By now, the benefits of marketing automation are not new to most of us. Today, many industries are adopting MarTech and digitalising their operations to keep up with the rising competition and customer standards.
In fact, according to the latest reports, the marketing automation software market is growing at 8.55% and is expected to reach $25.1 billion by 2023.
So, is marketing automation in insurance a worthy investment or not?
Insurers often have the task of promoting and selling a range of services. But, this can’t be done by selling just any service to any customer.
It’s a strategic process of constantly being in the know about customers and leads while optimising marketing and sales strategies to address their unique needs.
Insurers still relying on legacy systems or those yet to invest in the right tools may find this task challenging, getting lost in the cutthroat competition.
In a climate like this, advanced automation capabilities like segmentation, personalisation, real-time analytics, and scheduling can give insurance companies that extra push they need to thrive.
So, how does marketing automation in insurance boost engagement?
Helps send targeted messages to policyholders
Everyone who approaches your insurance services has a unique need. The best way to satisfy them with your services is to understand what these needs are. The benefit of marketing automation in insurance is that you can identify your audience’s needs even before they interact with you.
Think of the analytics tools provided by automation platforms. Using these, you can analyse data from multiple channels like website visits, paid ads, or social media activity and track the behaviour of current and potential customers. This insight into your audience will help you analyse and forecast the type of content and products that would entice them.
Combined with advanced features like segmentation, content triggers, and nurture campaigns, marketing automation enables you to deliver content to your audiences before they even know they need it.
As such, you can provide valuable content to establish lasting relationships and encourage potential and existing policyholders to move through the sales cycle to a point where they feel comfortable trusting you with their insurance needs.
You can automate and schedule for messages to be sent to larger groups at once with segmentation, allowing you to deduce the sub-groups within your list who share the same purchasing interests. This way, you can reach more of your policyholders in a shorter span without compromising your personalisation efforts.
It increases your cross-selling opportunities
Let’s say you acquire a new customer—your relationship with them can’t end the moment they purchase a product from you. Instead, you need to ensure that they continue transacting with you by gaining their trust and loyalty.
Cross-selling is one of those opportunities that marketers and business owners should leverage because it’s achievable with far fewer resources than selling to a new prospect. Latest studies reveal that the probability of selling to an existing customer is 60-70% while the numbers drop to 5-20% when selling to a new prospect.
This is another capability enabled by segmentation features. By analysing the purchase history and categorising your audience based on past behaviour, you can determine which new policies or services are most applicable for them so you can confidently promote the right product to the right customers.
Think of an instance when a client subscribes to one of your services. As your marketing automation tools can immediately provide data on the purchase and the stage of your customer’s buying journey, you can send them messages on other products that would complement their purchase.
Improves your conversions
Multi-channel lead scoring and real-time engagement alerts ensure greater transparency in your sales process. This means insurers like yourself can understand where your prospects are in the sales cycle—gone are the days of blindly selling to prospects.
Thanks to automated tools, you have in your arsenal the data that’s relevant to your prospect. You know which emails they’ve opened, what web pages they’ve visited, and what social media posts they have interacted with—all of which are invaluable in gauging not just their interest in your content but also their preference of communication frequency.
Remember that too many emails can risk your messages being sent to the spam folder. But knowing the exact frequency of messaging that would encourage clients to keep engaging with you is what’s going to make them trust your brand and not click on that unsubscribe button.
Collects better data to optimise your campaigns
While it’s natural that you make mistakes as a human, they can also cost you, leading to loss of time, resources, money, and even your existing policyholders.
Thankfully, automation tools can cut down the probability of errors significantly. By collecting, storing, and retrieving data from your previous campaigns, messaging strategies, and customers’ engagement and responses, you can make informed decisions when refining your marketing processes. The result is a better customer experience.
Combined with automated emails and scheduled posts, there will also be no missed communications due to human error.
Customers can experience a higher level of engagement from you thanks to the extra attention, which would in turn foster a loyal audience who will act as the best ambassadors for your insurance company.
Not only will it help retain your customers but also bring new customers through referrals and recommendations.
Marketing automation in insurance builds lasting relationships
Automation is an all-in-one solution for businesses struggling to keep up with new market trends and outpace increasing customer expectations and the evolving digital landscape.
For those working in the insurance sector, in particular, it provides multiple opportunities to reach out to your audience and garner their interest.
If you need to optimise your campaigns to get the best response and engagement rates from your audience, get in touch with our experts today.
Schedule a free consultation to find out where automation can lead you!