Breathe Life Into Sales: Life Insurance Agents Can Use The Life Foundation’s Marketing Tools To Increase Their Business

Copyright 2010 Gale Group, Inc.All Rights ReservedASAPCopyright 2010 A.M. Best Company, Inc. Best's Review

September 1, 2010

Pg. 34(4) Vol. 111 No. 5 ISSN: 1527-5914

237134046

1737 words

Breathe life into sales: life insurance agents can use the LIFE Foundation's marketing tools to increase their business; It's All About Life

Feldman, Marvin

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Insurance companies like New York Life, State Farm and Allstate--to name just a few--are leveraging the nonprofit Life and Health Insurance Foundation for Education's impartial, public education resourcesto boost bottom-line results. As reported to LIFE, last September, during Life Insurance Awareness Month, New York Life had its best month ever in life insurance premium. State Farm reported record-setting results as well. It received more than 107,000 life insurance applications in September and placed $12.9 billion in coverage that month.

During the "Insure Your Love" campaign earlier this year, Allstatebegan to cross-sell life insurance to its home- and auto-insurance policyholders. The company found response rates increased dramaticallyby sending LIFE's "Because He Loved Me" flyer, along with the foundation's Life Insurance Needs worksheet and a handwritten note from theagent promising to follow up with a call in a few days.

Allstate says it includes the "Because He Love Me" flyer because it creates a way for its agents to segue into conversations about their clients' life insurance needs, which they can determine on their own using the worksheet. The flyer features a poem from a woman who describes how her husband loved her through small displays of affection,and even though he died of cancer, his love for her and their familyis still evident through the financial plan he established that continues to keep his family financially secure. Allstate says it has been distributing about 180,000 flyers a month.

For even the savviest insurance marketers, use of these credible, third-party educational tools are helping set new records. These foursteps illustrate how to use LIFE to boost sales.

(1) Build Trust

Providing prospects with access to LIFE's impartial educational materials, videos, online tools and calculators, located at lifehappens.org, provides a life insurance agent with the credible backing he needs to gain trust and confidence on a cold call.

Abraham Abich, of Abich Financial in Fairfax, Va., says that at different times of the year, his agency sends LIFE's educational materials on the importance of having disability insurance, life insurance and long-term care insurance to its entire client and prospect database.

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"Since the information comes from a third party, it immediately builds credibility, which helps me build trust with my clients," Abich says. "People do business with us because they know us, like us and trust us."

Insurance products are complicated. Overwhelmed consumers often give up the search because they don't have time to gain enough knowledge to feel confident that they are making informed decisions.

Ken Smith, of Central Financial Group in West Des Moines, Iowa, addresses this issue by using LIFE's educational resources to give his prospects and clients the insurance basics. "I use LIFE's online LifeInsurance Needs Calculator because it's straightforward and easy to understand. It also increases my credibility because I'm directing myprospects to a third-party tool," Smith says. "I also use LIFE's online Insurance 101 videos. Again, they are easy to understand and theyallow a person to explore the subject without feeling pressured. Butwhat I value most is that the education they receive from these materials makes them more open to listening to my ideas."

(2) Put a Face on Insurance

Even though insurance is an emotional issue, agents often talk about its technical aspects. But to gain consumer trust and ultimately close the sale, agents need to help their clients understand not what insurance is, but what it does to keep millions of families financially secure.

The LIFE Foundation provides agents with the ability to engage consumers in an emotional conversation about insurance. Larry Ricke, of Ricke & Associates in New Albany, Ind., says his agency successfully uses LIFE's realLIFEstories videos to touch clients' emotions.

"When clients become emotional about our products and services, itmakes the sale easier" says Ricke, a 37-year insurance industry veteran. "By incorporating the video clips into slide presentations, we have had a good success rate in closing the business."

Now in its 15th year, the real-LIFE stories program delivers personal accounts that illustrate how smart insurance planning ensured that emotional struggles caused by deaths or disabilities were not compounded by financial hardship. Today, about a third of LIFE's insurancecompany members co-brand its realLIFEstories to help their agents overcome consumer objections and reluctance.

"I mail the one-page flyers to existing clients as conversation starters;' says Andrea Simpson, of American Family Insurance in Westerville, Ohio. "After the mailing, I follow up with phone calls to ask their thoughts on the story and why I thought they might find it of value. The realLIFE stories are testimonials to how life insurance works at a difficult time, and it helps me bridge to that conversation easier."

