In the insurance industry today, change is constant. To keep up and stay relevant, insurers must shift focus to their marketing operations.

It is no secret that the insurance industry is radically changing. New regulations, technological advancements, and evolving customer demands are redefining a century-old insurance sales model.

Existing carriers are looking for new ways to grow profitability, invest more time and money into growing their commercial products and services, recruit and onboard the best agents, and identify strategies to increase touch points with the agent and policyholder. Meanwhile, new entrants to the industry are revolutionizing the way insurance is traditionally bought and sold. Despite the constant change, one thing remains as true as ever for all insurers: the need to acquire customers, sell services, and succeed. Now, let’s look at how all of this impacts you, the insurer.

Shifting Focus

One way your insurance company can approach these changes is by modernizing internal core systems that support quoting, amendments, and renewals. These systems, if implemented properly, can lead to an overall better agent or customer experience. But internal core systems do NOT focus on optimizing or enhancing your sales and marketing capabilities or distribution channel(s) - even though that’s increasingly important. The introduction of InsurTech has put increased pressure on insurers to innovate marketing and sales functions. To keep up with the change, you must look outward at what customers want and need, rather than inward, at your core systems. An optimized, trackable, scalable, integrated and de-centralized marketing and sales capability is critical to continued success in agency and direct-to-consumer distribution channels.

Introducing Insurance MOPs

Knowing all this, your insurance company should have decided to look outside-in, and invest in a better marketing and sales strategy. But what approach should you take? That’s where marketing operations (MOPs) experts come in. Organized in to multi-disciplined agile teams they can:

• Align digital marketing campaigns to overall corporate marketing strategies
• Design these campaigns into multi-step, event-based user journeys that are on brand and on message to drive your specific goals
• Execute these campaigns in a way that drives engagement and measurable business outcomes

MOPs teams use marketing automation technology as the underlying platform to build, deploy and provide reporting and analytics on campaigns and journeys. They work with the client to understand the business needs and have the ability to analyze results, provide deep insights and evolve campaigns and strategies to constantly improve results. Tracking performance at every point of engagement is essential to understand the effectiveness of each interaction in driving the desired business goals, especially because it provides you with insight to know what works and what doesn’t.

What’s In It for Insurance Companies?

You may be wondering: How can MOPs help my insurance company keep up with all the industry changes, engage customers, and grow profits? Insurance MOPs can actually help you overcome common pitfalls in these four key ways:

1 - Enhance your digital marketing strategies

According to 2017 insurance trends, there’s a need for digital marketing campaigns that connect the target audience with a carrier’s internal core systems, while maintaining a great user experience. In other words, integrating your marketing automation technology across your core systems environment is a key competitive advantage. It helps you enhance your marketing and sales capability by allowing you to track user engagement from point-of-contact through success, and all actions along the way. Whether defined as increased sales, improved profitability, increased awareness of a new product offering, recruitment of agencies, or increased retention, your success depends on this integration.    

#2 - Know your customers

Whether shopping for policies, filing a claim, or paying bills, insurance customers want a hassle-free, low-friction experience. They also want an experience that is memorable – messages that speak to what they want, when they want to hear it, on their preferred channel. By using marketing automation technologies to trace customer and agent engagement through every step of the journey, you can track what, when, and where messages and content are working effectively. In turn, that’ll help you provide a better customer experience and build relationships with agents and policyholders by using agent and policyholder data and analytical insights to drive engagement and retention. You - and your agents - will have the ability to segment audiences and customize communications based on each individual’s specific characteristics, making future campaigns even stronger.

#3 - Expand your revenue channels

As you evaluate how to expand your insurance carrier’s set of offerings to the end customer, it’s critical to think of ways to leverage affinity relationships across a network of risk management service providers. Campaigns can be designed to bring awareness to this broader set of services and potentially drive new revenue channels for you.

#4 - Keep your agents

One large challenge that many carriers, especially those with independent agencies, face is poor agent retention and a high employee turnover rate. As we described in a previous article, enhanced digital marketing strategies can help insurance carriers enable agents to sell. Centric’s MOPs services feature an insurance-specific, decentralized agency communication platform (ACP) that puts the agent at the forefront of the transaction. Agents use the ACP to define target campaign audiences, personalize their marketing outreach efforts, and execute more successful campaigns. When agents engage new and existing customers – and successfully sell their insurance services – they are more inclined to stay with you. A win-win for the agent, and you - carrier.

Clean Up Your Marketing, With MOPs

In the insurance industry today, change is the one consistent thing. To keep up and stay relevant, insurers, like you, must be prepared to shift focus to their marketing efforts. So get ready to rethink your digital marketing strategies and learn how to reach new customers in new ways. Be willing to help agents and marketing producers initiate, drive and track customer engagement. Insurance marketing operations is a comprehensive way to accomplish this. By making your marketing work more effectively, Insurance MOPs can help your company become the carrier of choice and create meaningful relationships with your policyholders.