Intent Data in Insurance

In today’s hyper-connected digital world, business success increasingly depends on the ability to understand and leverage intent data. This type of data can provide invaluable insights into customer behavior, preferences, and needs, helping companies to optimize their marketing strategies and drive revenue growth. In this article, we will explore the basics of intent data, its importance, how carriers can use it to enhance their marketing performance, and how more advanced carriers are levering a new type of behavioral intent data to identify risk and improve underwriting and loss ratios.

Understanding Intent Data and Its Importance

Intent data is a type of behavioral data that indicates a person’s propensity to take a specific action. This data is generated from a variety of sources, such as web searches, social media interactions, email engagement, and content consumption. It provides a snapshot of what a person is interested in or looking for, making it a powerful tool for predicting and influencing buyer behavior.

What is Intent Data?

Intent data is a collection of digital signals that indicate a potential buyer’s intentions or interests through their online activities. The data reveals the topics or products that the person is searching for, reading about, or engaging with online. This information enables carriers to gain a better understanding of their target audience and tailor their marketing efforts accordingly.

For example, if a person is searching for “best pet insurance” and reading reviews about different companies, a business that sells pet insurance can use that data to target that person with relevant ads or content about their policies. This increases the chances of the person making a purchase, as they are already interested in the product.

The Role of Intent Data in Marketing & Underwriting

Intent data can play a crucial role in the growth of a business. By understanding the interests and intentions of their target audience, carriers can create more effective marketing and sales strategies that resonate with their customers. Here are some ways that intent data can help carriers grow:

Identify and Prioritize High-Quality Leads

Intent data can help carriers identify potential customers who are actively searching for their products or services. By analyzing intent, carriers can prioritize high-quality leads and focus their marketing efforts on those individuals. This can lead to higher conversion rates and increased sales.

Predict Purchase Intent

Behavioral Intent Data helps carriers understand whether users are high-intent buyers, window shopping, or persuadable shoppers. Leveraging real-time insight into the purchase intent of your applicants can allow you to create different experiences and treatments unique to each to drive the best next action for them to convert.

Tailor Messaging to Unique Needs and Interests

Intent data provides carriers with insights into the specific needs and interests of their target audience. By tailoring their messaging to those unique needs and interests, carriers can create more personalized and effective marketing campaigns that resonate with their customers.

Optimize Marketing and Sales Strategies

By leveraging intent data, carriers can optimize their marketing and sales strategies for maximum impact. For example, if a business notices that a large number of potential customers are searching for a specific product feature, they can highlight that feature in their marketing materials and sales pitches to increase the chances of a sale.

Improve Your Underwriting Strategy

Real-Time Interventions on High-Risk Applicants

Premium leakage, non-disclosure, and misrepresentation are very common in digital insurance applications. If you knew, however, that a user was lying or manipulating answers to important underwriting fields, you would likely underwrite them differently or pass them for manual review. ForMotiv identifies risky behavior during the underwriting process allowing carriers to underwrite more accurately, reduce premium leakage and non-disclosure, and, ultimately, improve loss ratios.

Key Benefits

Here are some of the key benefits that carriers can experience:

Enhanced Lead Scoring and Prioritization: Carriers can identify high-quality leads and can focus their efforts on those individuals and increase their chances of converting them into customers.
Improved Targeting and Personalization: Carriers can create more targeted and personalized marketing campaigns that resonate with their customers.
Increased Conversion Rates and Sales Volume: By tailoring their messaging to the unique needs and interests of their target audience, carriers can increase their conversion rates and sales volume.
Improved Customer Retention and Loyalty: By providing customers with personalized experiences based on their interests and needs, carriers can improve customer retention and loyalty.
Reduced Marketing Waste and Improved ROI: By targeting high-quality leads and creating more effective marketing campaigns, carriers can reduce marketing waste and improve their return on investment (ROI).
Identify and Reduce Premium Leakage & Non-Disclosure: As mentioned above, the rate at which applicants manipulate their applications to receive lower premiums is shocking. It costs carriers nearly $30 billion per year. Solutions like ForMotiv stop premium leakage in its tracks by enabling carriers to dynamically intervene on high-risk applications before they are sold.

First-Party vs Third-Party

Effective use of intent data begins with identifying and collecting the right data points. By doing so, carriers can gain insights into their target audience’s purchasing behavior, and use that information to optimize their marketing strategies and increase revenue.

