What is the Best Way to Sell Life Insurance Online?

Selling life insurance online may sound more appealing than cold calling, door knocking, or driving to numerous appointments for some brokers and agents. Unfortunately, the sales process can often be much more complex than setting up a website and watching the sales notifications roll in.

Brokers who are successful at selling life insurance online treat it like another lead generation method, often their primary one, and not as a set-it-and-forget-it sales technique. But if you’re still on the fence about how to do it successfully, keep reading. This article gives some helpful hints on how to be successful in the online insurance business.

Want to sell life insurance online? The idea of sitting at home and selling life insurance over the internet is attractive to many brokers. No more suits, no more evening appointments, no more traffic.

I have some bad news: It doesn’t work like that. There really is no broker website you can build where consumers are going to click a few buttons, purchase life insurance, and money gets deposited into your account.

Actually, that’s good news. When the day comes that consumers simply click and buy life insurance, that’s the day that the life insurance companies don’t need you anymore – they just need their IT department.

That doesn’t mean that using your website to increase sales is a no-go — far from it. Your website can and should be an effective tool in your marketing kit. But we need to strip away a number of misconceptions and clarify our thinking.

You can translate a website into sales, but remember this – it’s not a computer problem with a computer solution; it’s a marketing problem with a marketing solution. And that means you should already have some level of expertise in this area.

What is the sale?

So we know you’re not going to directly sell life insurance through your website. So what good is the website? The answer is to rethink our idea of a sale.

On your website, a sale is a lead.

Generating leads is your focus. You’re not selling life insurance. Your goal is simply to convert a visitor into a lead. You want their contact information (their name and phone number) and permission to call them.

Once you have the leads, then you can go all old-school. You’ve got names and numbers of people you can call and sell life insurance to, just as you’ve always done. But first, rethink your website strategy to be simply a way to generate leads.

Treat your website like other lead generation methods like direct mail, telemarketing, or the one I cut my teeth on – approach letters to the birth announcements.

In India, there are two main ways to sell insurance:

1. An Insurance Advisor

An insurance advisor is someone who is registered with a particular insurance company and connects with customers to help sell them insurance policies, make claims, and more.

As per the guidelines laid down by the IRDAI, you need to undergo a training program and sit an exam to get your license and become an advisor.

2. A Point of Sale Person (POSP)

A POSP is a new type of license for insurance advisors created in 2015 by the IRDAI. While you still need to undergo the prescribed training program and clear the online examinations, you will be able to sell policies from multiple insurance companies in both life insurance and general insurance categories (including motor insurance, health insurance, travel insurance, and more).

This way, you can offer customers a wider range of options and different insurance plans from multiple companies so that they can choose the best product for them.

You can work with an insurance intermediary or broker to sell policies from many companies, or work with a single company as well. Thus, there are more options than a traditional insurance advisor.

How To Become An Insurance POSP

As we have seen, a POSP (or Point of Sales Person) is someone who is certified to sell insurance products from multiple companies, across different categories like life insurance, motor insurance, health insurance, and more.

To become a POSP, you just need to meet the minimum educational qualifications as given by the IRDAI and undergo a mandatory training course.

Qualifications Required for Becoming a POSP There are a few basic requirements for becoming an insurance agent. You must be at least 18 years of age and should have completed Class 10. You will also need to have a valid Aadhaar Card, PAN Card, and a bank account in your name.
To start as a POSP, you need to enroll with a specific company or an insurance intermediary, and then complete the 15-hour compulsory training offered by the IRDAI. Once you have finished the training and cleared the prescribed examination, you will get a license to sell insurance policies (as per the POSP guidelines).

So, anyone who fulfills these basic criteria can enroll to become a POSP. And since you will be able to sell and issue insurance policies online, all that you need for the job is a smartphone or a laptop and a good internet connection.

Setting up the online channels like Google listings, website creation, setting up other online channels like Google, Facebook pages, ads, email, SMS, WhatsApp, and more Short details about all this will be very helpful.

Double your sales

You know the sales funnel. 1000 contacts turned into 100 prospects, which turned into 10 sales. Want to double your sales? Simply dump 2000 contacts into the top of the funnel.

Wow – that’s hard on the web! If you’re getting 1000 visitors, how are you going to double that? More and better Google rankings? Paid advertising?

The answer is once again to rethink our approach to our website. You know, a “sale” is a conversion to a lead on your website. And you know that you always have to ask for the sale? So, are you asking for a sale on your website? Because the easiest way to double your sales on your website is to double your conversions, not double your traffic.

Don’t bring in more visitors. Instead, convert more visitors into leads.

