Looking for ways to improve sales and profits? A technique that many brokers are finding very effective is database marketing.
Of course, your brokerage is already using computers to improve administrative efficiency and customer service. Now you need to look at using your computer to help you sell. Database marketing, or direct marketing, helps you do just that.
What is database marketing? Don Jackson has a good definition in his book Winning: Direct Marketing for Insurance Agents and Brokers:
“Insurance direct marketing is an interactive system of marketing that ascertains, creates, and satisfies the insurance wants and needs of people by performing organized tasks affecting the transfer of services between seller and buyer; using one or more media for the purpose of soliciting a response, by phone, mail, or personal visit, from a prospect or customer; maintaining complete information on each transaction in a database; and doing so at a profit.”
ADVANTAGES TO BUSINESS
What should a good database marketing program do for your business? Some, or all, of the following:
- Help you enroll more customers and find customers with whom your agency can build more profitable relationships.
- Allow you to spot ways of servicing each customer according to his or her needs.
- Substantially reduce the loss of customers at renewal.
- Make your sales force more effective and efficient.
- Help your agency project a more consistent, high-quality image.
Of course, database marketing has been practiced in the industry for years. Many agents/brokers intelligently use direct mail, telemarketing, and even television for each of their markets and sell a variety of policies. The best have found ways to integrate these media so they work well, not only together but with the existing sales force. In fact, good database marketing is more akin to good customer service than the hard-sell noise that has given some direct marketers a bad name.
Let’s assume you’re interested in trying database marketing at your agency, or you want to see how your current efforts stack up against the best in the industry. First, review the essential ingredients in the art and science of database marketing.
Database marketing aims to do what we all dream of doing as marketers and salespeople: deliver the right message about the right product, at the right price, to the right consumer, at the right time, in the right way. As our efforts approach this ideal, sales success ought to follow.
INTERACTIVE AND INDIVIDUAL
What sets database marketing apart from all other marketing channels is captured in two words: “interactive” and “individual.”
Database marketing is interactive. It builds and sustains a relationship between seller and buyer in which the buyer responds to the seller in a meaningful way. The response (or nonresponse) helps guide the hand of the marketer in creating ever more relevant promotions in an ongoing process of trial and error. And since this dialogue is recorded in a database, we can go back and “replay” it at will to learn what worked and what didn’t.
Database marketing is able to relate to each prospect or customer as an individual because it is built around a database. A person’s unique preferences, needs, and behavior can be recorded and used by the marketer to ensure that communication is relevant and respectful. At its best, database marketing is appreciated by customers for its convenience and for the way it allows the customer’s needs to be anticipated and acted on by the marketer.
Doesn’t this sound a lot like good salesmanship? The most successful agents take the time to understand their customers, cultivate a relationship, recommend appropriate products at the right time, anticipate change and respond proactively, and learn from their mistakes and successes to achieve even higher levels of service for their clients. Database marketing and personal selling have much in common. Not surprisingly, they reinforce each other when used intelligently together. And that is what’s creating sales breakthroughs in the industry today.
The best database marketers do many little things right, but I group them into three main areas: strategy, technology, and execution.
KNOWING YOUR CUSTOMERS
The best database marketers compile an incredible amount of information about their customers and prospects (by name) and use it to make every marketing decision on product offering, product development, promotion strategy, and distribution.
Strategy begins with a thorough understanding of the markets your business serves, and the health of the relationships you have built, as evidenced by your existing customer base. It is important to be able to answer questions like these:
- Who are your customers? How would you describe their insurance needs?
- What products do they buy today?
- What products do they buy together?
- What products are they likely to need in the near future?
- How do renewal rates vary across segments of your customers’ base?
- How many new leads does your company generate annually, and what are the close rates on these leads?
- What is the premium currently generated on each customer, and how does it vary across different segments?
- What is your customers’ expected lifetime value - the net current value of your dealings with them in the future?
You must then decide what objectives you wish to reach as a business in terms of sales and profits. From these, consider the following:
- How can I best serve my existing customers, in products, prices, and promotion technique?
- What kind of customer do I want to attract in the future: more of the same, or targeted improvement?
- How do I develop their lifetime value?
- What new products, if any, do I need to introduce?
TECHNOLOGY: THE DATABASE
I mentioned that database marketing and personal selling have much in common. What sets them apart, however, is the use of information technology. Personal selling can be thought of as high- touch, person-to-person relationship building. Database marketing, on the other hand, relies on using computer technology to store and process information to create, target, and manage promotion campaigns.
The required technology will vary in cost and complexity, depending on the current size of your business and your plans for growth.
You will need a database to house information about customers, their transactions with your company, the promotions they have received, and any information you add to the database from external sources. You will probably find that this will need to be built with input from your existing billing and administrative system. You may also discover that the new marketing database will be best managed as a separate system, receiving information from your existing systems and feeding it back. This approach will help minimize cost and implementation headaches.
You will need software that allows you to manipulate information in the database for analysis and to execute marketing campaigns. You will also need routines that allow you to move smoothly from the concept of a campaign to its launch and management. Your system should allow you to specify and send out direct mail with ease. It should integrate with your telemarketing or sales staff, moving information into customers’ or prospects’ hands before a call, and moving information resulting from the call back into the database. It should contain modules that allow you to generate management reports with ease, to keep you in touch with what’s happening across a variety of different aspects of the business.
MAKING IT WORK
Once the strategy has been mapped out and the software is in place, sales appear like magic, right? Wrong. I have seen the best database-marketing plans collapse because they were improperly executed. I have also seen good work thrown away because management did not know how to use information in the database to improve on marketing efforts.
In implementing your new program, you must analyze the following issues:
- How do I get information about the success or failure of contacts - phone, mail, or sales force - back into the database easily aneffectively?
- How do I plan the marketing campaign so as to measure impact, and how do I use this information to improve as I go along?
- How do I ensure that all members of the team support the goals of the database-marketing program and participate in its success?
Let’s recap. An effective database marketing program should:
- Integrate with and support your existing sales force
- Build on existing information systems
- Put your salespeople, their management, and your executives more in touch and in control
- Sell simple products at low unit-cost
- Deliver highly qualified leads for more complex products
I hope this brief introduction will interest you in trying database marketing, if you have not done so already - or that it has suggested a few areas in which you might improve what you are doing now.