Keeping Ahead of the Curve
In today’s brisk economic climate, every industry is struggling to adapt. Nowhere is this truer than in insurance. Selling insurance can be very difficult if the right tools aren’t employed, but those companies that have shown the willingness and initiative to embrace new technologies have seen their businesses thrive even in difficult times. More and more people are shopping for insurance online, and those companies that take advantage of this fact are seeing big returns.
A Pew study found that 53% of all Americans not only use the internet, they use it on a daily basis. What’s more, 92% of those American making more than $50,000 a year use the internet. There are few areas where this has become as visible as it has in the insurance industry. Most people are shopping for their insurance online these days. A whopping 80% of individuals who bought auto insurance last year began their research online and almost 30% of the 25-50 age group wound up purchasing their policies online. These trends aren’t limited to auto insurance, though. Across the board, customers are turning to the internet as a valuable tool in their shopping for the right policy and those companies willing to make the shift to pursuing internet leads are cashing in.
While traditional business models have insurance companies trawling through fewer and fewer opportunities with less and less sophisticated methods, internet leads allow agents to ignore limitations like geography and time and increase the number of contacts they make and policies they write. Rather than spending time seeking out interested buyers, agents using internet leads can focus on those individuals who have already expressed an interest in buying their products and spend more time closing sales. What’s more, the right software can allow a company to organize and efficiently track their leads in order to maximize sales. Advanced data and sophisticated methods of organizing and distributing leads in real time allows a sales staff to contact quality leads quickly, efficiently, and get the desired results more often.
The internet has changed the pace of business in insurance sales. Internet leads are more effective than traditional methods, particularly when contacted within the first five minutes. Those companies that have been willing to utilize these leads and employ efficient methods of managing and tracking those leads have had the most success in recent years.
