In the second half of our January forum, we invited a number of advisers to discuss what both advisers and insurers can do to better engage consumers in 2023 both from a new business and existing client perspective. We heard specifically from panellists;
• Setul Mehta – Openwork
• Lee Thomas – Pangea Life
“The most successful vote when it comes to getting proper decent cases is through a fair channel... You were talking earlier about seeing a lot of life insurance adverts on the TV. I don’t think I’ve ever seen any kind of advertising that talks about business protection. It’s always the personal stuff. It’s pulling the heartstrings. It’s ‘look after your family’, but very little do I see this put out there by insurers, which really focuses on businesses. I don’t know how people do business protection just purely on the phone and not working with professional intermediaries.”
“If I think about it from a network perspective, what we tell our advisers in terms of engaging with clients, is all the run-of-the-mill things that you would expect us to say. So, think about the reasons you want to engage with clients but ensure it is conversation focused. This helps retain and attract prospects and clients across all boards. I know Consumer Duty is important, but even prior to that you may be a protection-only specialist, but engaging in other parts of the conversation or attracting clients through that route is as important as it is the other way around… So, we have a CRM, and we find that of incredible value. It’s through dynamics analysis that a click of a button can enable engagement with clients when they’ve got, for example, birthdays coming up. So that’s a light touchpoint conversation reason to engage. It is a wonderful way to remain at the front of the mind. And it’s not necessarily just clients’ birthdays, but think about dependents and the birthdays that they have… CRM enables our advisors to be able to engage with more clients.”
“We have an internal marketing toolkit… You can pick and choose newsletters that go out from the Cost-of-living crisis to why you should review your budget and the importance of protection… It’s really easy to assume existing clients know what it is, but everybody is gaining and retaining new clients. And as you bring in more recruits and you get to the next generation of clients, they’ll want to know how to protect your mortgage and the importance of them downsizing, because it’s not just about protection in our world, it’s signposting in all sorts of other areas.”
“We’ve got a dedicated financial promotions team or an advertising approval team – They are authorised and signed up to provide content for advisers to use… We also provide guidance on what you can and cannot say that requires approval. If it’s just stating facts from another website or another source, that’s predominantly okay. If it’s starting to drive conversations between you and your organisation in specific areas of the list, then you must be careful of what you say and must make sure it’s in line with the FCA guidance. That’s the bit where we support by approving each of the posts, and then we’ll approve them for 6 or 12 months so people can repeat them.”
Click the audio playback below to listen to the full session.
Full session audio
To get the perspective of someone that does a lot of social media, particularly video social media, we asked Robyn Allen what the industry could do better with social media and how insurers might be able to use social media better. In true Robin style, she said, ‘Don’t worry, I will send you a video!’ which she kindly did. Click the video on the left to watch.
“Email inboxes are becoming really, really full. It’s very easy to look through your email inbox and if the subject line doesn’t grab you, it just gets deleted. I think there are a lot of people who’ve probably missed some really important emails over the years. And probably everyone on this call could relate to it because they thought it wasn’t important and it was. We’re starting to find that more people are picking up physical pieces of post and engaging with them more than they are with electronic communications. I’m a big fan of using as many ways of communicating with clients as I can to really ensure that they’ve got the message one way or the other.”
