How Insurance Agents Should Be Using Customer Data for Marketing

To improve the efficiency and effectiveness of outreach efforts, insurance agents should be using customer data for marketing. You don’t need to be a data scientist to know how to use data for marketing purposes. You just need the right tools and some relatively straightforward analysis that essentially anyone can practice. 

What Insurance Data Can Tell You

What can insurance market data tell you? Depending on the customer data you collect for marketing purposes, you can answer questions such as:

• What does my typical customer look like (e.g., business size, maturity, industry)?
• What types of policies are most popular?
• What marketing tactics (e.g., organic social media, pay-per-click advertising, email) lead to the most sales?

Before you get to these answers, however, you need to know how to collect customer data, including in a way that’s practical and compliant. From there, you can dive into customer data based on the specific needs of your insurance business. 

This guide will help you understand the sources of customer data you can use for marketing and how you can apply insurance marketing data to improve your customer outreach.

Unsure where to start with using customer data for marketing? Wheelhouse, powered by Talage, helps you easily generate quotes for customers online while providing you with the data you need to better understand your prospects and customers. Get in touch to learn how Talage can help you enhance your marketing.

Types of Customer Data

Using customer data for marketing depends on the information you collect. This insurance marketing data sometimes includes demographic data, such as:

• Age
• Gender
• Location

This data can give insurers a more detailed sense of what their typical customers are like. If you know your customer base skews toward young business owners, for instance, you might want to then market more on channels like Instagram. 

Customer data can also extend beyond personal characteristics. Insurers can collect marketing data related to customer behavior, such as:

• Email open rates
• Website visits
• Social media engagement

These types of customer data can provide a broader sense of what marketing efforts work. For example, collecting data on email open rates can show you whether tactics like using questions within your subject lines leads to more customers opening your email newsletters.

Before you get too far into using customer data for marketing, however, it helps to define your goals.

“Rather than create data and then decide what to do with it, firms should decide what to do first, and then which data they need to do it.”

Harvard Business Review

Where to Source Customer Data

Having a sense of the types of customer data you can use for marketing is important. But you need to know where to find this data to actually make use of it. 

In some cases, marketing data automatically gets collected through the tools you use. For example, social media platforms provide data on the success of your advertising campaigns. In other cases, you may need to add tools or change settings on your marketing platforms. This is especially true if you’re looking to collect specific types of data.

Places to Source Data

Some of the places where you can source customer data include:

• Your Website – Your website can be a great source for using customer data for marketing. Tools like Google Analytics can be integrated into your site. You can then collect demographic data, along with key information such as the most popular pages on your website.
• Social Media – Social media platforms have built-in data offerings. You can easily see the number of impressions your tweets get. However, if you’re interested in using customer data for marketing, you can dive deeper with social media management tools like Buffer or Hootsuite. Doing so provides you with more of an understanding of the types of customers you’re reaching and how your marketing has improved over time.
• Email – If you use email marketing tools like Mailchimp or Constant Contact to send newsletters, you can access a trove of insurance marketing data. For example, with Mailchimp, you can assess your marketing performance directly through metrics like open rates. You can also compare your results against competitors. That way, you get a better sense of what areas need improvement.  
• Wheelhouse – Wheelhouse, a SaaS platform by Talage, enables agents to sell and service insurance policies. It can also be leveraged as a data source. For example, Wheelhouse users can see demographic data. This helps them to better understand what types of customers are accessing the platform to get quotes.

Agents can use this customer data for more effective marketing, such as creating targeted landing pages for specific industries. Customer data from Wheelhouse can also be exported into lists, which can be used to target prospects across digital channels.

How to Use Data for Improved Marketing

Using customer data for marketing not only depends on collecting quality data from the aforementioned sources. Agents also have to be able to analyze this information. However, as mentioned earlier, anyone can leverage customer data, even if you don’t consider yourself much of a data expert.

Within many of the platforms that help you collect data, the software automatically provides you with actionable insights. For example, with Google Analytics, you can generate automated or custom insights (or both!). This information can show you details like a surge in site traffic from mobile devices over a certain time period. 

Then you just have to apply this information to your own circumstances. Perhaps you’ve been focusing on blogging as a marketing tactic but haven’t paid attention to how your articles look on mobile. If that’s so, you want to make sure you’re optimizing for these devices. If you’re not savvy with web development, you can find freelancers or agencies who can help out in this area.

CRM Tools

To help analyze insurance marketing data, you can turn to customer relationship management (CRM) tools like Salesforce or Hubspot. These tools tend to have robust, automated capabilities for using customer data for marketing. And they often display data visually, making it easier for you to quickly digest data. 

Also, CRMs can typically integrate with other data tools and combine multiple data sources. Including information from your email click-through rates to the time spent on different pages of your website. That way you don’t have to scramble to find the information you need to make good marketing decisions.

Privacy and Compliance Considerations for Customer Data 

Using customer data for marketing can vastly improve your outreach efforts. Yet you still need to know how to use this data. And in a way that follows the law and accounts for your customers’ privacy. 

Depending on your location and that of your customers, you may need to comply with certain data-related laws. These typically include the types of data you collect, how you store customer data, and how you disclose data collection to customers. Examples of these laws include: 

• General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) for businesses with European customers
• California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA) for businesses with Californian customers
• Gramm-Leach-Billey Act (GLBA) for businesses that may hold financial information about customers

Privacy Laws

Search online to learn about the privacy laws you need to consider for using customer data for marketing. Consider looking up laws based on location and the types of data you want to collect. However, this guide is not meant to be legal advice by any means; please speak with a legal professional for more specific information on compliance.

Even if you don’t fall under the jurisdiction of certain privacy laws, you still want to be careful about how you use data for marketing. For your customers’ sake, and to retain trust, try not to collect data you don’t need, especially personal, sensitive data. In the event of a cyber breach, you don’t want confidential information to fall into the wrong hands.

That’s why it’s important to practice good cybersecurity hygiene (SentinelOne offers a good guide). For example, with any data-related tools you use, such as CRMs, make sure you choose a strong, unique password. It sounds like a no-brainer, but people still use a pet’s name as their password.

Start Turning Your Data Into Marketing Gold

As you think about the information you want to collect and start using customer data for marketing, you can refine your process. At first, you may only be able to handle a small amount of data collection and analysis. But as you get the hang of it, you can leverage more data. The data can help you determine what your customers want and how you can reach them more effectively.

Wheelhouse, powered by Talage, offers the technology you need to get started with using customer data for marketing. You’ll enjoy a branded platform that delivers instant, bindable quotes in a self-serve platform for business owners. The data collected from this comprehensive tool belongs to you, so you can use it as you see fit. Over time, you’ll be able to better understand your customer base. Use this understanding to improve your business decisions for the benefit of yourself and your customers.