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Producer Self-Management
Agency Web site design
Keeping up with a constantly evolving communications tool
By John Edward Love, CPCU
"Do you have a card?" has been replaced by "What's your Web site?" The need for a good Web site grows in importance every day. People want instant gratification, which translates to the ability to pull up your Web site and understand instantly what you do. Visitors to your site want to know why your agency is different, and what you can do for them.
Succinctly explaining your value to buyers on the Web is challenging because most insurance agencies offer a number of different types of products, intended for different buyers. Fundamentally, a Web site should be designed for your desired visitor (prospect or client). That's a pretty tough feat to accomplish if you sell personal lines, commercial lines, and employee benefits. In addition, many agencies offer financial services such as retirement plans and life insurance.
Assume you sell three to five products, to two or three categories of buyers (as measured by the premium they pay). Now factor in that you have specializations in certain industries. Thus, in terms of designing an effective Web site, insurance agencies create quite a few challenges for both the designer and agency management to consider.
A self-induced problem is that insurance agencies historically spend less than 3% of their revenue on advertising. Add perhaps another 2% for other marketing expenses and you are left with a relatively small budget for the design of your Web site. In fact, as a percentage of overall revenue, I suspect insurance agencies of $5 million to $10 million in revenue, for example, would rank very low in the expense allotted to develop their Web sites, compared to other industries with companies of that size.
We are just beginning to see agencies that regard their Web site as their most important source of business. Digital marketing companies are beginning to take agency principals by the hand to show them how to ensure that their Web site is a top producer.
Web site design challenges
So what are some of the Web site design challenges for the average independent insurance agency?
• What is the profile of the "average" buyer at your agency? What is the range of demographics to which you market (gender, age, income)?
• Do your visitors come to the Web site to: a) learn about the agency; b) obtain self-service as a current client or; c) purchase insurance online?
• Which products or services is the visitor interested in?
• How does the agency protect its intellectual property from competitors, while giving value to visitors?
• What are the agency's carrier-partners able and willing to do to support the agency's Web site design functionality (e.g., instant quoting)?
• What are the legal and compliance issues associated with the proposed Web site's design and functionality?
• How disruptive will an interactive Web site be to the agency's existing culture and infrastructure? (Particularly, will staff respond quickly to Web-generated inquiries?)
• Who will maintain and keep the site updated (vendor or staff)?
• As a design consideration for the Web site, how important is search engine optimization?
This last question also creates confusion with "average" Web designers, most of whom expect insurance agencies to be able to transact a lot of business over their sites. They frequently fail to grasp the difficulties that agencies face, considering their carriers' capabilities, or even the desirability of the type of buyer who purchases over the Web. There can be a difference between the type of buyer who uses search engines and the type of buyer who's been driven to the Web site via e-mail, or even an old-fashioned direct mail campaign.
So how do you design a Web site that might be viewed by a 70-year-old grandparent who needs to change a car on his personal auto policy or the CFO of a $100 million revenue manufacturing company who is checking out the agency before accepting an appointment request from a producer? How does this site get optimized for a 25-year-old buying her first homeowners policy via a Web search, or a veteran HR manager who needs open enrollment tools?
There is no easy answer, and to some degree a "lesser of evils" approach may be necessary. But remember that doesn't mean it won't be a "great looking" Web site. It does mean, however, that the agency may have to make some decisions regarding how the site is designed in order to appeal to the most preferred or desired buyers.
Let's think through one typical scenario: An agency generates most of its new business from large commercial accounts; but those buyers rarely use the agency's Web site to make the purchase; and the agency is more likely to generate sales over the Web for personal lines prospects. You, as a senior executive at the agency, know your bread gets buttered with your producers' efforts to bring in large commercial and employee benefit accounts, but personal lines is very profitable and you can generate sales without producers if you have an effective online site.
The planning process
When taking on the daunting task of redesigning its Web site, this agency needs to institute a planning process. That process starts with a discussion among representatives from each department regarding a wide and deep variety of buyers who come to the site for various reasons. Acknowledging up front that this site must serve many constituents and cannot be perfect for everyone is probably a healthy perspective.
The representatives of each unit within the agency should then identify and write down the profile of their top two to three targets. This will help with future discussions with the Web designer. Another category would be the products themselves and what level of online capability is possible for that agency, based on its carrier-partners.
