How To Sell Insurance Online: 5 Best Practices

How to sell insurance online? Selling insurance online is more efficient. But that doesn’t mean it’s always easy. Figuring out how to sell insurance online still requires solving areas like how to source leads, build relationships and provide a great overall customer experience. However, the ways in which insurance agents engage in these activities may look a little different online.

For example, rather than relying as much on prospects visiting your office to discuss policy options, the relationship might start through a channel like social media. From there, the prospect might visit your website on their own and obtain a policy quote. In some cases, they might even complete the whole purchase without directly speaking with you, but that doesn’t mean you can sit back and wait for sales to come in.

Instead, you can try to position yourself to sell more insurance online by following these five best practices, as we’ll explore more in this article:

1. Make Purchasing Easy
2. Keep Track of Leads
3. Optimize Your Website
4. Establish a Strong Digital Presence
5. Connect Your Marketing and Sales Strategies

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#1 Make Purchasing Easy

Figuring out how to sell insurance online often means putting yourself in your customers’ shoes. From their perspective, what makes buying insurance online appealing? In many cases, the answer is that it’s easier than the old-fashioned way of calling up or even emailing an insurance agent for quotes. But if you don’t offer an easy online purchasing experience, potential customers might not be gaining much advantage and could go to a competitor’s online channels instead.

One way to make purchasing easy is to use InsurTech tools like Wheelhouse that let customers quickly obtain bindable quotes for commercial insurance from multiple providers. Plus, agents have access to a whole host of tools that simplify the experience for clients.

For example, if clients make a typo on coverage applications or forget to fill something in, agents can edit applications and might be able to still put the application through, rather than having to go back to the customer to ask them to fix it and thus slow down the sale.

Agents can also easily cross-sell policies with Wheelhouse while making the purchasing process easier for clients. Rather than starting from scratch for each quote, agents can use copy quoting capabilities to carry over information from a previously quoted application, which streamlines what’s needed to quote additional lines of coverage. If customers just have to complete a few more questions to obtain a quote for another type of policy, they might be more willing to purchase more insurance overall. 

#2 Keep Track of Leads

Figuring out how to sell insurance online also means learning to keep track of leads online, rather than in person. As leads submit information online, you want to be able to capture and organize that information so you can stay on top of things and get prospects across the finish line, rather than letting sales fizzle out.

For example, using a customer relationship management (CRM) system can help you capture lead data from whatever channel they come through and then track where they are in the customer journey and your outreach. Suppose you see that a prospect provided their contact info as part of your social media advertising campaign. From there, you might want to reach out and see if you can answer any questions they may have or provide any other type of support. If they don’t respond initially, you might try to follow up. And rather than remembering where you stand with every lead, a CRM can help you stay on top of all that.

Meanwhile, tools like Wheelhouse help when it comes to managing quote requests. When customers get that close to completing a sale online, you don’t want to let any information slip through the cracks due to a lack of organization. 

#3 Optimize Your Website

Another aspect of selling insurance online is optimizing your website, which can take shape in a few different ways. For one, you want to optimize your website speed so that potential customers have a good experience, rather than leaving before they have a chance to obtain a quote.

Web users “expect a fast result for the content that they want. When they don’t get it, they usually bounce. Slow page load is an interrupting experience for the user and it can be a source of frustration and often users simply don’t have the time to wait,” notes HubSpot, which points out that website owners can turn to free tools like Google’s PageSpeed Insights to help in this area.

Optimizing your website can also mean making your site look aesthetically pleasing and easy to navigate, which might require the help of a web designer. You also likely want to look into search engine optimization (SEO) to help drive leads to your website.

#4 Establish A Strong Digital Presence

Your website can be your primary online sales channel, but that doesn’t mean it has to be the only place where potential customers can find you online. To drive more traffic to your website, or to send leads directly to sales landing pages, for example, you also might want to build up your digital presence such as through social media or email newsletters. Other areas like guest blogging on other websites can also help, such as by increasing your brand awareness.

That said, you don’t want to stretch yourself too thin, and you don’t need to be everywhere at once. This area can be pretty subjective, so it might take some trial and error to figure out what works for you. For example, perhaps you’re having trouble gaining traction on Facebook, yet LinkedIn seems to be working well for you, or vice versa. 

In that case, there’s no rule that says you have to be on multiple social media channels. Instead, you might want to focus more (or only) on the one that works for you so that you have more time to build more relationships and drive leads to your website.

#5 Connect Your Marketing and Sales Strategies

Lastly, figuring out how to sell insurance online often means connecting your marketing and sales strategies to make sure you’re efficiently moving leads through your funnel. 

For example, if you’re engaging in lots of digital advertising to market your brand, yet your website isn’t set up to capture leads online or provide insurance quoting capabilities, then you could be missing out on sales. Conversely, if you place your sales emphasis on setting up online quoting capabilities but aren’t doing anything to drive traffic to your website, you could be cutting yourself short.

This alignment can be particularly important at agencies with multiple employees in different roles, as you wouldn’t want to create information gaps between the two departments. If sales teams don’t know what marketing teams are doing, for example, sales staff might cold call a business owner who’s already signed up for your email newsletter.

“When sales and marketing work together, they can improve sales productivity, increase marketing ROI, and deliver a better customer experience (CX). The two groups can share technologies and processes that allow them to monitor and optimize every stage of every sale, from first touch to closed deal,” notes Oracle.

See How You Can Sell Insurance Online

Following these five best practices can often help solve how to sell insurance online, but they’re not the only ways to do so. The experience of selling insurance online can differ among agents, depending on factors such as your own comfort with digital channels and the types of customers you’re serving. So, you might need to experiment to see what works for you.

Overall, though, figuring out how to sell insurance online can help you scale your book. If customers can obtain quotes on their own time, for example, rather than waiting for you to generate quotes for them, that could potentially increase the number of customers you can take on.