In my report, Insurance MarTech 100: Overview and Vendor Index, I profiled a representative sample of what are probably several thousand solutions, startups, and vendors in the marketing technology space. These solutions span simple tracking beacons to holistic digital marketing platforms. It is certainly a broad range of technology, which may intimidate insurers who are only just getting started creating a consumer-facing digital presence that is independent of their agents, distributors, and producers.
So, where do you start? Here are three basic technologies that are table-stakes for any digital marketing strategy:
A public-facing website
By now, most insurers own a domain and public-facing homepage. However, it is no longer enough to display a phone number or link to an agent or client portal. The website is the face and mouthpiece of the company, and most consumers need several touchpoints with the brand (one recent study said 6.5 touches) before they are ready to speak to anyone.
Consumers – especially younger generations – expect to start the quoting process from the homepage. Whatever distribution channel the insurer uses should have a call-to-action on the homepage (e.g., “get a quote,” “find an agent”) to start the consumer down the purchase funnel. Moreover, before consumers are ready to get a quote, they usually want to read information about the product in terms of premiums, options, deductibles, reviews, testimonials, and other product information. This digital content has to be current, fresh, and readily available.
A web analytics solution
A good implementation of a web analytics solution will constitute the eyes and ears of the public website. Visitor behavior will inform businesses whether they need to refresh, expand, or archive content. Click-through rates, recorded in web analytics, will reveal the effectiveness of any marketing campaign that the organization pushes out.
Some solutions provide information about the demographic makeup of visitors, informing a company’s go-to-market strategy. In many cases, businesses can glean more useful insights from the customized measurement of clicks and actions than from page-loads—so an implementation design and strategy should precede the deployment of a solution.
An email marketing platform
The basic ability to send an email to customers and leads, in an automated manner, is critical to maintaining customer loyalty, controlling brand favorability, building trust, and communicating critical messages. Even if intermediaries handle most communication, only the brand is in the position to represent itself and communicate with consumers as a whole—as many brands learned during the early weeks of the current pandemic.
Maintaining an active list of email addresses is a responsibility of the CRM system and is an example of where marketing technology intersects customer data governance.
There are, of course, other very basic MarTech solutions that ought to be in-place: social media monitoring, SEO tools, VOC surveys, and individual channel management like AdWords or DoubleClick. Even so, it is hard to imagine a digital marketer trying to raise brand favorability and generate prospects and leads without these three essential elements: a public-facing website, a web analytics solution, and an email marketing platform.
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