min read

Insurance Conversion Rate Optimization: What Is It, Why It Helps, and How to Do It

Published on

October 13, 2022

Contributors

Ray Huang

Head of Marketing

Ray is the Head of Marketing at Canopy Connect and has helped dozens of startups and growth companies over his 20-year career to develop strategies and implement tactics that yield high-impact results.

Conversion rate optimization must be a top priority in your insurance agency strategy. Learn how to leverage high-quality leads to maximize success.

On paper, it may seem like you have an impressive number of insurance leads queued up. But can you count on them all to come through?

In reality, simply assessing the number of leads point-blank provides a poor understanding of the true value of incoming opportunities. More is not always better: a few dozen quality leads will far outweigh the value of hundreds of leads with poor conversion potential or low quality. In fact, most of those poorer leads end up being a waste of your time and resources.

As an insurance agent or business, conversion rate optimization is the true key to maximizing your revenue.

Spending your resources on nurturing leads that have little chance of converting is a poor strategy and a recipe for attrition. Meanwhile, focusing efforts on leads that are more likely to convert can maximize your return on investment (ROI) and build a long-term client base.

This ensures consistent revenue and reduces the resources needed to combat the effects of attrition and expensive acquisition efforts.

In this article, you’ll learn how to boost conversion rates with quality leads to grow a long-lasting, loyal client base.

What Is Insurance Conversion Rate Optimization?

The term conversion rate optimization (CRO) refers to increasing the percentage of people who take a desired action on your website. Your goal for visitors may be to request a quote or schedule a consultation. The more people who take an action in line with these goals, the better your conversion rate is.

This is not to be confused with increasing your visibility or merely increasing traffic. Although better visibility and higher website traffic offer better potential for more customers, it becomes a costly exercise if few of these visitors act.

Track conversion rate improvement and strategy feasibility over time with this simple formula:

[(Number of conversions) / (Total number of site visitors)] x 100

For example, if you had 1000 visitors to your site and 50 of these visitors requested a quote, your conversion rate would be 5%.

(50/1000) x 100 = 5%

If, during the following month, you drive more people to your site—say, 2000 visitors—yet only 50 of them request a quote, your conversion rate would then drop.

(50/2000) x 100 = 2.5%

More traffic does not automatically result in quality leads or increased conversions. Thus, it’s more beneficial to work on improving quality leads before you focus on driving more traffic.

Let’s say your traffic for the following month remained at 1000 visitors—however, this time 100 of these visitors requested a quote. The conversion rate would double to 10%.

Conversion rate optimization starts with a sound marketing strategy that does not focus solely on funneling traffic to your website—but instead gets the right visitors to your site.

What Benefits Come With Improving Your Conversion Rate?

Conversation rate optimization offers benefits far beyond just attracting qualified leads. To win new customers online, you need to receive quote requests, and follow through to convert quotes into policy sales. Conversion rate optimization allows you to make data-driven decisions regarding your marketing strategy, as opposed to guessing what might draw in customers.

Let's say you average 1000 monthly site visitors and 100 of those visitors request a quote. On average, only one of these converts into a sale. You can now determine your cost per acquisition. In order to make 10 sales per month, you would need about 10,000 unique site visitors.

Your conversion rate can also serve as a benchmark to track how certain campaigns and marketing strategies impact the number of conversions and sales. Essentially, this allows you to optimize marketing for maximum ROI.

This data gives clearer insights into who your audience is and what their needs are. Now you can create segmentations based on potential customers' actions and their purchase stage.

Additionally, hard data can point to problem spots that lead to a low turnaround. Perhaps your quote request form is too long or complicated, or potential customers feel they don’t have enough information to make a confident decision. Knowing where to make small tweaks can improve the customer experience and set you apart from your competitors.

Another aspect vital to your success is your policy renewal conversion rate. Retaining repeat customers is more cost-effective than acquiring new sales. Your conversion rate optimization strategy should include renewals as a critical focus. Experiment with various image offers and layouts to determine what best attracts lucrative return business.

Advanced CRO Strategy for Insurance Agents and Agencies

So you’ve taken these basic steps to optimize traffic to your website, and your lead quality is on the rise. Congratulations! But it’s important to remember that this is only the first stage in improving conversions.

Advanced conversion rate optimization strategies will help you go beyond merely making your business visible.

Implement these tips to attract more of the right visitors, turn visitors into leads, and convert leads into sales.

Know Where to Implement Your Conversion Rate Optimization Strategy

Just getting prospects to your website isn’t of much use alone if they aren’t compelled to explore more or can’t find the information that initially drew them in. Your homepage is the first impression your customer gets of you. You only have a few seconds to engage them—or you’ll lose them to a competitor site.

