Summary

• Insurance marketers are faced with a lack of tools and strategy to follow through on policy offers for consistent returns
• Moving past policy-centric approaches and siloed assets is the first step to personalized engagement for insurance customers
• Smarter analytics and audience journey mapping can unlock omnichannel engagement benefits on a large scale for these enterprises

The insurance industry has traditionally relied on call centers and agents to sell products, albeit to varying degrees of success. People are rarely willing to purchase insurance policies—be it health, life, or retail products—and overcoming this reluctance has always been a challenge, even with perks included in the offers. How can the industry power through these hurdles?

The good news 

• General awareness of the value of insurance and related investments has increased considerably across age demographics. 
• The channels from which people purchase insurance products have expanded as well. Of particular note is the rising prominence of comparison sites that allow consumers to easily explore and compare competing policy offers.

• The technology used by insurance companies to manage customer information has evolved too. 

Past and present

In the past, a sole core system was functional. It served as the reservoir of all information, where siloed, and often limited, information of customers could be kept. Such systems were often policy-centric. rendering it impossible to retrieve data on a customer who had ten different policies with a provider through a simple search. The data had to be retrieved by scouting specific plans—resulting in multiple identities for one customer in the system and cluttering ideal service delivery within tight timeframes.

Modern technology has made it possible to triangulate crucial elements from those core systems—including customer and product information. The key distinction is that the options available to insurance marketers have grown exponentially. They can now interact with consumers through traditional channels as well as a diverse array of digital touch points. There are more opportunities (and solutions) than ever before for more personalized, continuous engagement with insurance consumers.

Modern marketing edge

The new-age marketing solutions achieve this by, for instance, deriving insights into the individual consumer via interactions across channels. The insights can be anything from lifecycle stage and persona, to preferences and propensities. This critical customer information is consolidated, enriched, and made actionable by the new marketing automation solutions—especially those with a robust customer data platform as their foundation.

Instead of relying on surveys, such valuable information is gathered automatically and at scale—constantly updating each customer’s profile to optimize engagement at the individual level, including what offers to promote next. Detecting a change in a customer’s marital status can, for example, trigger the solution to recommend family insurance policies, delivered as part of a tailored, ever-evolving digital journey.

Future roadmaps

Modern tools and solutions enable the insurance marketer to move away from a policy-centric approach and towards holistic customer engagement. They now have at their disposal a much richer assortment of customer information that can automatically translate to more contextual interactions, across all stages of the customer lifecycle. 

With features such as look-alike targeting, the insurance marketer can further expand their reach, as the models available in the marketing automation solution analyze their existing audience segments to identify similar prospects.

The core goal is to motivate all these potential customers to stay engaged and loyal by providing them with a continuous stream of offers, communications, resources, and recommendations. The anchor of it all is the individual customer, not a whole demographic.

Key takeaways

Instead of sinking time and resources on siloed tools and a core system hostile to more individualized engagement, insurance marketers can now adopt integrated solutions that facilitate holistic marketing efforts. They will be empowered to centralize the management of key customer data, automate omnichannel journeys, optimize every step of those journeys for each individual, and, perhaps most importantly, measure the impact of it all via rich analytics.