When it comes to insurance lead generation, some companies excel in specific areas of the process. From generating large volume of leads to qualifying the leads that come into the pipeline to closing leads, it seems many businesses focus on only one part of this highly integrated cycle.
However, top performing companies are exceptional at all areas of the lead generation process. Let’s explore a few strategies that you can incorporate in your process to improve your team's lead generation prowess throughout the entire cycle.
1. Implement strict standards for lead follow-up times.
While there is some value in aged leads, it's always best to follow-up while your prospects still have top-of-mind awareness.
Most leads have a short shelf live, and if you are not getting back to a prospect immediately, you better believe that your competitors are.
2. Invest in a single CRM or lead management database.
It can be a nightmare trying to conduct drip marketing campaigns or conduct database analysis when your data is in multiple locations. One central marketing database will increase efficiency.
Salesforce is the most popular cloud-based CRM solution, but there are plenty of alternatives out there. Pick the CRM solution that best suits your lead management needs and fits into your budget.
3. Maintain consistent lead scoring criteria.
Once you’ve defined what an A tier or B tier lead is, keep the metrics for determining these tiers consistent across all your lead sources. A consistent lead scoring criteria will help ensure all your leads are qualified.
4. Do not neglect follow-up and lead nurturing.
Not every lead will close on the first upon first contact. You can improve your conversion rates substantially by implementing a standard lead nurturing strategy across your sales team.
Your company's strategy should be based on internal lead research: how long do prospects typically sit in the sales pipeline before converting?
Looking for an external, all-in-one lead generation and verification solution? Download our free whitepaper or contact us today to learn more about the DataWerx approach.
An effective customer retention strategy is vital for any company – it costs up to 5 times more to acquire a new customer than it does to keep an existing one. It would make sense that retaining existing customers be a top priority for your business. Keeping customers loyal and motivated to resist competition requires commitment in multiple aspects of your company, but there are two main parts to customer retention that need to be paid close attention to.
- Customer satisfaction
- Proactive customer relationship management
Customer Satisfaction
A customer’s satisfaction is highly reliant on the performance of your products and on how good your customer service is. How well do you understand the customer’s expectations? Are you delivering products or services that meet these expectations? These are vital questions that should be asked within your company on a regular basis. Failure to satisfy your customers will eventually lead to loss of business.
Customer Relationship Management
Good customer relationship management should involve some level of analytics. Leveraging technology to understand who your existing customers are can go a long way towards providing that extra bit of attention that builds loyalty over time. You can also utilize database marketing technologyto learn when your existing customers are seeking products or services from your competitors. This type of insight will help you stay abreast of your customer needs so and build loyalty.
At some level every organization understands how important it is to keep their existing customers happy – but not all of these companies know how to execute. Strong customer retention depends on a multi-faceted approach to satisfying the customer – everything from your products, customer’s interaction with your sales and account reps, and the introduction or cross-selling of new products must be presented with precision and care. Rarely can this be done without investing some time and resources in understanding your customers’ needs and seeing the complete picture of who they are.
Would you like to kick-start your customer retention strategy? Contact our database marketing team today!
More than likely, before your call center reps or agents begin following up with the direct marketing leads you provided them, you’ve gone through the process of securing the best leads or conducted proper due diligence on the marketing lists they are calling from. It’s now up to them to close the deal. But are they dedicating a proper amount of time practicing and refining a sales script to make it their own? If not, your conversion rates could be suffering.
Your agents typically have a few seconds to capture the prospect's attention, and the words they use are crucial in accomplishing this. The way they phrase questions or explain product benefits can be the difference between making the sale or hearing a dial tone.
It’s important that each agent or sales rep internalize the sales script. Allow your reps to make the sales script their own based on specific guidelines that you need them to follow. It’s more important they understand what you want to communicate to the prospect, as opposed to following a strict set of sentences in the exact way you wrote it.
Here are three things your sales script should communicate:
First, it's important your sales reps identify the prospect's pain point(s). For example, what is their reason for the prospect seeking a life insurance quote? The sales reps should not start by talking about the features of your products. Instead they should focus on identifying the reasons behind the prospect's needs and build rapport.
Once you’ve determined that there is an issue or pain point that your product(s) can address, the next step is to ensure that you are speaking with the person that can make the final decision. Will they need to consult anyone else before making a decision about the product or services you’re speaking with them about?
And finally your representative will want to determine whether or not the prospect can afford your product and if they are ready to buy now. Most prospects should be able to address standard questions relative their budget and timeframe for purchase. It’s important to focus on the person, how much do they know about the cost of your type of product or service? Have they sought this product before?
