The landscape of insurance marketing has evolved dramatically in recent years. What worked in the past — email blasts and cold calling — no longer suffice in an age where attention spans are shrinking, and personalized strategies dominate. To navigate this shift, marketing experts in the industry are reimagining how they engage with customers, and, in doing so, they’re shaping the future of insurance marketing.
In a recent discussion with Insurance Business, Richard Look, (pictured), president and chief strategist at insurance marketing firm Vertibrands, and recent IMCA Trailblazer winner, shared insights on successful campaigns he's run, programmatic marketing tactics, and trends that will continue to reshape the insurance marketing playbook.
Speaking on his IMCA win, which recognizes outstanding contributions to insurance marketing, Look shared, "The Trailblazer award is a wonderful recognition of my long-standing focus on the insurance industry. It's an honour to be acknowledged and rewarding to have my journey recognized."
With over 25 years of industry experience, Look has had a front-row seat to the evolution of digital marketing. Reflecting on his early campaigns, Look’s expertise has continuously adapted to changing technologies.
A standout success came in 2011 when he worked with CATcoverage.com, a private flood insurer, to overhaul their marketing strategy. Faced with the diminishing effectiveness of traditional email blasts, Look proposed a shift to programmatic marketing— which involves using algorithms and data to target and re-target specific audiences with personalized ads in real-time.
"We started small and spent the first few months optimizing their landing pages and ad messaging. Our goal with CATCoverage.com wasn’t to drive submissions right away but to get agents and brokers to register on their portal,” shared Look. “By the fourth month, we had 300 registrations, and in the fifth month, that number surged to 400 per month. This continued for seven straight years, it's an incredible achievement that speaks to the sustained success and growth we helped them achieve."
Thanks to advancements in digital marketing tech, today's programmatic tools also allow marketers to target competitors. As Look explained, if a prospect visits a competitor's site, such as the National Flood Insurance Program (NFIP), his team can redirect that prospect by showing them ads for CATcoverage.com. Additionally, Look incorporates marketing automation tools to engage leads through personalized voicemail messages.
"Our voice call system allows clients to leave a brief 30 to 60 second personalized voicemail. They might say, 'Sorry I missed you. I'm calling about our nonprofit insurance. This is what we offer, and I'd love to discuss how we can help. These voice calls have a 95% interaction rate, so they’ve been very successful.”
Look added, “One of our clients has their president do these voicemails twice a year, and they receive so many responses because it is not just a sales representative who makes the call.” This inventive approach illustrates how traditional marketing strategies can be reinvented with personalized, digital approaches.
However, when utilizing traditional methods such as email marketing, Look advised that it’s important to know when to refrain. In an era of spam filters, email marketing is no longer a fool-proof way to get consumers’ attention.
Reflecting on the marketing industry’s rapid shifts, Look shared, “Back in the day, you’d send out 30,000 emails and get 750 responses back. Now, you send out 100,000 emails, and you’d be lucky to get 50 responses. Email blasts are dying in terms of lead generation, but they can work once a customer has a relationship with a company. Before you retain that customer, the programmatic approach works very well.”
Speaking on the future of the industry, Look anticipated that Unified ID 2.0 (UID 2.0), an open-source project that helps advertisers and publishers connect audiences, has the potential to dramatically impact the future of insurance marketing, especially as consumers become increasingly conscious of how their data is used.
“UID 2.0 is a secure data sharing system that prevents users from having to download cookies. User data and emails are encrypted, so while marketers can’t get your actual contact information, they are still able to reach you,” said Look.
Offering users the ability to opt out of data sharing, the solution supports modern advertisers’ need to run personalized ads targeted to specific consumers without compromising their privacy. “It offers a lot of protections for consumers while remaining beneficial for marketers,” Look emphasized.
