As a marketer in the insurance industry, you know there isn’t any one marketing tactic that will guarantee success. It takes strategy, and the right mix of tactics, to see lasting results. And it can be difficult to know which key performance indicators (KPIs) to reference for a 360-degree view of your progress.

So, how do you pull actionable insights from analytics in insurance? It starts by taking a step back and laddering down from your overall goals.

Begin by Setting Goals that Align with the Customer Journey

Understanding the different stages of the sales funnel, and setting goals at each stage of a potential policyholder’s journey through the funnel, can give you the big-picture view you need.

In the insurance industry, it’s rare to see impulse buys. Your policyholders do their research and carefully select the insurance policies that are right for their family and lifestyle.

This longer sales cycle means marketing efforts need to include campaigns that appeal to clients at different points along the funnel—from brand awareness to consideration and conversion. And data analytics should provide valuable insights about the customer experience at each stage.

Match Data Analytics With Customer Behavior

Let’s say you’re developing marketing campaigns with the following goals:

• Boost brand awareness
• Acquire new policyholders
• Increase customer satisfaction and loyalty

The marketing tactics you use and the KPIs that track your success will differ at each stage. The metrics you use to gauge brand awareness in top-of-funnel marketing, for instance, are not the same metrics you use to evaluate customer behavior lower down in the funnel.

Identify Audience Differences at Each Stage

While the easy answer is to say the audience is always prospective customers, we know the identity of prospective customers changes throughout the buying process as marketing and sales tactics best qualify customers for the products they are inquiring about.

With that, marketers need to use historical data and their deep knowledge of the insurance industry to best align what an ideal customer profile looks like at each stage of the buying funnel.Note that this will be different for each insurance product and provider as those products have been tailored to specific customer types.

Once audiences are identified, marketers will need to match audience profiles with customer behavioral data to determine which data analytics KPIs should be measured at each stage of the buying funnel.

Top-of-Funnel Insurance Data Analytics to Watch

Marketers in the insurance sector use top-of-funnel data to determine how familiar their brand is to a target audience and to measure their demand-generation efforts. At this stage, tracking content downloads and counting clicks isn’t always the best predictor of success; it’s more important to cast a wide net and move the brand awareness needle.

A few usual top-of-funnel metrics to measure include:

• Impressions – represents the total number of times an ad or post is served to suers on a particular platform, like Facebook or Instagram.
• Reach – represents the number of unique people your ad has been served to.

However, we believe the following metrics tell a more compelling top-of-funnel story:

• Direct or organic website traffic – Web traffic helps you measure the number of people visiting a site, how long they stay on the page, and whether they’re new or returning users, but also gives marketers directional data on how easily their brand is found online.This also opens opportunities to take advantage of remarketing tactics to help push prospects through the buying process.
• Webinar, blog and social media metrics – These metrics let you know how your potential policyholders are interacting with your brand on different channels and how successful your content marketing efforts are.
• Brand lift – An increase in branded search term volume, and a positive shift in digital surveys, can indicate broader awareness of your brand among the customers you want to convert.
• Share of market penetration – This statistic measures the total number of possible accounts in a market and compares it to the number of those accounts your firm is working with. Tactics to move the needle here can include growing sales teams and investing in marketing strategies that focus on contract renewal time.

The metrics above can help you determine how well you’re attracting your target audience, but they won’t necessarily imply intent to purchase. Top-of-funnel tactics are focused on brand building and establishing credibility in the insurance market.Unfortunately, many insurance companies lose sight of this and lose their competitive advantage later in the buying cycle.

Remember, early marketing efforts have downstream impact on other, more direct response tactics.

Middle-of-Funnel Insurance Data Analytics to Watch

Clicks, downloads and other middle-of-funnel metrics can help you gauge how well you’re presenting your product as the right solution for your audience’s needs. The middle-of-funnel metrics below can tell insurance agencies whether leads are moving from the awareness stage to consideration stage. The goal of the consideration stage is to qualify and quantify potential customers

• Marketing qualified leads – At this stage, inbound calls and form completions are indicators that your awareness efforts are bearing fruit. Marketing teams need to work to qualify inbound opportunities as those with potential and those without in order to properly optimize efforts and audiences.
• Sales team response time – Measuring the average time it takes for an inbound opportunity to be qualified as one with potential and for a sales team to connect with the potential customer can generate insights for insurance carriers about the efficiency of their processes
• Return visitors – Unlike new visitor data, returning visitors can indicate that users are moving from the awareness stage to the consideration stage. This also opens the opportunity for retargeting tactics, which are often more focused on lead generation than brand building.
• Engagement metrics – Getting a user to interact with a marketing tactic is key to showing success. Engagement metrics can include link clicks, downloads, contact collects or landing page visits.

The best middle-of-funnel metrics are combinations of these metrics. Being able to measure the engagement of a remarketing campaign or a qualified lead from a returning site visitor typically lends itself to a customer who is more informed and closer to a purchasing decision.

