10 Ways To Keep Your Clients From Having Wandering Eyes

Hey All,

Here are 10 ways to retain more clients for anyone interested in keeping their clients from having wandering eyes!


1.Create Buyer Personas
Insurance is an intimate business. Clients rely on you to protect the things they love, therefore, frankly, you should give a damn enough about your clients to get to know them. And getting to know them means more than understanding their insurance needs, how decisions are made in their household, or their preferred method of communication. Understanding your client means knowing them on a personal level, understanding what makes them tick and aligning your client experience to your set of “personas”. A persona is a semi-fictional representation of your clients based on market research and real data about your existing customers. Buyer personas give tremendous structure and insights for your agency. It will help you determine where to focus your time, how to improve client service and allow you to get your team on the same page. As a result, you will be able to attract the most valuable visitors, leads, and clients to your agency.

How To Build Personas
Look at your client list, document and group your clients by interests, lifestyle, demographics, motivations, etc.. After you’ve stepped back and bucketed your clients, develop a persona for the trends you see amongst your base.

Examples of Personas:
Soccer Mom Susan – early 40s, 2 children, senior-level employee, always busy, needs time to relax, willing to pay a premium

Danny Drive Too Fast – early 20s, college student, speed risk, $30k vehicle, doesn’t care about service

Bingo Better Betty- late 60s, senior citizen, 1 car, health issues/worries, enjoys quality serivce



2.Send Trinkets On Unique Holidays
Every insurance agency in America will send out a birthday card or a Christmas card. How many insurance agencies will send their left-handed clients a card of left hander’s day? Yes, it sounds a bit absurd. But the point is to avoid the clutter and stand out in your outreach. Not to mention, the benefits are two-fold. Doing this not only shows that you know your clients, but it gives you another opportunity to stay top of mind!

Three Ideas After You’ve Bucketed Your Clients:
  1. Send all of your clients that own a dog (document name and breed) a few doggie treats on Dog Day (FYI it’s August 26th)
  2. End of summer? I bet your client’s children would appreciate a gift to clip on their backpacks.
  3. Who’s got a renewal coming up soon? I’m sure there’s a funky holiday coming up around then.
3. Make Them Laugh
You know they say, laughter is the best medicine and everyone loves a good laugh. Plus, the effective use of humor is a proxy for high emotional intelligence. This will give you an indication as to whether your team truly understands your clients. As opposed to being boring and run-of-the-mill, think of how you can use laughter to associate your agency’s brand with positive emotions and two stay top of mind. Who knows, you may come to find that you have some comedians on your team!

Three ways to add a humorous touch:
  1. Online content, think memes, daily jokes, or (clean) funny content from others
  2. Internally with office pranks (don’t forget to post)
  3. On signs and billboards
**Southwest are a good model to follow for using humor in customer service**

4. Brand Association
To double down on associating yourself with positivity. Think, how can my insurance agency brand associate itself with something commonplace in your community or service area. By associating your brand with things such as key organizations or local hot-spots, you become apart of your clients and prospects identity.

Associate Yourself With:
  1. The home sports teams
  2. The fire department, police department, or EMTs
  3. Religious institutions and churches
  4. Landmarks or indigenous animals
  5. Local favorites

5. Create Some Fanfare
The same way people want to associate with winners, positivity, and local favorites, they want to associate with the brands that make waves. Frankly, there’s only so far good service can go. A good way to gain an edge on your competitors is to be seen and be seen having fun. In our last post, we told you to bring your whole team when presenting awards.

6.Disassociate
Hey, our focus is to only associate with good things. Remember those buckets that we talked about? You should bucket your clients based on the value they bring to your insurance agency. No, we’re not talking monetary value, frankly are they worth having as a client? Remember, you only have a limited amount of time in the day. The more time you spend with headache clients, the less time you can spend providing awesome service (and doing the things on this list) to your great clients.

Here’s how to bucket your clients:
  1. High value- most profitable, pay on time, treat you with respect and value your services, or clients that continually rant and rave about you to others
  2. Churners- your disloyal clients who are constantly on the lookout to switch
  3. Bloodsuckers – these are your accounts that take up a disproportionate amount of time and energy in relation to profitability
  4. Golden geese – these are your 1 or 2 huge clients that come around every so often (tune in next week and we’ll tell you why you should consider cutting them)

7. Teach Them Stuff
You don’t have to stick to educating your clients on insurance. Each and every person in your insurance agency has special talents and skills. If you’ve bucketed your clients according to lifestyles and interests, you’d probably be surprised to find that there’s a whole lot of overlap between the groups. I have a client who’s an absolute 80’s rock junkie. He’s taught me more than I could ever imagine on little-known facts on some of the most famous bands. I wouldn’t be shocked to find that he has a section of his client base who was also into 80’s rock and roll.

A few insurance agents who teach:
This agency teaches a bunch of classes

This insurance agent shares incredible recipes

This agency has a recommended reading list


8. Hand Written Notes
I had to add this because of a client of mine (he’s also my insurance agent) sent me a letter last week. And I told him straight up the only reason why I even opened the letter was that I saw that it was handwritten. Usually, they go straight to the trash. I know what you’re thinking. How is the digital advertising agency designed exclusively for insurance agents promoting old-school stuff like handwritten letters? Well, we’re the first to say that in the digitally-overloaded world we live in, taking it back and going back to what used to work is definitely a way to stick out. And handwritten means you took the time to do it. And in your client’s minds, if you took the time to write it, you must actually care.

A few tips for your handwritten letters :
Use personal packaging

Use a stamp

Make the package lump lumpy

Include a P.S message at the end


9. A Fun Survey
Yea, yea, I know, I know, your company already does surveys. But I bet they are boring and I bet they don’t really tell you very much about your clients. That’s why you should give your surveys a spin. Make them more personal, dive deeper and get specific in the questions you ask. You need to know the truth. Ask questions that will warrant the truth. People like themselves, ask them questions about themselves. The more personal questions you ask, the more personal the information you’ll get. Make sure there’s a balance between personal questions, closed-end, ranking, multiple-choice, and open-ended questions.

4 Types Of Questions To Ask
Personal – get them invested in the survey, make them think, and learn a bit more about your clients

Service – get specific, ask them what they’d like to see

Comparison – compare and contrast different facets and features of your offering

Experiential – ask for direct examples or stories


10. Wow Your Influencers
These are the people who’s opinions are respected within their circles. If they give you the stamp of approval, their tribe will listen. Want to keep more of your clients? Go above and beyond for the influential people. Give them a reason to go out and talk about you. Give them a reason to mention you.

Even if that means:
Creating customized offers

Personalizing the experience

Allowing them to interact with your company through multiple channels, 24/7

Responding to inquiries and complaints within an hour

Treating them like royalty
 
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