Closing the $15 Trillion Coverage Gap with Storytelling
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If an experience is confusing, time-consuming, and not immediately beneficial — and involves getting your blood drawn — you probably aren’t lining up.
The life insurance product needs to become a more frictionless life insurance experience.
Recently on Digital Insurance Innovator, I had a chance to speak with Sarah Bennett, Chief Marketing Officer at Legal & General America (LGA), about marketing and life insurance.
“What I love about marketing is, to me, it's all about the intersection of human behavior, design, and analytics. It's all about learning how to help people and influence people and meet them where they are,” Sarah said.
Among the things we talked about are:
How to market to B2C and B2B channels with brokerage and distribution
Creating better consumer engagement and transparency
Strategies to use data to create a better experience for both consumers and brokers
Let’s dive right into the conversation!
“From an experience perspective, we really want to understand where the consumer is. At the end of the day, what do they need?” — Sarah Bennett
B2B2C Marketing
It’s important to LGA to leverage the great broker channel as well as to market directly to consumers. Its business is primarily through distribution.
“You can think about us as a B2B2C business,” Sarah said. “The distribution that we work with is really working with that end consumer.”
For life insurance in general, it’s a changing environment due to the explosion of digital and, yes, COVID-19. Digging into the digital toolkit and adapting for the distribution community is a challenge that Sarah relishes.
Soliciting feedback
LGA listens to its distribution partners about how its offerings affect the customer experience.
Lab Lift was designed to help accelerate the process of buying life insurance — but unless LGA’s distribution partners thought it did, it wouldn’t be a well-named, successful program.
LGA’s digital application platform is another offering about which feedback is essential. “We like to get a lot of feedback on what would make you want to use this? ...Is that going to be meaningful?” Sarah said.
Best practices, in this situation, are ultimately for the consumer’s ease of use.
Broker community experience
“What they want is for us to be easy to do business with,” Sarah said. Brokers want organizations like LGA to be clear and understandable and therefore easy to make that proposition to their customers… digitally.
Distributors are proud of their role as educators about what an important product life insurance is and how much it helps people. “Our role as the carrier is to help them help people with a great buying experience and a great product,” she added.
“Our mission is continuing to spend more attention towards educating the population, figuring out how to help brokers tell that story.” — Sarah Bennett
Better customer engagement, less friction
The process of life insurance is perceived as full of friction that everyone is trying to remove.
Some sources of friction that Sarah has seen:
Fluids. This is the physical evidence that needs to be gathered to purchase life insurance in the U.S.
Numerous steps. There are so many third parties involved in the purchase process.
Data & EHR. The industry is still discovering how to leverage data and the electronic health record to smooth the process.
“You really want to be able to go look at life insurance policies, figure out how much coverage you want, answer a few questions, and have them leverage the data that you know exists out there to help make a decision so that you don't have to get pricked,” Sarah said.
That’s the ideal real-life application of data. “We've taken the interview process down to under 20 minutes, and it can be all done digitally,” she said.
From product to experience
Life insurance has two parts to the experience — the purchase experience and the product experience (even though the product isn’t tangible).
“From an experience perspective, we really want to understand where the consumer is. At the end of the day, what do they need?” Sarah said.
Understanding the customer’s needs at this moment is one thing, but those needs change over time. One way to improve the experience is with something called laddering, which means buying policies for different durations based on life stages.
The engagement experience is an area where life insurance in general can improve immensely. Most of us tend to pay our premium and put life insurance out of our minds.
“There are absolutely opportunities that we're working on in terms of making interactions with us easier,” Sarah explained.
That might consist of reforming the entire website or improving ongoing communications with customers.
Or, it might look like additional benefits for people who get labs or blood work — because that’s health data they might not otherwise have had.
“What I love about marketing is, to me, it's all about the intersection of human behavior, design, and analytics.” — Sarah Bennett
Telling a life insurance story
To Sarah, problems like the $15 trillion coverage gap with women or with younger adults can be solved when marketing tells a persuasive story about the importance of life insurance for financial security.
“Our mission is continuing to spend more attention towards educating the population, figuring out how to help brokers tell that story,” she said.
Are people talking about their financial health? Car insurance, yes. Retirement planning, maybe. Life insurance, not so much.
“It really is about telling the right story about how this is part of your financial well being,” she said. “It's a great investment. And then it's something you know you're doing for your loved ones.”
Great digital marketing centers around understanding whether you’re driving the right customer experiences. A fully online journey is in the very near future for life insurance, which will lighten friction and deepen customer experience.
“I love the challenge of telling a story about something you can't touch,” Sarah said. “It's something that matters to people. It makes a difference in people's lives. It's important, and that feels really good.”
Connect with Sarah on LinkedIn or visit LGA.
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