Automating Your Marketing & Branding

by InsurTech Award
Article 2 in a 6-part series

Marketing Automation is one of six primary categories we recommend independent insurance agencies invest in to build out their InsurTech strategy in 2020.

What Is Marketing Automation?

Generate qualified leads, craft personalized buying journeys, and interact with contacts from top to bottom of the funnel with powerful marketing tools that allow your team to work smarter not harder.

Why It’s Important to Use These Tools

Marketing is critical to feeding your sales team and keeping loyal clients in the fold. But that means connecting with prospects and clients where they live— increasingly, online.

Marketing in the Digital Age

Online is where the action is—and if you’re not engaging there, your competition is.
If you are doing some digital marketing already, that’s great. Now think about what you could do even better—or finally start doing—with these labor-saving tools.

Marketing Automation Tools

Here are some of the major tasks and functions you can automate. We’ve included representative solutions vendors as well. These are just examples. Our list is not intended to be exhaustive of all the options out there, nor does ePayPolicy endorse or prefer one vendor over another.

Email Automation

Email is a versatile way to stay engaged with prospects and clients alike. But it requires time and skills you may not have on staff. Today, managing email campaigns has never been easier or more affordable, with software from  HubSpot, MailChimp and Marketo, to name a few.

Email automation tools enable you to:
  • Customize templates to your brand and target campaigns by audience segment or their actions
  • Schedule and deploy your campaign during prime time and track essential metrics and KPIs
  • Split test different elements to continue improving your campaign outcomes

Social Media Presence

Yes! Businesses do need to be on social media. People expect to find you there. Each site has its own niche, but it’s important to have a presence on all of them:

  • LinkedIn is a professional (business) networking site
  • Twitter centers around real-time global conversations and timely trends
  • Facebook is a multifaceted social networking site with the emphasis on “social”
  • Instagram is a popular photo and video sharing site owned by Facebook
  • Pinterest is a photo sharing site dedicated to visual inspiration
Social Media Management

Your social media visibility is only as good as your last post. Luckily, Social Media Management (SMM) tools do the heavy lifting for you. SMM software from  Sprout Social, HubSpot, Hootsuite and the like allow you to:

  • Schedule social posts when the right people will see them
  • Save valuable time by posting for you across all the platforms
  • See every interaction with your mentions
  • Connect with prospects and clients to grow your brand

Digital Advertising

Digital, or pay-per-click (PPC) advertising complements your other online marketing (especially social). You can display brief advertisements, service offerings, video content and more on Google and social media platforms and only pay when someone clicks on your ad. Management software and platforms such as AdHawk, Google Ads, and,AdRoll can:

  • Manage your digital advertising across all platforms
  • Aggregate your data into one dashboard for real-time updates
  • Suggest optimization tips based on viewer response

Thinking Ahead

If this seems like a lot to absorb, you can phase in these Marketing Automation Technologies at your own pace.
Email Marketing,  Social Media Presence, Social Media Management, and  Digital Advertising tools are designed to turbocharge your marketing. With their powerful analytics, you’ll see instantly how each channel is working for your agency.

Where Does Your Agency Stand?

Find out! The InsurTech Award presented by ePayPolicy is now open for entries. Top scorers will get cash and other awesome prizes. All entrants receive their InsurTech adoption score, along with valuable feedback. Enter today and find out how your agency stacks up against others (and how you’ve improved over time, if you’ve entered before). Judges even offer tips on specific ways to leverage automation for:

  1. Sales
    2. Marketing
    3. Team Collaboration
    4. Client Experience
    5. Customer Support
    6. Agency Management Systems

Automating Your Sales Process

by InsurTech Award
Article 1 in a 6-part series

Sales automation is one of six primary categories we recommend independent insurance agencies invest in to build out their InsurTech strategy in 2020.

What Is Sales Automation?

Boost your sales by managing and utilizing relevant information on prospects, leads, and clients. Centralize information and streamline your workflow to increase sales efficiency and productivity.

Why It’s Important to Use These Tools

Sales are about contacts, numbers, and nurturing. Now, more than ever, technology provides you with actionable intelligence about your prospects and clients so you can tailor your engagement, convert more business, and keep happy policyholders coming back for new coverage, as well as renewals.

