Email, Social Media, a Little SEO, and More
Act cFluent Newsletter, October, 2009 - Subscribe today Subscriber benefits include early evaluation of new products and discounts.
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As a variation on the kids game most of us played, think about having to choose only between using social media or email as a mechanism for getting your agency name and value proposition out there. To stack the deck further in favor of social media, let's lump together Facebook, Twitter, and all the blogs you care to include. Which communication medium would you choose to have with you on your deserted island?
There are a lot of daily distractions, and the hype surrounding social networking is one of them. Let me first disclaim the notion that I'm dismissing Facebook, Twitter, and other social media entirely. I'm not. Instead, I'd like to introduce the notion of balance. What proportion of your insurance agency efforts should go toward developing your online social network, and what time should you put into gathering, maintaining, and using customer emails?
The chart below shows that, still, people overwhelmingly use email to share information.
If you aren't using email to communicate with customers, you are missing a valuable (and virtually cost free) means of creating brand awareness and future pool of new customers because the right email message will get forwarded. The viral effect created by the sharing of your customer emails may be small in comparison to the hundreds of thousands or millions of views a popular YouTube video gets, but the introduction of your agency, through your customers, to new prospects can pay off even more handsomely.
Resources: See the new Best Practice guide in your Insurance Zone, including email boilerplate for a simple but effective monthly email campaign: Email Program for Soft Referrals. If you have a way to go in gathering customer email addresses, see the Best Practice guide Email and Customer Communication.
If a consumer has a negative experience with a product or service, they will share that experience with, on average, nine other people. That was the old rule of thumb. Today, social media like Facebook and blogs, and social networking mechanisms like Google Maps reviews, mean that a negative experience can be exposed to hundreds, thousands, or more, in just a few minutes time. What should you do if negative feedback about your agency is being shared? How will you even know?
Monitor the Airwaves
Some monitoring can be automated, some needs to be done manually. The first thing to do is to set up a few alerts using your business name as keywords. Google Alerts and Yahoo! News Keyword alerts are good places to start for automated alerts. You will need a Google or Yahoo! account, if you don't have one. You can have alerts set for your company name and those alerts can be set up as RSS feeds, or they can be sent to email or your phone as a text message. Whenever the Google or Yahoo! search crawlers index a page including your company name, or other keywords you want to track, you will receive an alert.
Facebook, which today has over 100 million users logging in daily, is outside the reach of Google's search engine, so you will have to check that manually. Set a recurring calendar item for yourself to perform a search from within Facebook on your company name, your brand slogan, and obvious variations.
While writing this article, I did a Facebook search for Progressive Insurance. Eleven results were returned, only two of which are official Progressive pages or groups. Among the other nine is a group titled 'Boycott Progressive Insurance' with 51 members, and another named 'Progressive Insurance Survivors' with 48 members.
If you have a well known slogan or a brand spokesperson, digging a little deeper is advisable. For instance, someone with nothing better to do started a Facebook group under the moniker 'I Hate Flo'. It has 277 members.
Respond and Redress
Negative reviews, even if unwarranted, generally cannot be removed. If you can identify the the owner of the post, try to contact them, correct their problem, and encourage them to edit or remove their review post. If that is not possible, post a response that acknowledges the problem (if legitimate), and what you are doing to correct the issue and prevent it from occurring in the future. Avoid assaulting the character of the post author. It won't do anything good for your online reputation.
Encourage Positive Reviews
If you were looking at a Google Map listing for a restaurant, and it had two negative reviews, would you eat there? What if it had nine glowing reviews and two dismal ones? You might start to suspect the the negative reviewers' experiences were anomalies or that they were fake reviews posted by competitors. The point is, you need to encourage your customers to post reviews on third party sites like Bing Local and Google Maps. Negative feedback is something all businesses experience eventually, and the web gives dissatisfied customers a big forum. Multiple positive reviews will offset this bad PR.
Resources: For instructions and email templates to help you manage online reviews, take a look at two of the Best Practice guides in your agency's Insurance Zone: Managing Online Reviews, and Local Search Primer. You may also wish to begin using the testimonial form available to you through the forms library (Click Manage Your Website --> Forms Management and select Testimonial in the Miscellaneous forms section. The form link will be added to your 'Customers' page.)
