In the first four parts of our blog series, we looked at how marketing automation helps brokers build omni-channel awareness and improves the audience consideration phase when strategically leveraging email, personalization and automated programs.

Our fifth blog looks at driving action. We examine how sales and service productivity can be optimized through lead management and behaviour scoring and the reporting benefits of having all inbound and outbound engagement driven through a single marketing platform.

Driving Action

Understanding how and where the audience engages is important for brokers. While this is equally true for both leads and customers, lead management requires a slightly different approach. Leads are still learning about your products and services so while you may have been successful at driving awareness and getting them to consider you, they often still require nurturing and education before converting.

Stages in the Lead Funnel

If your lead generation strategies have been successful you will see that bump in  traffic on your landing pages and/or website. Your sales team may have already quoted and bound some of leads, but regardless of whether you are focused on lower price point products such as tenant insurance or longer consideration ones such as comprehensive commercial policies, not all leads will convert to policyholders in a first (or even second) touchpoint.

You have invested in driving these leads, and you want to fully realize their potential. In order to do that you need visibility into their behaviour – including what drove them to you, what products they are interested in and the level of their interest. Measuring, monitoring and acting on each of these touchpoints is very important but can be challenging for a sales team without the right platform. And, without the ability to track each one of these, reporting on the success and return on your investment is next to impossible.

Lead Visibility

Everytime a lead engages with you- website, social, chat, text, email- they leave a digital trail. These breadcrumbs enable you to learn more about them, including the products or services that are of interest, the challenges they are trying to resolve and the channels where you are most likely to ‘find’ them. Think of the value that this enhanced knowledge, connected to a single contact, presents for your sales and service team. It  provides them with the ability to engage in a personalized way, and focus the conversation around how you can resolve the problem (ie provide the right coverage). This type of engagement gives a distinct advantage over the competition.

Lead Management

The benefit for your team is clear. So let’s break down how the lead management actually works. In part 4, we discussed how automated lead nurture and quote reminder programs can handle right timed follow ups with personalized and product specific messaging. Each time a lead engages with any of this content is an indication of their continued interest. But not all engagement is of equal value. For example, opening a reminder email is good, but clicking on an included link and visiting a product page is better. And, signing up for webinar you or a partner market is hosting is even better. Behaviour Scoring is an automation tool that tracks these different interactions and assigns a summed up score to each one of your leads. Your sales team can then be alerted about warm and hot leads with specific information  on where and how they engaged so they can follow up in a timely manner, armed with all the details they need for a valuable conversation.

Customer Service Management

Behaviour tracking isn’t reserved for just leads. Customers within the claims process – starting from finding out if they have the right coverage, to understanding the process through to making and tracking the claim – will also leave breadcrumbs. Viewed from the lens of a customer, think of the value of receiving an email from a CSR triggered by a visit to your claims page or hosted content relevant to the claims process.

Measuring the Impact of Sales and Service Productivity

Leads and customers aren’t the only ones leaving digital breadcrumbs. Every automated follow up email, every logged call from sales and follow up email from a CSR is also trackable. Having all these touchpoints automatically tracked enables reporting ranging from campaign and channel specific lead engagement, through to product specific lead timelines. And, combining these with sales data will power reporting on return on ad spend and ROI.

The real benefit of marketing automation for brokers is not in the multitude of tools and tactics, but in the overall efficiencies and growth that a best of breed platform can deliver for your brokerage.

We hope you are enjoying our blog series.

Join us for a live webinar on June 20 at 2pm where Nancy Costa, VP Marketing & Operations at The Hull Group will discuss how marketing automation has changed how The Hull Group approaches their lead management and customer marketing, and the value that the closed loop reporting provides.

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