Communicating the points above in the phone conversation is more important than just having reps follow a sales script verbatim. You’ve hired intelligent people. Don’t waste time making them memorize a script. Focus instead on educating them on the key points you want them to communicate to your prospects.
Now that you've got a game plan, download our free eBook to learn how to generate quality leads for your sales team to contact.
Whether you’re already onboard with database marketing as the driving force behind your direct marketing efforts, or you’ve decided you need to be, there’s always something that can improve your bottomline results. To help get the most from your valuable data let’s take a look at the three key strategies that should be a part of every marketer’s strategy; newbies and veterans alike.
Continually Grow Your Database
With the internet, direct mail and other marketing tools available like data appending there are almost limitless opportunities to capture new data about your existing contacts. Do it! Your database should be constantly expanding, and not just in the number of records but in the depth and breadth of the information included in each record. When it comes to data, err on the side of even too much is not enough.
Manage and Monitor
Data, like effective marketing, is in constant flux. People move, change jobs, get married or a host of other life changes. Put a process in place to consistently update your data regularly. Having a clear picture of your existing customers should drive your efforts to bring in new ones. Using inaccurate or outdated information to drive your marketing campaigns is a recipe for disaster.
Experiment
If you’re managing your data you should have a pretty clear picture of what’s working, and what’s not. Rarely if ever is marketing absolutely perfect. Continually try different ways and means of contacting your customers and prospects based on earlier results. Tweaking the messages, timing of your contacts and data analysis should be an on-going step in your database marketing process.
The upsides of using data to drive your marketing campaigns are simply too substantial to ignore. Taking a strategic approach to data management will ensure the results justify your efforts.
Change isn’t necessarily easy. And for some, it can be downright hard. But a shift in mindset is in order. It’s simply not cost effective to approach marketing in the traditional manner anymore. Average response rates of 1% to 2% shouldn’t be acceptable, nor do they have to be.
Getting Started
You probably have multiple sources of information – Customers, prospects, other departments, third party data providers – you name it. First, integrate this disparate data into a cohesive, usable format. Information should be the basis of your marketing efforts, but it’s got to be easily accessible to be effective.
Now, segment the data into groups with similar characteristics and behaviors. Some detailed analysis will provide commonalities amongst your best (and worst) customers. Commonalities you can then use in your marketing efforts.
What’s In It for Me?
Using data to drive marketing will lead to response rates 3, 4 and even 5 times that of traditional campaigns because you’ll know who to target and what they really want. That translates to better ROI, a more efficient process and easier measurement of results.
Each successive targeted campaign will provide you with even more information for future efforts. What worked? What didn’t? What can be improved and what did you learn? Before long your data will be useful to the whole company, not just marketing.
Improve your retention rates, particularly for your most important customers. Your best customers share certain traits – maybe buying preferences, demographic or social behaviors. Knowing this will allow you to better serve this important group, and find others just like them.
Making the shift to a data-driven culture will take some work – most good things do. But the results will make you wonder why you didn’t do it years ago. Good question.
Today marketing professionals have more data, which equates to more opportunity, than ever before. Understanding how to sort through and use this information, streamline marketing efforts and drive better results is what identifying your ideal customer is all about.
Where to start? Analyze the characteristics of your best and most profitable customers. With some investigation you’ll find your key customers share a number of traits. Now we need to determine what those traits are and how best to utilize that information.
Identifying the Ideal Customer
Here are a few ideas to get you started.
Assess your business objectives: In order to identify your ideal customer, you must first take inventory of your key business objectives. For example, is your goal to increase online purchases, thereby reducing overhead? Or is it to increase the profitability of each new customer? Whatever they may be, clearly assessing your business objectives allows you to more accurately segment your customers by their real value to your company.
Segmentation: Now that you’ve assessed your business objectives, use the information in your database to carve out, or segment, customers that meet your criteria. Segmentation allows you to focus your marketing efforts on customer profiles you’ve defined as “ideal.” Invariably, you will find behavioral and buying patterns, demographic similarities and other commonalities among customers.
Append your data: A segmented customer database in itself is extremely valuable, but it can still be improved upon. What are your ideal customers’ online purchasing habits? What about their socio-economic or life style characteristics? How do they prefer to be marketed to? Appending data can provide all of that information, and more.
Starting your marketing efforts with a comprehensive analysis of your ideal customers is the first step to improved response rates and ROI.