Boston, MA, USA
July 17, 2007 Online
Insurance Sales and Marketing: What's Happening and What's Next
Report Published by Celent
Celent projects that online insurance sales
will double by 2011, and that the Web will play a major role in most
personal insurance purchases across auto, life, and health.
Celent’s latest report, Online
Insurance Sales and Marketing: What’s Happening and What’s Next,
is an update to its 2002 report, Online
Insurance Sales and Marketing: Practices and Profiles. Key findings
include:
- The web has become an increasingly
important communication channel between sellers and buyers of personal
insurance.
- Most consumers’ purchasing process is
“Web Influenced”
- Search engines like Google and Yahoo!
are critical channels for insurers that cannot afford massive consumer
marketing campaigns to drive shoppers directly to their sites, and
more insurers are embracing search engine optimization to help capture
these shoppers
- Pure online sales are growing, but will
still account for less than 15% of sales, even in personal auto.
The report estimates the current breakdown
of "Web Influenced," "Web Initiated," and "100%
online" sales across personal auto, individual life, and individual
health sales. “While 100% online sales are unlikely to exceed 30% in any
area, the Web will be a major influencer for nearly all sales within five
years,” says Matthew Josefowicz,
managing director of Celent’s insurance group and coauthor of the
report.
The report describes the online ecosystem
within which buyers and sellers have a number of ways to reach one
another: the interactions can be direct between the consumer and the
carrier; through online marketing driven by search engines; and through
online agencies or agents’ websites. Insurers need to manage and
direct those interactions or risk losing shoppers’ attention to
intermediaries that may direct prospects elsewhere.
To demonstrate the varied landscape of
online marketing and sales, this report provides snapshots of web
activities for top carriers, aggregators, and online agencies in three
areas: personal automobile, life, and individual health.
Personal automobile includes: State Farm,
Allstate, Progressive, Geico, Nationwide.
Life includes: AIG, MetLife, Northwestern Mutual, Prudential, and New York
Life.
Individual health includes: UnitedHealth,
WellPoint, Kaiser Permanente, Aetna, and the Health Care Service Group.
Other significant online players profiled
in the report include eHealthinsurance, Insweb, and Esurance.
The 36-page report contains nine figures
and eight tables. A table of contents is
available online.
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