When an insurance company is ready to focus on direct to consumer sales, it can feel tough knowing where to start. Your team may feel confident it’s time to drive traffic directly to your site and excited to create new customer profiles to support the longevity of your product lines.
So far we’ve covered why direct to consumer sales are important and how Progressive Web Applications can support this transition. For a look back, see Parts 1 & 2 below:
- Part 1: The Insurance Direct to Consumer Sales Model: What is it & How Does it Work?
- Part 2: The Insurance Direct to Consumer Sales Model: Benefits of Progressive Web Apps
How to Transition to Direct to Consumer Sales
The transition to direct to consumer sales starts with your company’s website. Many small to mid-sized insurers may rely on agents and other methods of third-party referrals to generate business. To strengthen a direct to consumer approach, the company must support a website to attract users to a simpler experience.
Key Considerations for Direct to Consumer Sales
1. Begin your focus on one, affordable product.
When starting out your direct to consumer sales model, it can feel overwhelming to focus on all product lines at once. This may split your internal resources and muddy considerations on what would be most profitable for the business. By singling one product and ensuring it is priced competitively, your team will have a strong starting point to support a fresh product launch on your website.
2. Simplify the customer’s journey.
Once the shopper arrives on your site, are there stopping points along the shopper’s path? Consider how entering information may slow down the customer, cause confusion or raise questions. These are great moments to catch and support the process with automated communication, such as chatbots or queues to chat with a representative, preventing the shopper from leaving your site. Banks and insurers are quickly starting to adopt video services, which help give the user a friendly and assistive face when coming across a question.
The shopping experience may need to be broken out into smaller steps if the shopper is spending a large quantity of time on one page or if sessions are dropping during a particular step in the process. Surveys with incentives could also be beneficial to hear from customers as they go through the shopping experience. When users seem to hit a pain point in their experience, consider ways to alleviate the process, such as a notification to enter an email address and remind the user to come back at a later time, or prompting with a chatbot for help moving forward. Measuring the performance of your website and how users from various channels behave is key to expanding to future products.
3. Predict and monitor where shoppers need help to continue their session.
While filling out an application, the shopper may have trouble making selections. Consider ways to simplify choices for the shopper, such as by applying automatic discounts to not only ask the shopper if they qualify, but to show them the savings for qualifying to incentivize them to stay engaged in the shopping experience. This applies to bundling, such as combining home and auto insurance, to show the shopper their savings if they choose to expand their policy from their initial selection. Reassurances can be added along the way to establish future touch points, such as when an auto insurer offers safe driving discounts and must collect driving data after the policy is active but before the discounts are applied. The shopper should be concisely informed on how this works and what to expect so that they not only feel satisfied with an easy experience, but also gain trust in your brand walking them through the process.
4. Measure success and test new approaches.
Performance can be measured not only based on metrics within your user’s behavior, but also for performance by channels. Marketing efforts can draw from various channels, such as social media advertising, search engine advertising and display advertising, as well as direct and organic search traffic. These channels should be monitored to ensure new users are reaching your site in a number of ways. Monitor steps in the shopping process, such as by constructing a landing page for your advertising and funneling traffic to this particular page, setting you up for A/B testing down the line when deciding to split and test traffic.
Technology to Support Direct-to-Consumer Sales
The rise of direct to consumer sales is driven by shoppers adopting a do-it-yourself approach as they assume all the tools they need to make the purchase will be readily available. This means insurers must adopt the right technology to meet expectations.
Many shoppers today prefer to not require help when purchasing insurance, but still desire to have access to fast assistance when they need it. This is why chatbots, queues for text chatting with a representative and queues for videoing with live associates have become more popular. Many shoppers feel frustrated waiting on phone lines and are relieved to find accessibility built into their shopping experience to call on.
Progressive Web Applications (PWAs) make many of these advancements possible. PWAs have app-like functionality and are search engine friendly, acting as advanced gateways for insurers to use for launching, testing and measuring the success of complex customer journeys.
WaterStreet Company & Progressive Web Apps
WaterStreet Company aims to deliver best-in-class solutions for P&C insurers. This year, we are excited to begin leveraging Progressive Web Apps for our clients in addition to our Business Intelligence Suite.
We provide advanced P&C Insurance Software designed to grow with your business, allowing integration with next-generation solutions.
Reach out to WaterStreet Company today to request a free consultation and demo of our solutions.
