Is Your Insurance Agency Website a Super Hero?

First, Define Super

How do you determine website 'effectiveness'? It is tempting to only count quote requests and policies written through your website. Sometimes we just want a quick look at traffic counts. But doing that oversimplifies and understates the value of your agency website. You will have a number of key objectives for your agency, and those objectives will frame the way your website can add value, and suggest what you should measure. For instance, if one of your goals was to receive more policy change requests via the web, then you would measure total policy changes submitted through your website. If you want to track your website's role in bringing you new customer relationships, then you will need to measure a combination of things: website quote requests, and website contact request, phone call inquiries which originated from your website.

The general idea is to assign a value for certain actions, and then to measure the number of times each of those actions occur. A combination of the listings in your Insurance Zone and statistics provided by site analytics will let you measure just about anything. Following is a short list of actions you might think about measuring. One type of action may be more valuable to you than another, and you may want to 'score' your websites performance over a week or a month. Assign values of 1, 2, or 3 to different actions, multiply by the number of occurrences, and total for the week or month as a way to gauge your websites effectiveness from one month to the next.

• Online quote requests Contact requests via your web forms
  
  
• Email address acquired
  
  
• Policy change requests - total
  
  
• Annual Reviews or other Wizards completed
  
  
• Newsletter links 'opened'
  
  
• Calls originating from your web (see article on call tracking from the web)

Use Your Insurance Agency Website Resources for Customer Development

Customer development - more policies per account, improved retention, and referrals - requires 'touching' your customers and adding value to your relationship. Your website articles and videos, and the bulk email tool give you the opportunity to do that at virtually no cost. The change of the seasons offer opportunities to use information relevant to your customers' activities and concerns of the moment. Below is a list of web resources you could employ this month and next in a customer communication campaign, and of course you can add your own articles on the fly using the Risk Alert editor.

Articles - Personal Risk and Safety

Kids Off To College? New Risks

Teenage Drivers - Getting Control, Getting a Contract

Computer Password Security

Wireless (WiFi) Security in the Home

Protecting Yourself from Identity Theft

Videos - Personal Risk and Safety

Back to School

College Students Credit

School Bus Safety

Small Business - Risk Management and Business Planning

Business Emergency Planning

What Should I Know about Risk Management

If you want a quick refresher on using the Email Tool, or any of your website resources, sign up for one of the weekly training sessions on the Webinar section of www.cfluent.com.

Tracking Web to Phone Activity

Last month we talked about a pervasive dynamic that goes like this: Consumer sees information about your agency in print; Consumer goes to the web to validate and learn more about your agency; Consumer picks up the phone and calls you. For certain print ads or mailings, it may be worthwhile to register a separate domain name (e.g., www.agency.com for your everyday use address and www.agencyonline.com for print advertising). The two domain names would point to different 'home' pages that differ only in one way: the agency phone number.

Print ad effectiveness could be measured in two ways: the number of hits to www.agencyonline.com, and the number of calls to the special phone number for that url. Registering a separate, distinct domain name for this purpose is quick and easy; and getting a phone number set up can be similarly easy and inexpensive. Here are a few alternaitives

Google Grand Central - calls can be automatically rolled to any number (like your normal agency phone line). The service is free, but is not widely available. grandcentral.com

Vonage - Small Biz Basic from Vonage at $40/month (1500 minutes, $0.039 per min after), - You can also get area codes and exchanges for ads you might be running in different market areas. vonage.com

Skype - This service has been around as a computer-to-computer (Skype user) type of VOIP for a long time. More recently Skype added the ability to call land lines and cell phones, and to register a traditional phone number to your Sype account so you can receive calls from land lines and cells. The cost of a traditional phone number is $60 a year; calls can be automatically be forwarded to your regular phone line at the rate of $0.021 per minute. skype.com

*Prices are based on each companies advertised rates. Prices may change; please visit the VOIP companies website for up-to-date pricing.

You might be tempted to just use a separate phone number on your regular home page, but be careful. Customers will be used to seeing your phone number in other places, and your agency may have had the same phone number for years. Broadly displaing a different phone number on your website will confuse some customers, especially since a large number of your customers will look up your website just to get or verify your phone number before calling.