Does your insurance website convert?
Spending all of your digital marketing time and budget on getting visitors to your site but not optimizing for conversions is like buying a bunch of leads but failing to sell to them.
You can have all of the website visitors in the world, but if they’re not converting into leads then your website isn’t working for you.
Luckily, you can be sure your insurance website is attracting new visitors and converting them into real prospects. All it takes is some smart design…
And the following conversion elements.
A Clearly Defined UVP
Why you?
You have 0-8 seconds to catch the attention of visitors on your website. What sets you apart from the agent next door, or from someone’s neighbor’s-brother’s-whatever-in-law who also sells insurance? Make your unique value proposition clear from the get-go.
Not sure what your UVP is? Check out Insurance Marketing 101: Your Message Matters to learn how to craft a compelling message.
Strong Calls to Action
You have to let people know - very clearly- what you’d like them to do on your website.
You can’t just put up a bunch of information and let your visitors sort through it themselves.
It’s not that they don’t have the intelligence to figure it out – most of your web visitors are probably very smart people.
But that doesn’t mean they WANT to spend the brain power trying to decipher exactly what they need to do to get a quote, contact you, or sign up for your newsletter.
According to branding expert and author Donald Miller, there’s a survival mechanism within people’s brains designed to tune you out if you start confusing them. Basically, information overload causes people to ignore the source of that useless information.
Don’t overload your visitors’ brains.
Tell them what you want them to do with CTAs prominently located on your homepage, landing pages, and internal product pages.
What is a CTA? A call-to-action (CTA) drives a potential customer to take a certain action that will move them through a conversion funnel. It usually looks like a BUY NOW button or an email sign up form.
Make it very clear that your goal is for website visitors to GET A FREE QUOTE NOW, and they won’t have to think twice about how to do just that.
Simplicity
A disorganized or cluttered website is never going to convert at the rate that a clean, simple, and well-organized site does. When it comes to a website that converts, simplicity is essential.
Researchers from Google found that “visually complex” websites are consistently rated as less appealing than their simpler counterparts.
And simplicity carries over to your CTAs and forms, too.
If you are asking for customer information, use as few form fields as possible. When all you need is a customer’s name, contact info, and business type or replacement cost, don’t ask for anymore.
You’ll have plenty of other opportunities to mine for customer data - don’t scare away a potential lead by using 20 field form when 3 will suffice.
Trust Signals
Your website visitors don’t know you. You haven’t earned their trust yet. But there are ways that you can use your website to do just that.
A trust signal is a feature or quality of your website that can inspire trust in the minds of your visitors, even if they’ve never met you before.
What is a trust signal?
Testimonials
You know that referrals are crucial to your business. According to studies, 72% of consumers trust online reviews as much as personal recommendations.
The most effective testimonials are specific, rather than vague. “Tony helped me save $600 on my car insurance last year,” is a much stronger testimonial than “Cheri is great!”
Substantiating testimonials with a full name (first and last), location, or customer picture can make these trust signals even more powerful to prospects.
Contact Information
Fears of identity theft can make today’s website visitors hesitant to give out personal information to nameless “strangers” on the web. Let them know you’re a real person, working from a real office.
Stanford University’s Web Credibility Project says a simple way to boost your site’s credibility is making your contact information clear: phone number, physical address, and email address.
Your contact information should be located on the footer of every page, as well as a dedicated contact page. You may want to include it on your homepage, too. Maps and directions to your office can further inspire trust.
Your Photo
An easy way to show potential visitors that you’re a real person is to prove it with a picture! Include your photo on your website, rather than a stock photo of some random “business person” or no photo at all.
In one case study, simplifying a website and adding a large photo of a real, smiling person increased conversions by 102.5%.
People want to know who they’re working with. Show them your smiling face.
Security Signals
You know that cyber breaches happen every day. (That’s why you’re constantly recommending your clients get cyber liability insurance.)
Your website visitors know it, too.
Inspire trust by securing your site with SSL. When your website visitors see the green “secure” lock in their browser bar indicating your site is secure, they’ll feel safe.
SSL encrypts data sent between a web server and browser. It prevents hacks by creating a secure connection. In other words, it protects the privacy of your prospects when they give you sensitive information online.
Social Media
People put their trust in social media. According to TIME, millennials who have lost trust in institutions like banks, government, and conventional media are putting their trust in social media.
In an age when even the Pope is on Twitter, social media accounts are necessary for your business survival. If you’re not on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube or Google +, you’re not inspiring trust from your audience.
Add social media icons that link to your social media accounts on your website. Be sure that your content (blogs, videos) can easily be shared on social media.
It’s okay if you don’t have a presence on every social media channel. But aim for at least 3 social media accounts that you can regularly post to and engage with.
Pro-marketing tip: Free up time! Use a social media scheduling tool like Hootsuite or Buffer to schedule posts in advance.
Does Your Website Make the Grade?
A clean and simple website that clearly states your UVP, has strong calls-to-action, and displays trust signals is a website designed to convert visitors into leads.
How does yours stack up?
Driving traffic to your website is great, but only if that traffic converts into leads and sales. When your website is optimized to increase conversions, you’ve got a site that’s working hard to help you build your business.