How to Increase Insurance Sales With Digital Distribution

Digital distribution channels have increased the opportunities to grow insurance agent sales. No longer do agents need to be limited to selling to those they can meet face-to-face, nor do they need to spend as much time manually generating quotes for prospects.

Instead, today’s insurance agents can easily provide quotes through digital distribution channels like their websites, as well as through their digital marketing efforts across social, email and more. That’s because application programming interfaces (APIs) make it easy for agents to connect with carriers’ underwriting platforms, and from there, provide bindable quotes to customers.

But you don’t need to be an expert on APIs to increase insurance agent sales online. Modern insurtech tools like Wheelhouse make it easy to ultimately provide quotes to customers across digital distribution channels.

In this guide, we’ll explore how insurance agents can increase sales on their main websites as well as through landing pages that tie into digital marketing channels.

Increase Insurance Agent Sales on Your Website

The first place to tackle when trying to grow insurance agent sales online is often your website. As you build up your digital presence, whether that’s getting active on LinkedIn, blogging or other digital marketing activities, you want to be able to convert prospects who make their way to your website.

Enable Insurance Policy Quoting

The easier you can make it for prospects to purchase from you once they make it your site, the better. But if they have to take additional steps like booking a call with you and then waiting days or even weeks to receive quotes, they might lose interest. Instead, successful insurance agents capture sales directly on their websites.

For agent’s not yet savvy to digital distribution, that means agents need to enable insurance policy quoting right from their sites. Ideally, these quotes should be bindable so the whole purchasing process is efficient and digital. Tools like Wheelhouse can make this possible, helping you convert your website traffic from insurance prospects to insurance sales. 

Make Your Website Easy to Navigate

In addition to making it easy for leads to obtain quotes on your website, you also want to make your website as a whole easy to navigate. Before a lead decides to generate a quote, they might want to learn a bit more about your insurance agency.

Your website should be easy to read, with clearly defined sections. The specifics can differ from agent to agent. But generally, you want to have sections with clear menu headers like:

• About: Potential customers might want to learn the basics about your agency, like who the agents are, who you serve, and how you can help. If someone’s looking to buy commercial insurance, they likely want an about page to confirm they’re in the right place and not on an agent’s website who only sells life insurance, for instance.
  
• Services: Your about page might generally touch on the services you offer, but you should also have a section devoted to laying out the specific insurance services you provide. That way, a visitor doesn’t have to go digging through your site to see if you’re an agent that can help them with their insurance needs.
  
• Check Quotes: In addition to providing a section within your home page for insurance quoting, you can call out your quoting capabilities within your main menu. That way, a visitor coming to your site can quickly navigate to this area if they don’t want to sort through the other content on your home page.
  
• Contact: Lastly, your website should have a clear contact section. Your digital distribution strategy might be geared toward closing more insurance sales online, but sometimes leads still want to get in touch through email or the phone to discuss more. So, make it easy for leads to know how to contact you.

Increase Insurance Agents Sales Through Landing Pages

In addition to selling more insurance policies through your own website, insurance agents can also increase sales by creating landing pages. That way, insurance agents can target their sales efforts to different types of insurance customers.

What Is a Landing Page and How Can It Increase Insurance Agent Sales?

For those unfamiliar with landing pages, think of them as simple yet powerful standalone websites. Your main website might not be able to appeal to all potential buyers at all times, so landing pages can serve more specific purposes to increase insurance agent sales.

Technically landing pages can have broader definitions, but “when we talk about ‘landing pages’ in online marketing, we usually mean a page that is specifically designed to receive and convert traffic from an online marketing campaign,” explains Disruptive Advertising, a digital marketing agency.

How Can Insurance Agents Use Landing Pages to Grow Sales?

Landing pages can be the destination for traffic that you generate through other digital distribution channels, and they can also act as the gateway to other content. Consider using landing pages with the following:

• Email: Your email marketing newsletters or other types of email messages can hook marketing leads and then drive them to a landing page where they can obtain an insurance quote. You can even create specific landing pages for different types of email marketing segments, such as one for small business owners and one for mid-size companies.
  
• Social media: Instead of going for the sale right away on social media, try building more genuine engagement. Then, every now and then you can drop the link to a landing page that expands on a topic you’re sharing information about on social, and that landing page can include quoting capabilities to capture sales. Insurance agents can also post the link to their landing pages within their social media bios. Plus, landing pages can be a great destination for social media ad campaigns. You could even create different landing pages to correspond with relevant ad campaigns. For example, you might create one ad campaign for e-commerce companies and another one for software companies. Each campaign can drive to a landing page that speaks to these different industries.
  
• Ebooks/whitepapers: Some insurance agents might decide to set up landing pages to capture leads when releasing content. For example, if you produce longer content like an ebook or whitepaper that provides real value to business owners, they might be willing to drop their contact information into a landing page that then enables them to download the ebook or whitepaper.  
  
• Webinars/digital events: Insurance agents can also set up landing pages as gateways to register for webinars or other digital events. Landing pages can also be used after these events, such as if you send an email out to attendees thanking them for joining, with a link to a landing page for more information. 

Use Wheelhouse to Increase Insurance Agent Sales

Wheelhouse empowers both carriers and insurance agents to grow sales by unlocking digital distribution. Business owners looking to purchase commercial insurance can quickly access bindable quotes online while comparing quotes from multiple carriers.

All agents have to do is drop their custom link anywhere they have a digital presence, such as their website, social media or even in an ad. From there, customers can follow the link to generate quotes at any time, through an easy-to-use, self-serve platform. 

Insurance agents can also use Wheelhouse to create targeted landing pages. Whatever type of digital marketing campaign you want to run, you can then direct prospects to customized, branded landing pages geared to the specific audience you want to reach. Leads can then become customers as they generate bindable quotes through the landing pages.

So, if you want to grow your sales as an insurance agent or increase distribution channels as a carrier, Wheelhouse can help. Click the button below to learn more.