Like a stool that is most stable when it’s on three legs, driving business results from digital customer experience stands on traffic, engagement, and conversion activities. When the three are done in conjunction with one another, you’ll see the strongest results.
Traffic-driving activities through organic and paid efforts, and establishing content marketing strategies to ensure engagement take up a lot of investment and resources. The last thing you would want is for visitors to land on or engage in an experience that’s not fully optimized for them. That’s where conversion rate optimization (CRO) comes to the rescue. CRO is a data-driven, results-focused approach to taking the user experience to a higher level to transform more site visitors into paying customers. The insurance industry is perfect for taking advantage of CRO strategies, especially in driving quote submissions.
Today, everything starts with a Google search. For shoppers who are in the market for new insurance, the journey usually starts from search with a goal in mind. Let’s say that is finding a new auto insurance. This search for auto insurance will expose available options to the shopper, after which he or she will decide which option looks the most fitting and then visit the insurance company web/mobile site. Once a potential customer lands on that insurance company’s website, it has very limited time to get the person's attention and funnel the person into the quote process.
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For insurance companies, web and mobile sites play an important role in driving quote generation. Optimizing these platforms to drive higher conversions is critical. Here are three ways to best use CRO tactics on insurance sites:
1. Connecting the right user to the right product: There are multiple tests we can conduct to figure out how much information about the site visitor we can capture in advance and make sure that the person sees the most relevant content up-front in a visit. For example, if everything we know about the visitor suggests that he may be interested in homeowners insurance, should you be showing him the other 20 product options? The conversion goal here would be to connect this prospect to a homeowners insurance company as quickly as possible and get him to engage in the quote process as fast as possible.
2. Highlight the main call-to-action (CTA): If the user is faced with multiple engagement points, different product options, or various next step alternatives, the result would be increased confusion, and the user potentially leaving the site. To get the insurance customers to the quote process more effectively you need to offer easy to follow designs, clear messaging, and clear call-to-action for the next step. Use CRO to determine how best to display your main key performance indicators from a visual design and placement standpoint. For example:
- Testing “sense of urgency” on the CTA language: “Get A Quote Today!”
- Testing visual treatments for quote start CTA: Usually darker, bolder colors that contrast well with the rest of the page design and content work the best.
- Testing placement: Place your quote start CTA always in the same section of the site to train users’ expectations. Test placing it as a part of the global navigation or as a part of the hero banner.
- test number of form fields
- test single versus multiple (2-3) steps
- test CTA button on the form submission
