With the recent news that Amazon and Google are considering getting into the auto insurance market, the insurance industry is left holding a collective breath to see just where that leads the future of insurance and retirement benefits sales.
Think as a retirement advisor that you can't embrace the online retailer model? You may have it a bit easier than you imagine. U.S. census data shows that while e-commerce companies reach the consumer directly, online sales makes up a mere 1.2 percent of all retail sales.
In fact, leveraging the power of the click can be a huge sales benefit for advisors. A 2010 Kellogg School of Management study examined the behavior of consumers as they shopped. The data trails they leave, even on non-retail sites, says the study findings, can provide a wealth of information that can help companies reach their customers.
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Those data trails also are key to understanding today's customer behavior. According to IDC, 75 percent of the B2B buyers (and 84 percent at the C-level) are taking to social media to make purchasing decisions. "Senior executives—the C-level and VP-level buyers who demonstrate the greatest propensity to use social networks for buying—set the pace for others in their organization. Where the leaders go, others tend to follow," said Kathleen Schaub, vice president of research in IDC's CMO Advisory Practice, in a prepared statement.
Researchers Jan A. Van Mieghem, the Harold L. Stuart Professor of Managerial Economics and Professor of Operations Management at Kellogg and former student Tingliang Huang, now assistant professor at the Lally School of Management at Renssalaer Polytechnic Institute, followed the website activity of one anonymous company that sells industrial products globally. (The site itself is a non-transactional one.) Researchers had access the company's click data and sales information regarding customer accounts.
Turns out watching click activity can be quite revealing. The company had been identifying the ten most likely sales prospects by watching their clicks. In the summary report, Van Mieghem says his research was able to prioritize the likelihood of each of these customers to buy. "We can even predict how large a purchase will be and when the purchase is likely to occur."
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Huang said that the data studied over a four-year period showed key information, such as how many times a business visited the website, what pages were viewed, and how long on average visitors stayed on the pages. According to Huang, it was less about the length of stay and more about which pages were viewed and how often. He said the Contact Us page holds promise. "We think those pages are important because there's a good indication of the potential of becoming a real customer."
For retirement advisors, such data creates an opening to a larger conversation, the study reveals. That's because data can determine a consumer's probability of buying, the study concluded, which advisors can then leverage into a prospect call.
The smart retirement advisor will be looking to combine technology and big data with cold calling. Huang said. "Click tracking typically brings win-win outcomes for the firm and its customers, especially compared to traditional operations and marketing strategies studied in the literature."
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