Have a look at your website, but do it from the perspective of it being a lead generator. Are you asking for the sale? Are you specifically, directly, and pointedly asking for their contact information as the primary purpose of every single page on your site? If not, you’re not asking for the sale.

Failing to ask for a sale is the biggest single mistake I see on broker websites. Your website should be focused visually and graphically on getting the visitor to provide their contact information. Does everything on the page draw you towards entering your name and phone number?

A simple “contact us” form on a contact page is useless. People don’t click through to another page and fill out a contact form any more than they say, “Hey, can we please fill out the application now?”.

Getting Started

Selling online means you can work from anywhere as long as you have an internet connection, so you can say goodbye to the long commute, office politics, and those stiff dress codes.

But remember, you must be licensed in your state in order to sell policies to the general public—even if you plan to do so online. This includes selling life insurance, as well as other types of products such as casualty, property, and auto insurance.

You must be licensed in your state in order to sell insurance including online.

The first thing you’ll need to do is set up your website. A life insurance website should be viewed as a lead generation tool, not a sales generation tool. Just like direct mail or telemarketing, the goal of your website should be to put you, as the broker, in front of as many qualified prospects as possible. But you still have the job of converting those prospects into sales.

As important as it is to have face-to-face interactions when selling insurance, online marketing is a great first step to getting prospective clients. With the birth of digital marketing, the traditional approach to selling insurance (door-to-door, cold calling, multiple face-to-face appointments) has become the least practical choice for insurance brokers.

If you want to learn how to sell insurance online, here are some tips that should help you get started:

1. HIRE AN INSURANCE MARKETING COMPANY

Not all insurance brokers are adept at marketing their products, especially in the online marketplace. This is where insurance marketing agencies or companies come in. When you work with an insurance marketing company, you can quickly gain more leads and marketing skills that will help you broaden your market.

If you are a beginner in the insurance industry, an insurance marketing company can help you gain more knowledge on how to generate leads and sell your products more effectively.

2. BUILD A WEBSITE

For potential clients to find you, you need to have your own website. Setting up a website can be tricky if you don’t know where to start. Thus, hiring a professional web designer can put you at an advantage. With a professional-looking website, you can attract more traffic and eventually generate more leads.

However, if you don’t have the budget for a professionally-made website, you can start with web-designing software like Wix or Squarespace.

3. INCREASE TRAFFIC TO YOUR SITE

Once you’ve established your website, the next step is to increase the traffic to your page. You can do this by creating social media accounts across all the popular platforms (Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram), paying for a digital marketing service for SEO and PPM, and increasing the valuable content on your site with blogs and videos.

4. MAKE A SIMPLE QUOTE FORM

The majority of visitors on insurance sites want to find out what your products are and how much they will cost. To turn these visitors into leads, create a simple quote form that will ask for the basic contact details of your potential client.

Avoid asking personal questions like full names or birthdates at this point; you can get these details later. Instead, require only an email address and contact number in your quote form. Otherwise, visitors will find the website untrustworthy and likely exit your page.

5. OFFER SOMETHING IN RETURN

How can you turn your website visitors into leads? You can start by offering something in return for their email addresses, like free quotes and guides that they will receive via email. Whatever your offer may be, the goal is to attract these clients into purchasing your products.

6. RESPOND FAST

One of the primary reasons people go online to look for insurance policies is that they want a fast and convenient response. If you want to turn your leads into customers, you should employ a system that will give them a reply as soon as possible. If you leave them hanging for too long, they may move on and find another broker.

Selling insurance in a competitive market is one of the first challenges you will encounter as an insurance broker. But with these tips, you can start learning how to sell insurance online more efficiently and effectively.

The Sales Funnel

The sales process is a little like a funnel. This process starts with countless prospects. A prospect is anyone who the salesperson contacts. A small percentage of those prospects turn into qualified leads. Then, based on your closing ability, a percentage of those leads turn into sales.

Website visitors represent prospects. A website that receives 1,000 unique visitors per month has 1,000 prospects. If 10% of these visitors enter their contact information on your site’s lead-generation page, this nets 100 monthly leads or 100 people you can contact and pitch life insurance to. With a 20% closing rate, you can make 20 sales per month, initiated through your website.

Want to increase your sales? There are three ways you can do so:

Put more prospects into the sales funnel by increasing website visitors
Turn more website visitors into qualified leads
Improve their closing rate to convert more leads into sales

Increasing Website Visitors

The easiest way to sell more life insurance online without changing anything is to get more people onto the site. Remember, the more traffic you bring in, the more potential you have for closing sales.

Let’s assume the visitor-to-lead conversion rate stays at 10% and the closing rate stays steady at 20%. You can easily double your monthly sales from 20 to 40 by getting 2,000 unique visitors to your website each month instead of 1,000.

