Insurance Marketing Metrics – Should You Look at the Trees or the Forest?

17 September, 2014

One of the most important elements of inbound insurance marketing is the assessment of what worked, what didn’t and which combination of activities generate the greatest return on investment. However, knowing which numbers to evaluate is tough. In many cases, it’s easy to study the “trees” while you ignore the insurance marketing “forest.”

Here’s an example: You might be tempted to tout social media as a great success because you increased your Twitter followers by 20 percent in a given month. However, counting the number of followers accumulated is a “trees” exercise. It’s an important detail, but not necessarily indicative of return on investment.

Here are the three superior “forest-level” questions to answer the question of Twitter return on investment in your insurance marketing program:

  1. How many website visits were generated last month via Twitter? (If people click through to your website, they are actually engaged and interested in what you do.)
  2. How many Twitter visitors converted on a form on your website? (If they download content or submit a contact request, that indicates they have entered a buying cycle and are even more engaged.)
  3. How many Twitter visitors became customers? This, obviously, is the ultimate measure of ROI. If you notice that a high percentage of website traffic is from Twitter and furthermore, that Twitter visitors are converting on the website and ultimately becoming customers, you can then calculate Twitter ROI.

Ironically, this line of questioning works for almost every insurance marketing activity undertaken. If you send an email, you can look at the trees by measuring open and click through rates, and then you can step back and assess the forest, by looking at how many website visits and conversions were generated by email compared to other sources.

Should you ignore the trees?

While the tree measurements will never really answer the ROI question, they do serve an important purpose of comparing the performance of one creative effort to another. If email A had a much higher open rate than email B, I can study the subject line and try to put any best practices identified to work in my next email creative effort. The only problem is that there are many variables that impact the result of the email – some of which may be completely out of your control such as vacation season, an old list or a big market distraction. The same email creative may perform fantastically one time and not so great the next you run it. So, pay attention to the tree measurements, but don’t “set your clock” by them. They can be fickle.

How do you get the forest measurements?

If you’re running your website on a HubSpot platform, the forest measurements are easy because they’re all built-in to the system. If you’re running WordPress or some other platform, Google Analytics can shed some light. Off-line activities are the hardest to measure online. For example, if you go to a tradeshow and a tradeshow contact later comes to your website, how will you know that the tradeshow was the source?  The easiest way is to set up a landing page with a URL only provided to tradeshow participants. Again, HubSpot makes this process much easier than a lot of other platforms.