Although you can’t provide all the information on your homepage, you can emphasize links to various topics to streamline the user journey. You can also simplify the steps it takes for users to get in touch with reps, sign-up, and request quotes, to further enhance communication.

Having a blog as part of your website is another key conversion opportunity. When it comes to insurance, customer questions are unending. A blog can set you up as an industry leader by providing tips, explaining complicated terms, and sharing industry updates with readers. This conveys transparency and builds trust. Adding a call to action (CTA) within articles further leverages these leadership pieces as conversion opportunities, driving readers to your business.

Create Better Forms on Your Website

As mentioned earlier, once you get prospects to your website, you want to make quote inquiries as effortless as possible. Users don’t want to fill in lengthy forms—and they don’t want to get halfway through a form just to realize they don’t have the necessary information on hand.

The best way to eliminate hurdles is to tell users what to expect beforehand. This may include the time it will take to complete the form, the information required, and the documents they’ll need to attach.

Make form completion as simple as possible and only ask for the bare necessities. Users will bounce if they feel that they’re wasting time filling in irrelevant data fields. Also, avoid stacking multiple entry fields on one page. When a user sees a long list of entries to complete, it can feel overwhelming.

Making a multi-part form can help make the process seem simpler. Make sure to get contact information first in case they don't complete the remaining pages. And set up a process to follow up with those form abandoners. However, while a multi-part form helps, you will still want to create a succinct user experience.

Speak to the Right Audience

Not everyone who engages with your business is truly interested in what you have to offer. Keep an eye out for certain red flags to determine whether someone is wasting time, that you could invest in a prospect who is serious about insurance.

For example, a reluctance to provide you with even basic information indicates that you’re not going to get very far with a prospect. Some leads might also provide answers that are inconsistent or contradictory. Seek clarification from prospects to determine the real situation, and whether there is a genuine interest.

If your prospect seems unenthusiastic about sharing their needs, they are not ready to progress on the sales journey. Let prospects know that you can only help them with an accurate quote if you have the required information. If they are not ready, offer to follow up with them in a month or two, or give them the option to contact you. If they are not really interested, they likely won’t contact you again.

Showcase Your Authority and USP With the Right Content

We briefly mentioned the importance of maintaining a blog to establish yourself as an industry leader. A blog also offers a range of other key benefits to your business. For example, using a blog as part of your marketing strategy can increase site traffic and leads.

Regularly updated blog content (especially with relevant locally targeted keywords) helps your site rank higher on search engines in locations of relevance, driving more targeted quality prospects to your web pages.

Keep content relevant and aim to answer pressing consumer questions. The more valuable it is to your target audience, the more they will engage with your content and share it. Feature your unique selling propositions and share your posts on social media and other industry journals.

Optimize Your Landing Pages

Landing pages are designed specifically to target certain actions. Unlike your website, a landing page is a single-page design. When a prospect sees your offer, a link will take them directly to the page that allows them to access information specific to the offer and request further details. They won’t have to navigate through any other pages. This allows you to target and engage with specific audience segments. It also makes it easy for prospects to engage with you.

For example, you may be running a campaign for prospects in their early twenties who are taking a policy for the first time. A dedicated landing page for this demographic can feature relevant information, videos, or infographics—and an obvious contact form for inquiries.

Landing pages can also offer free resources, eBooks, or event registration.

Boost Your Conversion Rates With Canopy Connect

Conversation rate optimization requires time, effort, and patience. But once your strategies are in place, you will reap the long-term benefits. A sound strategy can help you gain quality leads and eliminate time wasted on low-quality inquiries. With consistent efforts, lead generation will start to happen almost automatically! As your website starts to rank higher on search engines and you establish yourself as an industry expert, you’ll be able to make data-driven decisions and build a loyal customer network.

With the right tools, you can start leveraging conversions immediately while you perfect your strategy. Canopy Connect partners with you to eliminate customer pain points that hinder engagement.

Canopy Connect offers an instant data collection solution that benefits you and your prospects. It means no more nagging for the information you need, and no more tedious forms for clients to complete.

When a client would like a quote, you send them a link via email, text, or QR. By clicking the link, the user authorizes safe information sharing of their current insurance policies with you. Clients can even submit this info while on the phone with you!

You get immediate access to the client's insurance background and can offer them a competitive insurance quote without any delay. Canopy Connect’s solution allows for instant information processing, simplified quoting, and deal closures while your leads are hot.

Traditional methods of collecting insurance information involve multiple back-and-forth requests, dragging out the sales cycle. Canopy Connect equips you to impress customers from the very first encounter with efficient tech solutions and on-point service.