How can you use your website most effectively to grow your agency and increase revenue? One thing’s for sure: Just letting it sit there like an electronic billboard isn’t going to get you anywhere.
Ready to get started? Here are seven key strategies that will get you on the road to making the Web a key part of your agency’s profitability.
1. The buck starts here. The starting point in creating a profitable website is accepting, if you’ve been fighting it thus far, the fact that customers use the Web in their everyday lives. On a recent flight, I was talking with my seatmate about this very topic. He relayed a story about a trip he took to China.
His visit took him off the tourist track and along ancient roads that may have dated back thousands of years. Near the Great Wall, he saw an elderly man who looked old enough to be one of the road’s original travelers.
He was right out of a travel poster. A round farming hat protected him from the bright sun and a basket of firewood hung around his neck. It was exactly what anyone would expect from such an idyllic setting, except for what the man was doing: On the side of the road, in the middle of nowhere, he was busily texting someone, somewhere in the world. It could have been someone in America as easily as his family in the next village. The man was hauling firewood and using the Internet.
Now, whenever owners tell me their customers are just too old or not tech-savvy enough to care about the Web, I tell them about this picture-perfect moment in China.
2. Get right to the point. A basic rule of Web design is, “If you don’t know what your site is supposed to accomplish, neither will your customers.” A website can accommodate multiple purposes, as long as you know what they are and clearly communicate them to visitors.
Some examples of purposes for a website are:
- Customer service: You can allow customers to use your site to make inquiries, obtain information about their accounts and request or self-issue certificates of insurance. Personal Lines clients will appreciate such online services, but they can be of even greater value to your Commercial Lines customers.
- E&O prevention: Privacy legislation and federal compliance regulations have made doing business by phone and e-mail real E&O issue. Taking advantage of the security of authenticated electronic signatures is simply good business and distinguishes your agency from the competition.
- Reaching new markets: You can use Web and landing pages to expand inexpensively into new markets or reach existing markets more effectively.
- Communicating with customers: Someone is going to touch your customers on a regular basis. It can be either you or the commodity brokers. Online newsletters, updates on staff and explanations of new markets are good examples of information that you need to communicate to your customers. The most important way to increase the profitability of website is to make sure that the home page clearly states how your agency is unique, and how the customer will benefit from entrusting your staff with the protection of their assets.
3. Know your target market. The way your target prospects manage their lives depends on such variables as age, education, hobbies, and vocation. A profitable website considers these demographics and announces to visitors that you understand their specific needs.
Here’s a great exercise. Go to your agency’s website. Close your eyes and imagine that you’re one of your customers. Are you male of female? What are your specific needs? What do you want and need to see on the website?
Then open your eyes and see how quickly you can locate this information. How long did it take? How long would this customer remain on your website? How did the customer benefit from the experience?
Consider the following:
Why do more and more people prefer the Web for shopping and service? Possibilities include:
- Schedule (convenience)
- Control
- Information
What generation does your visitor belong to? The needs, wants and preferences for doing business vary greatly between baby boomers and Generation Y.
What questions might visitors ask and how can we make the answers easy to find. A website exists to answer visitors’ questions. In a perfect world, as soon as a question arises in the visitor’s mind, a link to the answer would immediately pop up on your site. You’ll never achieve perfection, but if you start with the user’s needs, you’ll move in the right direction.
4. Give your visitor something to do. A call to action is an important element of any marketing program, and especially true for Internet programs. Calls to action might include:
- An invitation to schedule a comprehensive review of the visitor’s protection needs.
- An offer of brochures on relevant topics, such as teen driving, toxic mold, identity theft, and protecting kids from the Internet. An excellent resource for ideas is www.iii.org
- Answers to questions designed to present value to the visitors. For example, you might ask, “If you were driving to work tomorrow and caused an accident resulting in more than $300,000 in damages, would you want your insurance to pay for it all?”
The goal of a call to action is to make sure you know more about customers when they leave your website than when they entered. Require all visitors to provide information about their needs before they receive your offer.
5. Focus on both features and benefits. No product has real value until it meets a customer need (or perceived need). Once you know your customer’s or prospect’s values, you can lead them to discover compelling “features” and “benefits” of doing business with your agency.
A “feature” is a fact about a product or service your agency offers to your customers. A “benefit” adds an emotional connection to facts by illustrating how the facts will change and enhance the visitor’s life.
An excellent example is Wal-Mart’s USP (unique selling proposition), “Save money. Live better.” The tagline effectively offers a fact (we have the lowest prices), and then presents the benefit: improvement to the quality of a shopper’s life (you’ll live better because you shop at Wal-Mart).
6. Define “profitability.” You won’t know if your website is profitable unless you set measurable performance and revenue goals. For example, let’s say that you want to increase Life insurance business. You might have some high-impact photos accompanied by such questions z, “Would you want your home paid off in the event of your death?” If you’re measuring the activity on your website, you might set a goal of a 1% close rate based on the number of hits during a campaign period.
A simple way to track sales that come from a specific offer is to create separate e-mail aliases for different calls to action. For example, if you’re offering a brochure on teen drivers, you might create an alias such as [email protected]. (An alias does not create a new e-mail address; it allows an existing e-mail address to have an additional name.)
7. Keep it simple. Don’t get caught up in a lot of graphics and “stuff.” On the Web, content is king. If you don’t have a message to deliver, it won’t matter how slick your site is. Visitors won’t return. Here are some tips for making the most of the content on your site:
- Always write from the visitor’s point of view. Avoid “insurance-speak.”
- Keep information on a particular topic in one place. Don’t make the user go to different parts of your site to find information on the same topic. They’ll just get confused and leave.
- Try to keep content to about 280 words per page. People prefer clicking to scrolling.
- Divide text into paragraphs of two or three sentences with white space around them.
- Write subheads above paragraphs to make it easy for users to scan a page for information relating to their needs.
- Make columns wide enough for the shape of phrases and sentences to be clear, but not so wide as to force the eyes to travel more than halfway across the screen to find the beginning of the next line. The standard width of websites is 1,024 pixels.
- Put text in a readable font (preferably 10-point Arial, Verdana or Times New Roman) and in a color that contrasts strongly with the background.
- Because users can become confused easily, keep the navigation as simple as possible. Don’t offer multiple ways to navigate the site.
- Use action words whenever possible. The Web requires concise writing, because users don’t want to waste time. Get to the point, and make sure to communicate information of value to the visitor. Phrases such as “find out,” “read about” and “buy online” have been shown to work on the Web. For example, you might say, “Our agency has plenty of information available about protecting you and your family.” You might also simply say, “Find out how we protect people’s stuff!”
CONCLUSION
Creating a profitable website does not have to be an overwhelming undertaking. Just follow these basic guidelines, and then listen to what your visitors tell you about their wants and needs. Develop your site based on measurable results, and profitability is sure to follow.