Selling Life Insurance Online: 8 Steps for Probable Success
If you are an insurance agent or broker, selling life insurance online seems like a better alternative to cold calling, door to door selling and the numerous drives to appointments which usually end up without a sale.However, selling life insurance is not easy either. It not as simple as creating a life insurance website and waiting for customers to log in and buy life insurance from you.
For the most part, you should treat your life insurance website as a lead generation tool just like what many professional insurance professionals do.
If you are just entering the life insurance sales profession or even a professional already, here are a few steps you could take if you want to increase your chances of selling life insurance online:
Note: These steps were based from collated online information from authoritative insurance websites.
8 Steps for probable success in selling life insurance online:
1. Decide If You Really Like Selling Life Insurance2. Prepare Your Home Office
3. Be A Certified Life Insurance Professional
4. Prepare Your Website
5. Develop Your “Sales or Conversion Funnel”
6. Increase Your Website Visitors
7. Convert More Website Visitors to Leads
8. Increase Your Closing Rate
Final Words
The Details:
1. Decide If You Really Like Selling Life Insurance
Selling life insurance and in fact, all kinds of insurance products is very hard, but is very profitable.
This is because for the most part, an insurance agent’s income is mainly commission-based. For independent insurance agents, their profits are determined by the difference between their sales and operating expenses.
In the US for example, the median income of insurance agents in 2021 was about USD 50,000 per year. The top 10% of insurance agents who are not independent make about USD 130,000 per year.
But forget about these income statistics, your income would mostly depend on your ability to close more sales.
So ask yourself now: “Do I like a job where I’m paid only by commission which depends mainly on my ability to close sales?”
If you don’t like this, then it is advised that you stop reading this article and read about other careers which provides a more stable income.
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2. Prepare Your Home Office
If you are selling life insurance online, there is a high likelihood that you would also be selling life insurance from your home, to be more precise: from your home office.
One thing you need to know immediately is this: Do I have to get a business license if I have a home business?. Each country and each state have their own rules regarding home based businesses.
You would also need a computer, high-speed internet connection, printer, and phone. You would also need office supplies like paper, pens, snacks and so on.
You would also need a quiet place to speak with your clients virtually. You would also need a real home office to meet your clients should they visit you in your home.
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3. Be A Certified Life Insurance Professional
Before you can sell life insurance, you need to firstly be a certified life insurance professional. Your first step is to be educated in the life insurance industry via a pre-licensing education or training.
Only after this are you allowed to take the life insurance certification exam given out by your country or state.
Some of the other certifications you can get a professional license for are: health, casualty, property, auto insurance and accident insurance professional license.
Do take note that there are countries that require security checks like fingerprinting and background checks.
You may choose to work as a “captive agent” or an insurance agent who works only with one life insurance company or you can work independently: offering products from several different companies.
These companies may have their own certification tests which you need to pass before you can sell insurance for them.
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4. Prepare Your Website
For the most part, you should treat your life insurance website as a lead generation tool and not as a sales generation tool. It must attract as many qualified prospects as possible to you.
However, it is still you that has the job of converting these prospects into sales.
Here are a few tips to have a successful life insurance website:
It must be as user-friendly as possible:
Your website texts must be easy to read and understand, your website theme must be pleasing to the eye; your website pages, buttons, links and so on must be easy to navigate, and so on.
You could study successful life insurance websites to know what makes people visit and interact with them. Once you know what makes them successful, create an improved version of your own.
Have an effective Quote Form which is as simple as possible: Make sure that you don’t turn-off potential customers by asking too many questions. Ask only the most basic information which you could use when you contact them later. Try to get a customer’s trust first before asking for their personal information.
You can do this by providing them the appropriate tools they need to make an informed choice. This may include insurance articles and online calculators to guide them through the quote process. This helps them figure out what product suits them and their lifestyle.
It also gives you a better idea of how to tailor your sales technique to them, giving you a good chance of selling a policy that suits their pocketbooks as well as their needs while at the same time gaining their trust.
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5. Develop Your “Sales or Conversion Funnel”
The sales process is like a funnel where many prospects go in the top of the funnel and from there, a few closed sales come out at the bottom. This is the concept of the “sales funnel”.
