Consumers are empowered with digital tools that have placed unprecedented purchasing power in their hands – literally. Laptops, tablets, and smartphones have revolutionized the accessibility of information and immediacy of the sales process. These buying habits are reflected in the evolution of health insurance sales, but potential success in 2018 and beyond depends on the strength of your health plan’s online presence.

Marketing represents a critical component of your sales strategy, but investing those dollars in the wrong media can be a painful missed opportunity. Each marketing channel has its own best practices, and knowing those distinctions is essential to developing the right messaging and generating qualified leads. To avoid missing the mark with your marketing tactics, learn how each one fits in the bigger picture of your strategy. Apply these tips to make sure you are using each tactic for its optimal purpose.

As competition gets tougher across insurance sales, employing effective marketing tactics is essential to reach your target audience and maximize your resources. With limited time and budget, your marketing efforts need to be strategic and efficient, serving your audience when and where they are looking for information.

Improving lead management is a growing conversation among health insurance organizations. When managing your lead funnel, distributing leads to agents is a demanding, time-consuming process, and the reliability and consistency of that process is critical to your team’s success. When you’re faced with ambitious sales goals and limited resources, manual lead distribution can become a painful bottleneck in your business cycle and will result in lost sales opportunities.

One of the trending topics among insurance agencies is how to improve lead management. As businesses look for new ways to boost efficiency, one critical area is resolving the time agencies spend on manual lead distribution. Rather than staying bogged down in lead management tasks, consider the hours you could recapture in your week by using automated lead distribution.

Think about how you are currently storing your agency data. How much value are you gaining from it? Is your data fragmented across multiple systems or tools? You may be missing critical opportunities to find out where your marketing and sales resources are best spent and which strategies or campaigns are resonating with your audiences.

Insurance agents are typically faced with ambitious customer acquisition goals, often pushing retention efforts to the back burner. Needless to say, neglecting relationships with current clients can be costly for any agency’s churn rate. Maintaining meaningful communication with your clients is critical to keeping their business, and effective engagement requires more than just sending a birthday email. Avoid the pitfalls of assuming that retention will naturally happen from good customer service alone. Consider the following three retention strategies to keep your clients on board.

Choosing the right CRM is critical to your sales success. Market research has found that investing in a CRM can return $8.71 for every $1 spent, and implementing an industry-specific CRM can raise lead conversion rates by up to 30%.

CRM is critical to the success of your organization. Agencies can choose between an industry-specific solution, building a proprietary system, or using a well-known system like Salesforce. Since all of these options require time and resources, it’s vital to make your decision based on the return on investment the CRM solution will provide.

For any business to grow more efficient, leadership needs to analyze workflow processes to locate bottlenecks and areas for improvement. For an insurance carrier or agency, your agents are likely pulled in multiple directions and switching between tools, balancing lead management, quoting, enrollment, and customer retention. Managing your lead funnel efficiently and effectively is crucial to achieving sales goals and developing sustainable business practices. Here is how AgentCubed can help manage your funnel.