The Always Essential Role of Sales

There will always be market dips and other times when you’ll need to ramp up quickly or even rebuild your business. Sales automation tools accelerate the sales process, so you can do more in less time.

As you prepare for the US economy to reopen, these tools can make a big difference right now. Not only can you laser focus your prospecting, you can spot opportunities within your own data, and take your client nurturing to new heights.

Sales Automation Solutions To Consider Implementing

Here are some of the functions you can automate. We’ve included representative solutions vendors as well. These are just examples. Our list is not intended to be exhaustive of all the options out there, nor does ePayPolicy endorse or prefer one vendor over another.

CRM

Customer Relationship Management (CRM), also known as Sales Force Automation (SFA), captures every prospect/client interaction in a live record. This includes everything from emails and calls to quotes and renewal notices. Major platforms like Salesforce, Pipedrive and HubSpot let you:

  • Replace multiple tools (or manual tasks) with a convenient, one-stop solution
  • See where to focus efforts and receive alerts when action is needed
  • Sell smarter, close faster, and grow your agency
Meeting Software

You might think of meeting software as a digital “time management assistant” that coordinates your schedule, organizes meetings, and keeps your team on track, wherever they’re working today. Apps (some free!) like Calendly, GoToMeeting and Google Calendar:

  • Alert you about upcoming tasks and appointments
  • Schedule team meetings without the back-and-forth emails
  • Make it easy to attend video meetings remotely via any mobile device (or computer)
Tracking & Analytics

Business Intelligence (BI) solutions let you manage and support business data with analytics, easy-to-understand visuals, and reporting. BI software providers include Tableau, Sisense, Domo, and many more. For insurance agencies, advantages include:

  • Securely connect, combine and manipulate data from multiple sources
  • See key data in real-time across agency functions (sales, marketing, customer support, etc.) to track and plan 
  • Get trusted insights to make decisions faster and more confidently

Thinking Ahead

Who wouldn’t want easy-to-use tools that help you focus, organize, track, and ultimately, boost your sales? With powerful automation technology like CRM Solutions, Meeting Software and Tracking & Analytics (BI), your sales team becomes super productive—and nothing falls through the cracks. 

Where Does Your Agency Stand?

Find out! The InsurTech Award presented by ePayPolicy is now open for entries. Top scorers will get cash and other awesome prizes. All entrants receive their InsurTech adoption score, along with valuable feedback. Enter today and find out how your agency stacks up against others (and how you’ve improved over time, if you’ve entered before). Judges even offer tips on specific ways to leverage automation for:

  1. Sales
    2. Marketing
    3. Team Collaboration
    4. Client Experience
    5. Customer Support
    6. Agency Management Systems

 

Our 6-part series covers all of these InsurTech solution categories. We invite you to explore them all.

Automation Nation

by Business Strategy

Automation Nation
*Automation can be defined as, “the technology by which a process or procedure is performed without human assistance.”

Love it or hate it, automation is the name of the game, and it’s here to stay. And no matter what your stance is, whenever the topic is broached, be prepared for some push-back.

Proponents of automation argue that it eliminates, or at least reduces, human error, cuts down on new hire spending, and evokes greater efficiency and productivity within organizations.
Opponents worry that automation will lead to their unemployment and greater unemployment overall, as machines and computers will perform their jobs with more precision, at a lower cost, thus taking their place in a company. 

Skeptics also contend that artificial intelligence (AI), robots, etc. may be intelligent and efficient at the task and responsibilities at hand, but not yet sophisticated enough to handle unexpected situations; they are only programmed to do one or a finite set of actions. 

As a tech company, operating in the insurance space (where human connection and relationships have historically dominated the culture), it can sometimes be difficult to get people onboard with the shifting landscape of technology and automation.

But, ePayPolicy is here to try!


AI doesn’t have to be a scary word or concept. True, we watch movies like Minority Report and I, Robot that tend to sway our opinion in a negative direction, but those are dramatic depictions of only potential disastrous outcomes. (But how great are those movies, right?!) In reality, AI, automation, and tech infiltrate almost every aspect of our daily lives, whether we realize it or not.
Inspired by our trip to Las Vegas for the WSIA Automation Conference last week, our team has put together a list of some of the most visible and recognizable examples of automation and AI in our world today.

