Tosten Marketing’s Blog
Remain Proactive In This Hard Insurance Market
Be proactive, not reactive.
Tips & Strategies To Help Your Agency Grow & Retain In A Hard Insurance Market.
For those of us who have been in the industry as long as I have (22 years), we know this difficult market will pass. So, hold on and let’s focus on what we can do to ensure positive growth.
Here are things you can work on to continue to grow, thrive or make it through this market.
Focusing on Retention
Newsletters: Newsletters are a great way to talk directly to your clients and let them know that you understand their frustrations with the insurance market. It allows you to inform them about what is happening in real time in your state insurance market.
Simply communicating to your customers that rates are up, underwriting is tightening, or an insurance carrier is pulling out of a state is a great way to be proactive.
It also offers you the opportunity to let them know to call you if they need to be moved to another company because of pricing or cancellation.
Annual Reviews: I do an annual review with my personal agent every year. It is a good opportunity to look for gaps in coverage and ensure that nothing is changing with my coverage.
For the agency, it retains my business. It shows me they care and that they’re being proactive about keeping me and my family protected. Use a tool like Calendy (free for most) to help you schedule these calls. A simple email with the offer to review my coverage and policies with a link to Calendly can be an effective and quick way to put the offer out there.
Cross-Sell: Hard markets make for a great opportunity to cross-sell business. If you’re speaking to your customers, make sure things didn’t change in their lives. Perhaps they got married or had a child. What a great opportunity to discuss the importance of a life insurance policy.
Other markets include earthquake insurance, flood insurance, utility line covearge and specialty vehicle policies.
Please feel free to reach out to us if you need help with any of these items.
Other Ideas and Strategies
Place Most Emphasis On Your Best Customers & Have A Plan & Process In Place For Renewals
Organizing your book of business by customer type can be a great way to retain your best customers. Labeling your customers A, B, C can help you stay in front of those customers who matter to your book of business the most. An “A Customer” may be multi-policy, high net worth customers while “C customers” might be monoline non-standard auto customers.
By organizing your policies with the most important to least important, you can ensure you’re giving your best customers the most attention, offering reviews, monitoring for policy changes as well as life changes. My agency sends me an actual paper newsletter each month, while their B & C clients get an e-newsletter. While all customers are important, it is the most important, highest premium customers who get the special treatment. There is nothing wrong with that.
Get Google Reviews
Getting reviews on Google is always important, but in hard times it is more important than ever to establish local dominance. New Google reviews will help you remain higher in search engines for local business. Aim to get 3-10 new Google reviews per month.
Enhance or Adjust Your Product Offerings
Pick up new carriers: If you’re finding that you’re not rate competitive and that your main carriers have tightened underwriting so much that you can’t write anything, it may be time to pick up a new carrier.
Many of our agency customers offer only a few carriers while others have access to over 20. While the right balance might be somewhere in the middle, offering new companies can help you retain the business until the market softens up again.
Find a Niche Market: Niche markets include anything that is a more obscure insurance category. This includes short term vacation rental insurance, Trucking Insurance and many more. Running paid search for markets that you can write can offer you not only an increased revenue stream, but growth overall for your agency. This protects your book by diversification of risk.
Get licensed in neighboring states: If you’re finding you can’t write with any new carriers (I’m talking to you, California and Florida) consider getting licensed in neighboring states. While organic traffic to your website is unlikely, you can run paid search ads in any state you want. By creating a dedicated landing page to the neighboring state, it gives the appearance that you’re located there. If you do decide to go this route, be sure to talk with other agents about which carriers are competitive in the state. This will ensure your efforts to grow are successful.
Enhancing or Creating A Referral Program: In states that allow it, (check with your insurance commissioner’s office first) enhancing your referral program and letting customers know about it in each communication can help you continue to get new business leads.
Let Us Know How We Can Help.
We hope that you found some benefits to helping your agency grow or maintain during the hard insurance market of 2023. If you need help with anything at your agency, please feel free to reach out to us. Most of our customers employ us for 3 services; the most popular being Website & SEO, Google Business Profile Management and Blogging services.