But how do you increase traffic? Consider the following:

Paid search engine marketing (SEM): Search engines such as Google have paid advertising programs where website owners can bid on keywords and pay for each visitor generated from web searches. SEM can be an effective way to increase traffic, but competition for high-traffic keywords is steep, resulting in high bid prices.
Organic search engine optimization (SEO): Search engine optimization involves optimizing a website to appear at the top of organic rankings for certain keywords. Website owners can accomplish this on their own or hire SEO specialists to do it for them.
Social media marketing: Integrating a website with social media such as Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube is a highly effective way to increase traffic.

Converting Visitors to Leads

Getting big traffic numbers is futile if these visitors just browse your website and aren’t actually converted to leads. You should optimize your site to appear high in search engine rankings, but also to compel visitors to take the next step and submit their contact information.

Effective ways to convert website visitors into leads include offering a free report on life insurance for entering a name and email address. Or you can promise to provide free quotes that visitors can only receive via email.

Increasing Closing Rate

It doesn’t matter how many qualified leads you receive, you are the one who has to close them in order to make sales.

The best and most visible website in the business means nothing to a broker incapable of working the sales funnel properly, converting prospects to leads, and turning leads into sales. No website or digital marketing strategy is sufficiently effective to obviate the need for top-notch salesmanship.

Frequently Asked Questions

What’s the difference between a POSP and a normal insurance salesperson?

The main difference between the two is that an insurance agent can only sell insurance plans of the company they are associated with, and they can get either a license to sell life insurance, a license to sell general insurance, or a composite license to sell both life and general insurance.

On the other hand, a POSP agent can sell insurance plans across all the above categories of insurance, and from a variety of insurance companies, though to do so they need to be associated with an insurance intermediary or broker.

Who can become a POSP?

Anyone who meets the basic criteria (being over 18 years old and having passed Class 10) can become a POSP. Thus, it is the perfect opportunity for freshers.

And, since you can do this work part-time, it is also a good opportunity for college students, homemakers, retirees, and even those who already have a job but still want to do more things on the side

How much money you can earn as a POSP?

As a PSOP, your earnings won’t rely on the number of hours you work but on the number of policies you issue. Since there is no fixed income, and no maximum limit, there is a lot of scope for high earnings. Essentially, the more policies you sell, and the more renewals you get, the more you can earn as a POSP.

What documents do I need to submit to register as a POSP?

To register as a POSP, you will need the following documents:

A copy of your Class 10 (or above) pass certificate
A copy of your PAN card and Aadhaar Card (front and back)
A canceled cheque with your name on it
A photograph

What products can a POSP sell?

Depending on the company they work for, a POSP can sell insurance plans across several categories of insurance. These include life insurance, term insurance, motor insurance, health insurance, travel insurance, and more.

When can you start selling insurance?

Once you have registered with an insurance company or broker, you can complete the 15 hours of training and pass the required examination. Then you will receive an eCertificate, and you can start selling insurance online as a POSP agent.

What are the Advantages of Being a POSP?

There are a number of benefits of selling insurance online as a POSP:

There are no fixed timings for You can easily choose and set your own working hours and decide whether you wish to work full-time or part-time.
You can become your own boss — you’ll be able to work when it’s convenient for you and set how much work you want to do.
It’s possible to work from home: Since POSPs can use online processes to sell policies, they can easily work from home, or even anywhere else they want to.
There are set commissions – POSPs earn commissions that are set by the regulatory body (IRDAI). So, while you’ll likely get a stable flow of income, the amount will depend on the number of policies you issue.
Zero investment is required – There’s no investment or payment required when you join as a POSP. All one needs is a smartphone, a computer, and an internet connection!

A Few Reminders

While all of this is important, there are a few common mistakes people often make when they set up their online insurance businesses. Make your site as user-friendly as possible. No one likes having to navigate through a complicated site just to get some basic information.

Be sure you provide any relevant details that your prospective sales may need in a clear, concise, and visible manner.

Ensure you make your quote form as simple as possible. Asking too many questions can be a turn-off for potential customers. Make sure you request the basic details, including their contact details, so you can get in touch with them when the time is right. And don’t request personal or private information. In this day and age, you want to be sure that people can trust you.

You can also help your prospective clients by giving them the appropriate tools they need to make an informed choice. That may include calculators to guide them through the quote process.

This helps them figure out what product suits them and their lifestyle. And it also gives you a better idea of how to tailor your sales technique to them, giving you a good chance of selling a policy that suits their pocketbooks as well as their needs.

Also Read:

What is the Best Way to Sell Life Insurance Online?