(3) Build LIFE Into Your Marketing

Staying motivated throughout the year to sell life and disability insurance can be tough, but adding LIFE's three awareness campaigns into an agency's marketing plan can give producers the discipline needed to get the most of out of these efforts.

Life Insurance Awareness Month, observed every September, is one of the life insurance industry's most prolific marketing efforts. Those who successfully leverage the campaign start planning for this annum event months in advance. When agencies q make it part of their annum business plan, their staffs know it's coming and likely have given forethought to how they will make the most of it. Many companies and producers that prepare for and take full advantage of this event are setting records during the month.

American Family Insurance is one company that takes a disciplined business approach to its planning for this special month. The headquarters staff forms a cross-division team, including members of its life insurance division, marketing department and public relations team.In the spring, they meet to review the previous year's campaign activities, the LIFE Foundation resources available this year and to conduct a creative brainstorming session.

From this planning, the American Family team developed a three-tiered outreach effort to effectively engage their customers, sales force and employees in the campaign.

(4) Keep the Pipeline Full

As the industry's public education arm, LIFE is building the toolsand resources to educate consumers, but the foot soldiers deliveringthese resources are often the agents who sit down with them at theirkitchen tables to help resolve their financial protection concerns. The LIFE Foundation helps facilitate the use of its resources by agents through its online Idea Exchange at www.lifeexchange.org. The sitecontains hundreds of sales and marketing ideas from successful agents. For ease of use, the ideas are categorized to direct users to those ideas fitting their particular marketing need, whether it's targeting specific audiences like women or young families or specific situations like prospecting or point-of-sale.

By sharing these smart and effective ideas, agents are helping each other learn how to leverage LIFE resources, and ultimately help thefoundation achieve its mission of helping one consumer at a time make smart insurance decisions.

Contributor Marvin Feldman is president of the LIFE Foundation. Hemay be reached at mfeldman@lifehappens.org

Key Points

* The Big Picture: The LIFE Foundation provides marketing resources for life insurance agents and companies.

* The Significance: Insurers have boosted sales results and agentshave written new business using LIFE tools.

* Watch For: The latest campaign, "Insure Your Love," to kick off its second year next February.

Campaigns With Seasonal Flair

While Life Insurance Awareness Month in September is LIFE's most mature and well-known awareness effort, its Disability Insurance Awareness Month campaign in May has also gained a strong following.

This year, the initiative called on consumers to "Protect Their Paychecks," and LIFE provided the industry with an online toolkit packed with turnkey resources from videos to brochures.

A number of companies leveraged these resources to build robust efforts. Illinois Mutual built a comprehensive website for consumers around this event. Guardian partnered with Mental Health America duringMay to raise awareness of the link between depression and disability. Cigna released a pod-cast for consumers. Assurity featured LIFE's tools prominently online and even produced its own entertaining disability insurance video.

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One of the hottest new LIFE Foundation ventures is its "Insure Your Love" campaign. Held around Valentine's Day, this marketing platform presents a first-quarter opportunity to give the industry a jump start in the new year. Launched in 2009, the campaign's great timing and effective call-to-action, which pulls at the heartstrings, are reasons why this annual event is quickly gaining popularity among industry professionals.

During "Insure Your Love" this year, New York Life sent campaign-themed postcards to clients and prospects and followed up with a national call-a-thon among its agents, which resulted in more than 12,000 client appointments being set. Thrivent Financial for Lutherans encouraged its agents to personalize a turnkey news release announcing theInsure Your Love campaign and send it to their local newspapers. Assurity Life Insurance Co. dedicated a great deal of its home page realestate to its Insure Your Love effort. CUNA Mutual developed an Insure Your Love Intranet site to motivate agents to take advantage of the campaign and direct them to marketing resources and tools they could build into their own marketing plans.

These companies and their agents are not only taking advantage of the buzz in the marketplace resulting from industrywide awareness activities. They also are leveraging LIFE tools to improve their marketing efficiency, freeing up time to spend on sales and service.

LOVE MESSAGES: LIFE rolled out its "Insure Your Love" campaign in 2009. Its microsite (left) contains videos showing how love can motivate people to buy life insurance. It also contains a slideshow of photos that won LIFE's Crazy4Love Photo Contest. The photo below won thegrand prize and was submitted by Leslie Ryals.

September 16, 2010