When it comes to intent data, there are two types that carriers can use: first-party and third-party. First-party intent data is generated directly from a company’s website or other digital channels. This data is collected from forms, surveys, registrations, and other interactions with the company’s web properties. Third-party intent data, on the other hand, is acquired from external sources, such as data providers, publishers, and social media platforms.

First-Party

First-party intent data is highly valuable because it provides carriers with direct insight into their own audience’s behavior. By collecting data from their own digital properties, carriers can gain a better understanding of their audience’s interests, needs, and pain points. This information can be used to create more targeted and effective marketing campaigns, as well as to improve the overall user experience on their website.

Some of the most common first-party intent data collection methods include:

Form submissions: Collecting data from forms on your website, such as contact forms, registration forms, and subscription forms.
Surveys: Conducting surveys to gather feedback from your audience and gain insights into their preferences and behaviors.
Website analytics: Using tools like Google Analytics to track user behavior and interactions with your website.

The newest type of first-party intent data is user behavioral data. ForMotiv developed a way to capture a user’s “digital body language” as they navigate your digital quoting process that can be used in a variety of ways, from predicting the purchase intent of the applicant to the truthfulness of their responses.

Third-Party

Third-party intent data is valuable because it provides carriers with a broader view of their target audience’s behavior. By collecting data from external sources, carriers can gain insights into their audience’s behavior outside of their own digital properties. This information can be used to identify new target audiences, expand reach, and improve targeting.

Some common sources include:

Data providers: Companies that specialize in collecting and analyzing data from various sources, such as social media platforms and online publications.
Publishers: Companies that offer advertising space on their websites and collect data on their audience’s behavior.
Social media platforms: Platforms like Facebook and Twitter offer advertising options that allow carriers to target users based on their behavior on the platform.

Data Collection Methods and Tools

The most common method of collecting this data is through website analytics tools and marketing automation platforms. These tools track user behavior and interactions with a company’s digital content and can provide valuable insights into audience behavior and preferences.

Other methods of collecting intent data include social listening and monitoring tools, browser cookies, and search engine data. Social listening and monitoring tools allow carriers to track mentions of their brand on social media and gain insights into their audience’s behavior on those platforms. Browser cookies can be used to track user behavior across the web, while search engine data can provide insights into the keywords and phrases that users are searching for.

Lastly, as we mentioned above, carriers can leverage a new, unique dataset provided by ForMotiv that has shown to be highly accurate in predicting the intent of the end user.

Ensuring Data Quality and Relevance

To make the most of intent data, carriers must ensure that the data is up-to-date, accurate, and relevant. This requires ongoing monitoring and analysis of the data, as well as the use of tools and platforms that can filter and prioritize the most relevant data points.

One way to ensure data quality is to use data cleansing tools, which can remove duplicate or irrelevant data points. Another way is to use predictive analytics tools, which can help identify patterns and trends in the data that can be used to make more accurate predictions about audience behavior. An example of this would be ForMotiv’s Growth Solution, which predicts, in real-time, the purchase intent of an applicant so carriers can take action to drive the desired outcome. A window shopper vs. a high-intent buyer likely deserves different treatments – ForMotiv enables real-time experiences that adapt to that individual user.

Ultimately, the key to using this data effectively is to understand what data points are most relevant to your business goals and to use that information to create targeted and effective marketing campaigns and conversion strategies.

Analyzing and Interpreting Intent Data

Carriers must analyze and interpret the data they collect to gain meaningful insights into their target audience’s behavior and preferences.

Key Metrics to Track and Measure

Some key metrics for tracking and measuring intent data include website traffic, referral sources, page views, social engagement, email open and click-through rates, and search engine data.

Utilizing AI and Machine Learning for Analysis

AI and machine learning technologies can help carriers analyze large volumes of intent data and uncover patterns and insights that might otherwise go unnoticed. These technologies can also help carriers create predictive models that anticipate future customer behavior based on past patterns. Carriers have been using machine learning for years and most have mature models by this point. Finding a new dataset that can improve a mature model is rare, and highly valuable. Behavioral Data, in most cases, is effective at improving already well-tuned models.

Gaining Actionable Insights

Once carriers have analyzed and interpreted the intent data, they can use the insights to inform their marketing and sales strategies, fine-tune their messaging and content, improve the customer experience, and enhance their risk models.

Conclusion

Intent data is a powerful tool for unlocking insights into customer behavior and preferences, and driving revenue growth for carriers, in addition to improving underwriting. By collecting, analyzing, and interpreting the right data points, carriers can create highly targeted and personalized marketing campaigns that resonate with their target audience, maximize ROI, and improve overall performance in today’s highly competitive digital landscape.