Bottom-of-Funnel Insurance Data Analytics to Watch

Once potential policyholders are in the decision stage, you can begin to measure your progress with bottom-of-funnel metrics, like conversion rates per channel and total new customers acquired. However, there are more refined metrics that better identify the success of marketing efforts. Those metrics include:

• Cost per customer acquisition – This metric measures how much you’re spending to acquire customers. Every business should create an accurate cost per customer acquisition but many insurance companies don’t have the advanced data analytics capabilities to make it happen.
• Sales pipeline velocity – Measuring pipeline velocity shows the time it takes for a qualified lead to become a client. Today’s insurers typically start measuring this metric when a sales agent makes contact, but the goal would be the very first marketing touchpoint.
• Onboarding time – How long it takes to provide customers with coverage is a key indicator of business processes. Reducing the time it takes from when a client signs to when they get coverage significantly improves the customer experience.
• Consumer personas clusters – Use customer data in order to build persona clusters based on high-level demographics, media preference and how they prefer to receive marketing communications.Drilling down on this further allows departmental marketing teams to better understand questions like which persona clusters are more likely to respond to specific marketing tactics, or not at all.

Often, businesses become too hyper-focused on their bottom-of-funnel metrics and lose sight of the upstream efforts that affect these metrics. Remember to follow all metrics to the source when looking to make specific improvements.For example, in order to improve sales pipeline velocity, business intelligence teams would need to look for opportunities to better nurture and qualify prospects prior to ever making contact with a sales team member.

So, you’ve reached the bottom of the funnel. What’s next?

Evaluating Your Position in the Insurance Industry

Once your insurance business funnel is optimized, the job is not done. There are still opportunities to re-enter clients into the sales cycle with upselling and cross-selling potential.You could also focus on optimizing your position in the marketplace. Here are some advanced metrics that give a deeper understanding of your positioning:

• Coverage in force – This stat is the sum total of all your clients’ coverage for an insurance offering in a specific market. Measuring your coverage in force against other players in a region shows market opportunities and provides data insights on which service offerings to push moving forward.
• Total claims – This is the number of claims an insurance provider services every year for its customers. The total number of claims processed gives meaningful insights in to insurance pricing and claims management.
• Claim payout rate – Measuring the rate of how quickly a client can file a claim and get that claim serviced can be a useful measurement of customer satisfaction.

While you may have a good sense on your position in the insurance sector and who your customers are, you still may need more help positively affecting your marketing KPIs.

That’s where a partner like FM Engage comes in. We’re marketers and we know the insurance industry. We mobilize 50 years of proprietary consumer data to help financial and insurance firms make data-driven decisions about their business. We also utilize direct marketing tactics, like direct mail and email, to grow providers with more customers.

Are you ready to drive real results with strategies backed by real-time data?

• Website traffic – can help you measure the number of people visiting a site, how long they stay on the page, and whether they’re a new user or a returning user.
• Webinar, blog and social media metrics – let you know how your potential policyholders are interacting with your brand on different channels and how successful your content marketing efforts are.
• Brand lift – an increase in branded search terms, and a positive shift in digital surveys, can indicate broader awareness of your brand among the customers you want to convert.

These metrics can help you determine how well you’re attracting your target audience, but they won’t necessarily imply intent to purchase.Keep in mind, early marketing efforts have downstream impact on other, more direct response data.

Bottom-of-Funnel Insurance Data Analytics to Watch

Once potential policyholders are in the decision stage, you can begin to measure your progress with bottom-of-funnel metrics, like conversion rates per channel and total new customers acquire;, however, there are more refined metrics that identify the success of marketing efforts better. Those metrics include:

• Cost per customer acquisition – This metric measures how much you’re spending to acquire customers. Every business wants an accurate measure of how much it costs to acquire a customer, but many insurance companies don’t have the advanced data analytics to make it happen.
• Sales pipeline velocity – It’s important to know how long it takes for a qualified lead to become a signed client. Today’s insurers typically measure speed from when a sales agent makes contact, but the goal would be from the very first marketing touchpoint.
• Onboarding time – How long it takes to provide customers with coverage is a key indicator of business processes. Reducing the time it takes from when a client signs to when they get coverage significantly improves the customer experience.
• Consumer personas clusters – Utilizing customer data to build persona clusters based on high-level demographics, media preference and how they prefer to receive marketing communications reveals insights. Drilling down on this further allows departmental marketing teams to better understand behaviors such as which persona clusters are more likely to respond to specific marketing tactics, or not at all.

Often, businesses become too hyper-focused on their bottom-of-funnel metrics and lose sight of the upstream efforts that affect these metrics. Remember to follow all metrics to the source when looking to make specific improvements. For example, in order to improve sales pipeline velocity, business intelligence teams would need to look for opportunities to better nurture and qualify prospects prior to ever making contact with a sales team member.

So, you’ve reached the bottom of the funnel. What’s next?

Evaluating Your Position in the Insurance Industry

Once your insurance business funnel is optimized, the job is not yet done. There are still opportunities to re-enter clients into the sales cycle with upselling and cross-selling potential. And you can further optimize your position in the marketplace. Here are some advanced metrics that give a deeper understanding of your positioning:

• Coverage in force – This stat is the sum total of all your clients’ coverage for an insurance offering in a specific market. Measuring your coverage in force against other players in a region shows market opportunities and provides data insights on which service offerings to push moving forward.
• Total claims – Knowing the total number of claims serviced in a year gives meaningful insights into insurance pricing and claims management.
• Claim payout rate – Measuring the speed of how quickly a client can get a claim serviced after filing it can be a useful measurement of customer satisfaction.

While you may have a good sense of your position in the insurance sector and who your customers are, you still may need more help positively affecting your marketing KPIs.

That’s where a partner like FM Engage can help you achieve next-level results.. We’re marketers and we know the insurance industry. We utilize 50 years of proprietary consumer data to help financial and insurance firms make data-driven decisions about their business. We also employ direct marketing tactics, like direct mail and email, to grow providers with more customers.

Are you ready to drive real results with strategies backed by real-time data?