How to Create an Automated Customer Engagement System
It’s true in every field, but perhaps even more so for insurance–it all comes down to the customer’s experience. According to PWC, 82% of buyers are willing to pay more for a great customer experience. A Walker study found that 2020 would be the first year for customer experience to overtake price and product as a brand’s primary differentiator.
So how can you reliably improve the automated customer experience at your agency? The answer is insurance marketing automation. By harnessing the power of an automated marketing suite for your insurance agency, you can provide your clients and prospects an impressive and appealing user experience, which in turn brings you more leads and higher customer retention. Discover how you can use automated customer engagement to transform your agency experience.
What is Automated Customer Engagement?
Automated customer engagement is a marketing tool that provides a way for your agency to engage more often and at a personal level. More importantly, it makes the customer journey and interactions with your brand intuitive, easy, and, of course, engaging. Your customers expect not only professionalism and expertise, they expect a seamless customer experience that speaks to their unique needs.
That level of engagement is a difference maker for your agency, but it takes knowledge and the right kind of data to pull it off. Collecting and analyzing data is a straightforward process, but putting that data to work in a way that speaks to your audience can be quite a challenge. That’s because an automated customer experience has to be more than convenient and engaging — it has to send the right message, to the right prospect or customer, at the right time.
From automated email and contact form responses to technology that expedites the customer journey, customer experience automation helps agents build strong relationships faster than ever.
6 Ways to Put Customer Experience Automation to Work in Your Agency
1. Establish your brand persona with a professionally designed logo and defined colors
It only takes “about 50 milliseconds (0.05 seconds) for people to form an opinion about your website.” It is paramount that the visual presentation of your website is clean, appealing, and intuitive. When you have a cohesive insurance agency branding across your marketing materials, it’s easier to make the connection with your customers. Start with a professionally-designed logo to make your brand recognizable no matter where it’s seen.
Along with a logo, it’s important to define brand colors for your insurance agency branding. A University of Loyola study said that choosing consistent brand colors can increase recognition by up to 80%. You can even consider consulting a color psychology guide to select brand colors based on what they mean. Pick whichever one you like, but stick with it! Then make it the anchor for all your automated marketing to build that all-important brand consistency.
2. Demonstrate consistency by delivering quality content through automated email campaigns
Selling insurance can be a waiting game. Customers and prospects may know about you, but until they need your services, you might not hear from them. That moment could be months or even years from when you first meet them. How do you stay top-of-mind all that time? Through consistent automated email campaigns.
When you are communicating with a client or prospect on a regular basis, the primary goal of your emails is to deliver quality content. Email is a key element of the automated customer experience because with every email, you’re anchoring your agency to helpful, engaging content.
3. Understand the topics that interest and concern your audience with automated analytics
According to an IBM and Econsultancy study, 80% of elite marketers say that mapping the customer journey through analytics is “highly valuable” and the remaining 20% claim it is “quite valuable.” Watching your analytics can tell you a lot about what brought the prospect to the door of your insurance agency.
Rob Yoegel, former VP of Marketing at Gaggle, shared his advice on measuring the performance of content assets: “By analyzing the source of conversions/traffic, you can better understand what content resonates and what audiences are valuable to the business.”
Automated analytics allow you to define which topics will be the focus of your marketing content. You can continually personalize your content stream to each customer type or need for a more effective insurance marketing automation strategy.
4. Make the ask easier and more appealing with automated referral campaigns
It is impossible to overstate the importance of referrals. Referrals are the strongest variety of leads, and yet, many insurance agents are hesitant to ask for them. To make asking for referrals easier, agents need a strong referral program using automated customer engagement.
Nick Andrews, Former Channel Partner Marketing Manager at Liberty Mutual once told us: “Every year at Safeco and Liberty, we survey our fastest-growing agents. This year both personal lines and business lines have said that the number one source of new business is a formalized referral program. Having that in place is another key building block.”
The Agency Revolution automated referral program helps you reach out once a quarter with a non-intrusive email asking for referrals. Your clients may answer right away, or they may see those emails for years before recommending someone, but a consistent email campaign dramatically increases the chances of getting a referral.
5. Streamline the automated customer experience with chatbots
Your customers and prospects are busy people, just like you. That’s why it’s not surprising that 56% of people prefer interacting with your brand via messaging apps or chat to phone calls. Text messages and chat interactions are so popular because they are quick and to the point, giving your customers what they need, when they need it.
Chatbots are easy to configure and automate to provide customers with immediate answers to their most often asked questions. From specific questions about your agency to general questions about insurance, a chatbot application can be an integral part of a fulfilling automated customer experience.
6. Make exchanging information faster and easier for customers using automated forms
From getting the important information you need to stay in touch with leads to making it easy for prospects to learn more about your brand, automated forms make the process easier and faster. When your agency adopts the use of digital forms as a part of the automated customer experience, everything from submitting claims to making changes on an account becomes a simplified process for your customers.
Through quality, consistent communications, you can significantly improve the experience your customers and prospects have with your insurance agency. Insurance marketing automation allows you to keep up that level of quality user experience and will turn your marketing software into a growth engine for your agency.
Ready to learn more about how you can put customer experience automation and other marketing tools to work in your agency? When you invest in an automated marketing platform like Attract®, your agency can grow referrals and attract leads like never before. Get a free demo today and level up your marketing tomorrow with Agency Revolution’s suite of digital marketing tools.