For the Millennials: Autocorrect

According to Pew Research Center, 95% of Americans now own a cellphone of some kind (to be honest, we’re kind of surprised it’s not 100%).

It’s probably safe to assume that the amount of people texting on these cellular devices is in the millions, if not more. And each time we send a text, we rely on automation to predict what we are about to type. This automatic data validation function expedites time spent composing messages, making the process much more efficient.

For the Busy Bees: Virtual Assistants

Our days are colored with a bunch of little things to remember: to-dos, grocery lists, birthday reminders, dentist appointments, soccer games, that yoga class we keep signing up for…the list goes on.

Not long ago, we might have just scribbled these things down on a piece of paper (or tied a string to our finger).

Today, all we have to do is utter one of the following three phrases and instruct our virtual assistants to remember, remind, and re-schedule, for us:
“OK Google”
“Alexa”
“Hey, Siri”

Virtual assistants are engineered into our phones, laptops, tablets, and desktops, and even come standalone (like Amazon’s Alexa). VAs are quickly growing in sophistication and popularity, with a June 2017 article estimating some 35.6 million Americans to use “a voice-activated assistant device” at least one time per month.


Whether you’re just checkin’ the weather before work or keeping track of your all your oil changes for the year, virtual assistants can be huge time savers, and are relevant to the every (wo)man these days, not just the Tony Starks of the world.

Related: J.A.R.V.I.S.
An acronym for Just A Rather Very Intelligent System, J.A.R.V.I.S. is Tony Stark’s (aka Iron Man) artificially intelligent computer. The former’s responsibilities include assisting Mr. Stark with everything from heating and cooling the superhero’s home, to engine analysis and integrating with Stark’s Iron Man armor. Oh, and did we mention he’s also British?

Can y’all say, AWESOME???

 

For the Pet Obsessed: Petcube, Petzi, etc.

Pet cams enable us to watch, communicate, and play with our pets even when we’re not at home. Bonus: some even come with treat dispensers. Tech and automation at its finest — allowing us to interact with our fur children at all times!

For the Clean Freaks: Roomba

A series of autonomous “Robot Vacuums” sold by iRobot. Hate vacuuming, mopping, and the like? This device takes you out of the equation and leaves the monotonous chores to automation.

For the Sports Lovers: Topgolf, Auto-drafting Fantasy sports

The former is a sophisticated, high-tech driving range for golf lovers at every skill level. Inside each golf ball is a tracking device that is tied to a specific player and keeps score for them (electronically, of course) based off of where they sink (or don’t sink) the ball.
The latter is pretty self-explanatory. Didn’t do enough research on players this season? No sweat! Choose the “auto-draft” setting and you might get lucky and end up with Carson Wentz even though you were watching Game of Thrones on draft night.

For the Insurance Professional: ePayPolicy

Okay, okay. So we’re a bit biased on this one. But seriously, hear us out. 

We are the only payment processor built exclusively for insurance professionals, by insurance professionals. Our team collectively brings over 25 years of insurance experience to the table, and each of us is as passionate and hungry to innovate and push the envelope as the person next to us.

Our product enables agents and brokers to accept credit card and ACH payments online, while also passing on transaction fees to the insured in the process. With several management system integrations already tied to our name (including Vertafore’s AIM, Sagitta, and FinancePro, as well as i-Engineering’s ALIS and MGA Systems), and many more on the way, we don’t plan on slowing down any time soon.

The insurance space is so much about building relationships and having that face to face interactions with peers, that many people wonder if automation has a place in the industry.
ePayPolicy’s Answer: Yes. Absolutely.

Paper check usage continues to decline, and with good reason. It takes forever for the funds to clear, checks often bounce, you have to pay for stamps, etc., etc.

With ePayPolicy, all of those small inconveniences are eliminated. Our processor is compatible across multiple devices, so insureds can make payments anytime or anywhere, and insurance professionals can track and reconcile funds anytime, anywhere. 

Win-win.

For Everyone:

###
ePayPolicy is a tech company based in Austin, Texas. They enable insurance professionals to accept credit card and ACH/eCheck payments online while also passing on transaction fees to the insured.

Sign up takes less than 5 minutes.
Start accepting electronic payments in 24 hours.
No sign up fees or contracts and upgrade your account at anytime.

Sign up or Schedule a Demo today!
What are you waiting for?