Daily sales & marketing tips for insurance professionals

Insurance companies and lead generators like InsureMe have spent countless hours—years, actually—and truckloads of cash trying to secure a good position in the Google search results for terms like ‘car insurance’ and ‘insurance quotes.’

So, I’m here to burst your bubble: unless you’re willing to spend years and millions of dollars on the esoteric science/art/magic of SEO and paid search marketing, your web site isn’t going to show up on the first page of Google for terms like ‘insurance quotes.’ There’s just too much competition. The small agency doesn’t really have a chance.

But you should at least show up for your own name, and that’s where your Google Profile comes in. Your Google Profile takes minutes to set up, and it will help people find you in the search results. You can set up a public page for yourself or your agency and even add a link to your agency’s web site. I also recommend adding your agency’s physical address and contact information to Google Maps. This is especially important, as Google is increasingly incorporating local results even for  generic search terms. For example, you should be able to see your agency in the map results when you Google ‘insurance agency.’

The point is, don’t give up on Google merely because you’ll never rub elbows with Geico and Progressive atop the search listings. At a minimum, you want to make it easy for people to find you. After all, if someone takes the time and trouble to Google you, that person would certainly fall into the ‘hot prospect’ category, right?

You know the saying ‘it never hurts to ask’? Seth Godin recently blogged about this phrase and he added some caveats, namely that it does hurt to ask sometimes—that is, when you don’t have permission to.

Godin, a prolific writer and web entrepreneur, popularized the concept of ‘permission marketing,’ a revolutionary yet simple idea that holds that you need to get people’s permission before you can successfully market your services to them. Note the ‘successfully’ in the previous sentence. You can shill for your product or service to anyone on the street, anyone with an email account, telephone, television or front door, but you won’t be successful unless you establish a relationship first.

Godin’s conception of permission marketing isn’t some warm and fuzzy notion that requires you to sacrifice old-school effectiveness for new-school niceties. In fact, permission marketing is all about being more effective. It’s about being more precise and less indiscriminate. “Selling to people who actually want to hear from you is more effective than interrupting strangers who don’t,” says Godin. To give you an example, permission marketing is about trading the 2 percent response rate of direct mail for a 90 percent response rate among a highly targeted group that is willing to hear from you.

Permission can be built on something as simple as an introduction. It can be based on a gift. The point is, if you ask before you’ve earned it, you’ll hear a dial tone, or the digital equivalent—which is the sound of someone clicking the spam button.

Godin: “If you run into Elton John at the diner and say, ‘Hey Elton, will you sing at my daughter’s wedding?’ it hurts any chance you have to get on Elton John’s radar. You’ve just trained him to say no, you’ve taught him you’re both selfish and unrealistic.”

And what about insurance leads? Do you have permission to ask for the sale the minute the lead arrives in your email inbox? The good agents realize that while they’re dealing a targeted prospect, they do not quite have permission yet. A warm and professional introduction coupled with a demonstrated willingness to answer questions is usually all it takes to establish a permission-based relationship with a lead.

Still, deciding when to ask—knowing when you’ve secured permission—is a tricky thing that relies on intuition more than anything else.

Insurance scoring—insurers loooove it, and they think everyone else should heart it too. They insist that prices stay low because insurance scores (which include but are not limited to a person’s credit score) have an impressive knack for predicting risk.

But the public and state regulators need regular convincing, with fairness their primary concern. The NAIC recently convened a public hearing on insurance scoring, and industry representatives were forced, once again, to defend the practice, largely against a 2004 study conducted by the Missouri DOI.

The Missouri study revealed that the strongest predictors in a consumer’s insurance score were race and income, a fact which—rather understandably—created some hostility among the public and nervousness among policymakers.

The Insurance Information Institute (III) criticized the report when it came out in 2004, pointing out methodological errors that they said were the result of a pre-existing bias against the practice. Further, the III said, the Missouri department of insurance failed to acknowledge the benefits bestowed by insurance scoring: “The study’s opinions imply that the MDOI is prepared to eliminate the credit-related discounts currently offered by insurers to thousands of minority families living in Missouri as well as to homeowners and drivers throughout the state.”

Most states allow credit-based insurance scores, which is a fact commonly touted by insurance industry groups. (They’re less excited about mentioning that 48 states have laws putting certain restrictions on the practice.)

The faltering economy and tightening credit markets have sparked new criticism of insurance scoring. Critics predicted that the poor (whose ranks are swelling and whose credit scores have suffered) would be dealt another blow with worsening insurance scores and thus higher premiums.

“If insurance prices started to rise for no good reason, at a time when the public was least able to pay more, it would be a political, regulatory, and public relations disaster,” said Brian’s Sullivan’s May 18 Auto Insurance Report (print only, subscription required). “Insurers would be headed for a fierce beating, and worse, it would be well-deserved.”

Sullivan reports that while insurance scores are indeed dropping, they have not dropped as steeply nor been as volatile as credit scores, and that is good news for the insurance industry, because it means that insurance scores are calibrated well enough that they don’t simply mimic credit scores. (Many people falsely equate the two.)

Ultimately, though, the insurance scoring debate will probably stick around for a long time to come, with neither side landing a fatal blow against the other. Part of the reason is that the two sides approach the issue from radically different places. The insurance industry’s arguments, which center around efficacy, accuracy and low prices, don’t hold sway with opponents, who think that there is some larger issue of fairness at stake.