The sales funnel starts with all your prospects, who are anyone who comes in contact with you, the salesperson, either face to face, virtually or online.
A small percentage of these prospects would turn into qualified leads when they indicate interest. Then, based on the your ability to close a sale, as a salesperson, a percentage of these leads would turn into sales.
Your website visitors represent your prospects. For example, if your website receives 100 unique visitors per month, this yields 100 prospects.
If 10% of these visitors turned prospects enter their contact information on your site's lead-generation page, you would have gotten 10 monthly leads which are in essence, 10 people you can contact and pitch life insurance to.
If you have a 20% closing rate average, you would convert 20% of those qualified leads into sales. This means that you can make 2 sales per month through your website.
The sales funnel concept should always be in your mind whenever you are selling online, that is, you should get as many visitors to your website as possible, and design your website in such a way that these visitors turn into prospects then to leads and then finally into sales.
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6. Increase Your Website Visitors
There are a few ways you can increase your website visitors:
6.1 Search Engine Marketing (SEM):
Search Engines such as Google have paid advertising programs where website owners can bid on searched keywords and pay for each visitor generated from these keyword web searches.
But be aware that competition for high-traffic generating keywords are steep. Such keywords have high bid prices. So be ready to spend some money.
6.2 Search Engine Optimization (SEO):
This involves optimizing your website such that it appears at the top of the organic rankings for certain keywords.
As of 2021, the SEO industry is already worth USD 47 billion. This is how important SEO has become. You can hire SEO specialists to improve your website’s ranking.
But if you cannot afford the services of SEO specialists, you can still implement your own SEO strategies for your website thru the understanding of SEO concepts.
6.3 Social Media Marketing:
Using social media such as Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn, YouTube, and so on to promote your website is a highly effective way to increase its visitor traffic.
Though it may be hard work, businesses these days have already realized that they cannot rely on their website alone to increase their sales, they also need social media, as these online platforms are what most people are mostly visiting online.
6.4 Creating Engaging Online Content:
Do not underestimate the power of an engaging online content which could go viral causing hundreds of thousands or even millions of people to visit your website.
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7. Convert More Website Visitors to Leads
You might have hundreds of thousands or even millions of visitors to your website, however, these huge numbers are useless if these visitors don’t convert to leads.
Besides optimizing your website to appear high in search engine rankings, you must also be able to successfully persuade your visitors to take the next step and submit their contact information.
There are ways to convert your website visitors to leads: One is by offering lead magnets, such as a free reports/books about life insurance and other giveaways in exchange for your visitors entering their name and email address on the log-in form of your website.
It is suggested that you have a log-in form and lead magnets as early as you can, even at the inception of your website. This is because every wasted visitor is one less lead for you.
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8. Increase Your Closing Rate
No matter how many qualified leads you generate, you are in the end, ultimately the one who has to close the sale.
If your website has not sufficiently persuaded your leads to buy from you, it is now up to you to take the final step and persuade your leads to finally buy your life insurance product.
You can do this by addressing all their hesitations and questions about your life insurance products. You not only need to be a good salesperson, but must also have a very good knowledge of your life insurance products.
You could also follow the example of popular finance websites such as NerdWallet who earns a commission by featuring a list of insurance companies, letting their leads decide for themselves which life insurance company they would buy from.
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Final Words
If you want to be successful at selling life insurance online, you need to strongly focus on time tested digital marketing strategies, as well as have successful closing techniques.
You could do this by increasing the number of visitors in your website, turn them into leads, and then finally turn them into paying customers. This is more popularly known as the sales funnel.
But you can also follow the moneymaking strategy of successful insurance and finance websites, this is by featuring a list of insurance companies in your website for your website visitors to choose from.
These websites make money by earning a commission everytime a life insurance is bought from their website. It doesn’t matter to them which insurance company from their list their customer choose, as long as they buy from their website.
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When I working at a financial institution in my 20s a lady insurance agent tried to sell me insurance. She was in her early 40s. She said she quit her job as an employee of a bank to become a freelance insurance agent. She said she earns more and is free to do with her time as she pleased. She was nice and courageous. She knew our company also sells insurance but she still...