Insurance agents tend to juggle many marketing channels at once in order to attract clients and keep them engaged. But how do you know if all these efforts are working? The key is to measure your efforts, particularly by focusing on insurance marketing metrics that ultimately support your business growth and customer engagement.
The specific metrics that make a difference to a business can differ from agent to agent, but in general, there are several ones that stand out from the pack. In this guide to insurance marketing metrics, we’ll look at eight of the more powerful data areas across multiple channels. Focusing on these metrics can help you pull in more prospects and add value to your existing customers.
These insurance marketing metrics include:
- Leads Generated
- Cost Per Lead
- Webpage Visitors
- Search Rankings
- Email Open Rate
- Email Click-Through Rate
- Social Media Engagement Rate
- Social Media Impressions
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Lead Metrics
It can be easy to get caught up in insurance marketing metrics that don’t do much to drive your business forward. But if you’re trying to grow your business, then you want to track and improve metrics related to getting leads.
Leads Generated
As the result of all the different types of marketing you do, how does that translate into lead generation? For example, if you create a webinar, track how many new leads you generate based on those who sign up for the webinar and agree to be contacted in the future. Or, if you have a call-to-action on a blog post asking people to sign up for a consultation, track the number of leads this post generates.
Keep in mind that you can’t always connect the dots directly between every insurance marketing metric and the number of new leads, and some build on each other — a new social media follower might then read one of your blog posts, sign up for your email list, and a few weeks later obtain a quote — but the bottom line is that you need to be keeping track of your overall lead generation stats. See whether you’re trending up month over month, and also take note of the quality of these new leads.
Cost Per Lead
In addition to knowing the overall number of leads you generate, another important insurance marketing metric is to know your cost per lead. That way, you can get a better sense of how your marketing activities support your bottom line. If you have to spend $1,000 per lead, yet only one out of four leads signs up for a $1,000 policy, then you could be losing money on your marketing activities. Yet if you get your cost per lead down to, say, $50 per lead, then it could make sense to pour more fuel on your marketing fire.
To calculate cost per lead at the most basic level, add up your marketing spend (including advertising) and divide that by the number of leads generated. If you spend $2,000 per month on marketing and generate 20 leads, your cost per lead is $100. You can also look at the cost per lead for specific marketing activities. For example, if you run Facebook ads that include a lead gen form, you can calculate the cost per lead based on how much you spend on those ads and how many people fill out the lead gen form.
Website Metrics
As important as lead metrics are, they shouldn’t be the only focus. Other insurance marketing metrics, such as ones related to your website, can tell you whether you’re on the right track toward getting more leads and engaging your current customers. If you’re not getting much website activity, then you may need to make some adjustments before you can expect to increase your leads and retain clients.
Webpage Visitors
Track how many visitors you get both to your website overall as well as to specific web pages. In general, the more visitors you have, the more opportunities you have to convert them into clients or at least have them fill out a lead gen form. Strong web page traffic on certain blog posts, for example, can also be an indicator of whether you’re providing value to existing customers through your content marketing. That value can then translate into better customer retention.
As you measure webpage visitors, you might find issues like you’re getting good traffic to your homepage, but not many people are clicking on your contact page. In that case, you might need to experiment with changes, whether that’s tweaking the design to make the contact page more visible or adjusting your marketing efforts on a broader basis to do a better job of pulling in relevant website visitors.
Search Rankings
Another important insurance marketing metric is your search rankings, also known as page rank. Using a keyword research tool like Ahrefs or Ubersuggest, you can track where you rank for relevant keywords. Improving your rank won’t automatically mean you’ll get more leads, but it could be a good indicator of what’s to come. If you’re struggling to get website traffic, finding ways to improve your search rankings could lead to more visitors, which can ultimately translate into more leads and clients.
Email Metrics
Email marketing can be a powerful component in an insurance agent’s toolkit, and tracking email marketing metrics can help you benefit even more from this channel. Not only do you want to grow your subscriber list, but you also want to pay attention to insurance marketing metrics that indicate the effectiveness of your emails.
Email Open Rate
Having a huge email list doesn’t mean anything if your messages wind up right in subscribers’ trash. Track your email open rate to see what percentage of your audience at least opens your email. Doing so tells you whether you can pique their interest enough with your subject lines and your brand recognition to get them to at least see what you have to say. From there, you may need to work on crafting your email messages to get them to take the desired action, but at least you can see whether you’re getting your foot in the door.
Aim for an email open rate of roughly 15-25%, as Campaign Monitor notes, meaning 15-25% of your email subscribers open your emails. Much can depend on the industries you focus on, but this figure can at least give you a guidepost. Also, see whether you can improve your open rate over time.
Email Click-Through Rate
Getting people to open your emails is a big step, but from there you often need them to click on the links within your messages, whether that’s to sign up for a webinar, book a consultation, obtain a quote, etc. An email click-through rate tells you the percentage of your subscribers who click on a link within your emails.
Aim for a rate of around 2.5%, says Campaign Monitor. In other words, if you have an email list of 200 subscribers, at least 5 should click through to another page that you link to from your emails. That may not sound like much, but you have to be realistic about customer behavior. Not everyone is going to open your emails, let alone take action. That said, if you find certain types of emails lead to even higher click-through rates, then you might want to focus more on those messages.
Social Media Metrics
Social media can seem like a popularity contest at times, but there can still be some valuable insurance marketing metrics to focus on. These metrics might be a bit more removed from lead generation, but over time, improving your social media metrics can result in more email subscribers, website traffic, and eventually leads.
Social Media Engagement Rate
Too often, social media users get caught up in so-called vanity metrics such as follows and likes. While these could have some value, there are plenty of people who follow brands and like posts without genuinely engaging with the content. Other actions such as comments and shares could be a better indicator of how well your content resonates with your audience. But instead of looking at each of these areas on their own, it can be useful to measure your overall engagement rate.
Engagement rates are the currency of the social media marketing industry.
Hootsuite
Hootsuite defines engagement rate as “a formula that measures the amount of interaction social content earns relative to reach or other audience figures. This can include reactions, likes, comments, shares, saves, direct messages, mentions, click-throughs, and more (depending on the social network).”
Social Media Impressions
A large audience doesn’t automatically translate into more leads, but knowing how many people your social media posts reach can at least indicate your potential to get through to prospects. That’s why impressions can be a good insurance marketing metric when used alongside other metrics like engagement rates.
Impressions tell you how many people may have been exposed to your post, but that could include the many people who scrolled by without actually reading it. Still, you might notice useful patterns, such as if you get more impressions when posting in the morning, or if certain types of posts lead to valuable shares, which thereby increase your impressions with new audiences.
Turn Insurance Marketing Metrics Into Sales
Improving your insurance marketing metrics can be valuable, but you need to be able to close the deal once you start to reel in prospects. Using tools like Wheelhouse can help, as leads can easily generate bindable quotes whether they go to your website, visit links you share on social media, click-through to landing pages from your emails, etc. Keep your eyes on the prize, remembering that insurance marketing metrics can help tell you whether you’re on the right track, but you also need to be able to translate your marketing efforts into sales.