Communication breaks down quickly if the agency managers cannot implement a planning process that forces prioritization of the design elements for the site, or provide the designer with examples and details pertaining to desired capabilities. At this point it would not be a bad idea to invite carrier representatives to meet with the agency's team to discuss the proposed Web site and identify any help, resources, or money the carriers might provide.
What works
Now, let's look at what is proving to be successful in the world of online selling. Dedicated splash or landing pages to which buyers are driven (encouraged) by e-mail campaigns and search engine advertising are proving to be successful. A buyer searching for personal auto insurance might be perfectly satisfied with landing on a page dedicated exclusively to personal lines insurance. With this in mind, an agency may choose to design its site with a front end that is clearly, if sometimes inelegantly, designed to speak to the different categories of buyers.
Picture a home page design with clearly defined areas of the screen dedicated to each of the agency's product lines. Or, a variation could be a basic home page that presents the agency's core message, then buttons that lead to what are, in essence, home pages for each product line or industry. It has been disappointing to watch the explosion of Web sites that, primarily for search engine optimization (SEO) purposes, overwhelm their own home pages with text and links and flashing buttons.
Here's the most important perspective that should drive your design: The visitor to your site wants to be able to do in as little time as possible whatever he or she came to the site to do. So a clean site design, even if there are, for example, four frames that can be clicked (commercial P-C, personal lines, employee benefits, financial services), is preferable to an overly complicated series of drop-down menus that probably were intended to create six different ways for a visitor to navigate, but which serve only to confuse said visitor.
Another version or angle would be three action buttons on the home page: 1) "I want to learn more about Smith Insurance," 2) "I need to buy or request info on an insurance product," 3) "I'm an existing client who needs help." These three possible actions could be complemented by additional navigation buttons and menus but, again, clean and elegant is better than cluttered and confused.
There is no one style of navigation that will work for every agency or, for that matter, most agencies. Prioritizing target prospects most likely to be visiting this site and enabling existing customer service is the bottom line.
There is, however, change in the works for another common problem. Look at 10 agency Web sites and note how "wordy" they are. The volume of words on a page doesn't guarantee higher SEO rankings. It is actually better to have a variety of components that are properly tagged—and it's probably a better experience for the average visitor as well.
Fundamentally, insurance agencies sell an intangible service based on trust. So making the employees of the agency in whom the trust is being placed seem real, approachable, and trustworthy is a logical and attractive goal. For example, because account managers are frequently in the office and are not able to visit clients face-to-face, a video biography at the Web site makes that account manager come alive to prospects and clients—without interfering with his or her office duties.
Agencies frequently take on the task of rewriting their Web site and spend countless hours on the text—as if they've never heard that a picture is worth 1,000 words. Photos of clients; the service team with a client; customer logos or buildings; all of these enhance the richness and connection of the site with a visitor. In addition to staff biographies, customer testimonials in the form of video will become much more common.
Interactive sites
The ability to interact with the site through purpose-driven applications is another function that will become much more common. If you look at agency Web sites from, say, 2003 to 2008, they were designed as very wordy electronic brochures. Agency managers often found that the site did not drive many identifiable sales.
A cold analysis would probably reveal that there wasn't much the visitor could do. In other words, there were few real-time quote systems, painless application experiences, or even effective self-service functionality. Unfortunately, while other industries were training customers to use the Web (travel, paying bills, purchasing movie tickets) insurance agencies were, on average, providing little interactivity.
It's time to evolve and to identify the actions that the targeted visitors are likely to want to take when they arrive. Do they need self-service? Do they want to get a quote? Do they want to learn more about the agency by reading some of its white papers or viewing client testimonials? Show the buyers/visitors something useful they didn't even think about. For example, a template for a disaster recovery checklist adds legitimate value and provides something visitors can take away when they leave.
Despite the 15-plus years of growth of the commercial Web, it is still really in its infancy, and even tomorrow's Web sites very quickly become obsolete. True vision and leadership by agency principals, with a methodical development and design process that allows each unit of the agency to define the targeted client they seek, and to identify the online assets they want to implement, is the proper start to a better site.
The author
John Edward Love, CPCU, is the executive director of TechAssure and a 20-year veteran producer and agency executive. Look for his forthcoming book, "The Greatest Broker (You Can Be)," and sales training series.
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