-face interaction facilitates on-the-spot upselling, cross-selling, plus new and renewal sales. Nevertheless, much of the routine back and forth between business buyer and seller happens digitally, including emails and smaller compensation audits. It’s clear that commercial lines will be sold and serviced more and more online, following the digital pathways first established in personal lines.

External Marketing

Uniformity in marketing keeps your message consistent across multiple channels while containing your creative costs. So, employ the same integral elements when marketing to selected prospects, digitally and traditionally. Use identical images, similar headlines, and common copy in your email, direct mail and ad-based solicitations when they are directed to the same targets. Simultaneously add the same image and message to your social media posts. Direct all interested shoppers, regardless of originating media, to a web-landing page (with a prospect-identifying contact form) that displays these very same elements.

Internal Marketing

Match your chosen contact method with each insureds’ stated communication preference. Go digital (email, texts and social media) only when your policyholders allow you to interact with them this way. For those who withhold permission, use postal mail to deliver custom solicitations. As above, share your common creative elements across multiple media. And when your data allows it, incorporate custom content into each solicitation, based on each insured’s known buying history and habits.

Be Strategic

Motivating insureds and prospects to interact with you digitally is a strategic decision, and shouldn’t be one that’s left to the whims of each employee. Never let CSRs and producers “force” clients and potentials out of their comfort zone. Help staffers to accept that it’s still necessary to communicate both online and off, whether they like it or not. Why? Because the promised paperless world is getting a lot closer, but it’s not here yet.

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