Buying Insurance — a Personal Review with Stats to Back it Up
October 31st, 2008 by Lori Reed
I just went through a very rewarding experience of shopping for insurance. Of course, I went through InsureMe, and I received great responses from several agents, some emailed and some called. I discovered I’m the person who wants to talk… to an agent. Probably no surprise to those who know me.
So I thought it would be a good time to review how people shop for insurance. Or at lease review the statistics available. But before I dive into the stats, let me contrast the stats with my very individual experience.
I am the type of person who avoids insurance, at least shopping for it, and for me, it felt just great to have someone pursuing me to rethink my insurance coverage. I welcomed the phone call, because it meant someone was going to help me save money. A friendly approach was helpful too. Casual and no pressure. It has taken many call backs but I’m actually getting close to purchasing new insurance coverage.
Now for the stats: 15% of the time spent on the internet is for financial information and 12% is on shopping. In 2007, 32 Million people requested auto quotes via the internet. And the stats also show that people don’t go directly to a website, they use the search engines. In a Yahoo survey, 75% of the respondents turned to search engines because they didn’t remember or try to remember a web address. And 59% of those discovered new brands for what they were shopping for. Which means, succinctly, Google is giving your competition great visibility. By the way, if you search on auto insurance, you will get about 33 million ‘hits’ on Google. That’s a lot of competition.
But the stats still show that we might research insurance online but we typically buy directly from wonderful, supportive, sympathetic and patient agents like yourself. According to comScore — 2008, over 80% of the people buying auto insurance finished the transaction directly with a live agent. And the major reason was because, like me, “I like having a real person who I can visit with or call.” Just like the ones helping me with my own purchase. But they’ll l start on-line. 50% of those people buying insurance from an agent used the web for initial research. In auto insurance it is up to a whopping 86%.
