After running a handful of what we are referring to as: Going Paperless Adoption Campaigns in 2020 for both brokers and carriers, the outcome is that there is a lot to consider. For many insurance providers, time wasn’t exactly on their side in 2020 – making the campaigns either a form of organized chaos, too simple to be effective or worse: the realization of lingering E&O exposures.

Considering this initiative is here to stay we’ve put together 5 tips that you can use while building your own strategy in 2021:

1. Email Addresses, Data Accuracy and Security

This year there have been many drivers for capturing email addresses and the need for data accuracy, and the going paperless campaign tops the list. Your communication strategy hinges on having the correct addresses on file and in a format that will support deliverability and your email domain reputation. For many providers this use case shifted the mindset from data accuracy, a nice to have, to data accuracy as a must have, almost overnight. The challenges range from having very few addresses on file, invalid addresses, and determining who is the right point-of-contact to receive which coverage document. If you are like the majority you will find yourself having to add this layer of complexity. Start with these guiding principles, which will give you a leg-up to an already involved campaign:

  1. Consider a total one-time list cleanse. This will give you the best possible starting point and will weed-out a large portion of invalid addresses in one work effort.
  2. Engage the front lines to support the end goal. Either provide them a secure landing page with form capture and opt-in destination or create a simple BMS/CRM workflow for adding new / revised contact information directly in the principal database. Above all – avoid manual lists as accuracy is critical at this stage.
  3. If you must use manual lists, provide a BMS/CRM template to maintain accuracy and easy import.
  4. Deploy your campaigns with a leading marketing automation platform. There are many reasons for this but the most important are because of the power behind these functions: deliverability and opt-in/out complexities, list management and segmentation, automated journeys for nurturing, 360° visibility and built in landing pages to augment the user experience.

2. Document Hubs, Apps and Digital Delivery

For the audience that is open to receiving their documents digitally; most providers are driving users to self-serve applications for fulfillment and you may have already started providing this option regardless of the paperless phenomenon. If you’re a broker which environment do you recommend that your customers download? The carrier portal? Or your brokerage portal? In some cases both have been offered which may make it confusing for the insured. What’s more critical is having a plan to drive adoption with these tools. It’s important that you build strategies that are designed around both b2b and b2c adoption journeys and consider early adoption stages that are paramount to achieving your end goals. Here’s an example: deliverability rate, open rate, click rate and logins are all early indicators of success. However, they are not indicators of successful document download, coverage interpretation or continued usage. These are different stages of the journey and require their own tagging and analysis. Furthermore, If the application that you are working with will be the sender of any of the emails within this journey, deliverability, known sender domains and best practice email authentication will all be key.

Lastly, incorporating timely education and incentives that prompt an action, will significantly increase your likelihood of tool adoption among this audience.

3. Create a Nurture Strategy

Built and deployed correctly and depending on your audience criteria you can achieve a 65-75%+ early adoption success rate within your first 60 days. In order to achieve this, your approach will need to include nurture strategies and thinking beyond a one and done logic. This will include real-time reminders, education and on-going strategies for continued usage. Try including your messaging and call to actions (CTA’s) into your Renewal Communication strategy for example, where the likelihood of success is higher due to the relevance. The same logic applies for your new Customer Welcome Series. Take it a step further and incorporate CTA’s in other standing communications like newsletters, bulletins, cross-sells, websites, and even landing pages that house education and resources to help with the learning curve or interpretation of documentation and coverage. After you have gathered enough data, leverage those insights to help you optimize and add additional steps and flows as you see fit.

“However you build your journey, lead from a core objective that your brokers or your insureds can navigate in this new realm and don’t cut corners. This is truly about removing friction in a new process, not about checking a box.” – Robyn Croll, VP, Customer Insights

4. Solicit Confirmation and Feedback

Instead of manually following up to confirm access, this confirmation stage can be part of your journey. Use automated programs and stage tagging to perform this confirmation process. Depending on whether you’re driving customers to your own application or a carrier’s, your automated program strategy will look a little different, but will produce the same outcome. Pause and take note of which folks still have not taken action and what you need to do to address and nurture that audience further; perhaps off-board them if they prefer to receive their documents another way – and capture this preference. You can solicit feedback at any stage of the journey, including the confirmation stage, which will give you insight as to where, when and how to focus education. Are there aspects of the tool itself that can be revised and if so, how can you apply these learnings to your onboarding and renewal streams to reinforce the message?

5. Alert Departments

Consider alerting departments at different stages of the journey. This will keep them in the loop as to who has completed which action, who hasn’t and who needs off-line help. This will help enable a true Omni-Channel approach for your end goals. Leading marketing automation platforms will enable you to roll-up this data weekly for example so you’re not flooding someone’s inbox with daily confirmations.

Digital initiatives like this one demand the need for platform technology and quickly. In this use case it’s not only the need for digital document technology but the need for a leading email communication platform to push forward the conversation, educate and drive adoption of this initiative – on a one-to-one basis.

If you need assistance with building any facets of this use case, we are here to help. Contact us today to learn more about how we can help your organization.