Have you ever received an email with a subject line similar to this article's title? We get them sometimes ourselves. Upon investigation, most blandishments are scams. Even those emails that might come from more-or-less 'legitimate'* SEO (search engine optimization) providers should be scrutinized critically.
Legit or Not?
Emails coming from gmail, hotmail, and other free email accounts should be viewed with skepticism. If the company is legitimate, why isn't the email domain based on the compay's web address? If the email does seem to be based on an actual company name, or if the email contains a link including the company name, do not click the link or go directly to the website. Instead, do a search on the exact domain name, and see what comes up in Google. For instance, we recently received an email from an email address with the domain 'fast-results.biz'. There were links in the email, but nothing to identify the company in the link name or in the body of the email. A Google search on 'fast-results.biz' turned up nothing for a company by that name or with a website address based on that domain. You can draw your own conclusions, but the one I would draw is that this email is a scam.
Legit, But What About Results?
Classic SEO costs real money because there are multiple components that have to be monitored and revisited over and over again (e.g., keyword research, page rank, inbound links, site conversions). Too many SEO providers focus on page rank for unproductive keywords. Lack of keyword productivity falls in two areas: high page rank that does not convert into site traffic; and site traffic that does not convert into profitable business.
The first step to getting a website visit when someone finds you via Google search is your page meta description (the two line description accompanying your web page title and url in the search listing). For instance, a Google search (at least at this moment) for 'auto insurance' shows Progressive at the top of organic search - not surprising given their budget for SEO - GEICO and Nationwide are next. Here's Progressive's meta description for the web page returned in that search: 'Buy and compare auto insurance at Progressive. Save money on auto, motorcycle, boat, RV and home insurance. Start with getting an auto insurance quote ...'
Bear in mind that a lot of people will have seen or heard Progressive ads and will know who Progressive is through their aggressive and pervasive branding. Their page meta description suggests that you can do exactly what their advertising has been promoting: Compare, Buy, and Save...all online. I don't have access to Progressive's site analytics, but I imagine a lot of people click through to the Progressive website based on that search result. But what happens when they get to Progressive.com?
Back in the day, when people actually used phone books, a full page, screaming yellow page ad would get an insurance agency lots of phone requests for quotes. The problem is, most of those quotes didn't result in new customers, and many of the new customers that did come from the yellow pages turned out to be short-timers or unprofitable. The insurance agency business is different from other service businesses in several ways, and screaming out 'cheap prices and free quotes' - either through the yellow pages or on the web, can often be unproductive. Progressive can afford to be less concerned about these issues because they have the back end automation to make quoting and issuing auto policies cost effective - even if quote conversion rates are low. They also have the pricing and underwriting sophistication to keep risks profitable. The SEO game is radically different for Progressive than for most agencies because of their advertising budget and the substantial investment they have made in technology.
Start with Results and Work Backward
If your agency finally does decide to engage an SEO company (hopefully not based on a spam email offer) make sure any SEO plan starts with the end in mind. You may want people to sign up for a newsletter or enter a contest, but most often you will want an opportunity to quote. Be sure to measure phone quote requests as well as web requests. Page rank and increases in site traffic (from search click-throughs) are only leading indicators, not guarantees of conversion success and a return on your SEO expenditure.
As always, be sure to measure quote conversion rates from the SEO campaign source. And be sure to measure the profitability of business from this source. Determination of actual profitability will take time as loss ratios settle out. Instead consider how closely the profile of this business matches the profile of your profitable books of business. Considerations like how many customers purchase multiple policies, how many auto policies consist of late model and multiple vehicles, etc. should give you a read on likely profitability of business from this source.
If your SEO campaign is getting you new traffic, but the quote and profile indications are not favorable, it may be that your keywords are too general. Choosing keywords upon which to optimize can be tricky; consider that up to 25% of the search queries Google sees are unique and never before used. But before you ditch out on an SEO campaign that undoubtedly cost your agency a lot of money, get your SEO provider to go back and work a little harder to find productive keywords.
Resources: For more on keywords, see the blog post at Insurance Agency Web Power on long tail keywords. For a more thorough discussion of SEO, see Search Optimizing Your Insurance Agency Website from the same blog.
*Honestly, if a company claims to be expert at SEO, why shouldn't that tactic bring them all the new customers they want vs. sending spam emails?
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