Methodology – a blog on insurance agent websites, web design, and marketing

After a few minutes on the website, he began to notice things were a little off. Nothing major, just a typo here, some improper grammar there, a section out of alignment somewhere. When he started adding these clues up, he slowly came to a very bad realization: he had fallen victim to a phishing scam.

The moral of the story is not that you should NEVER click on an email from any financial institution claiming it needs sensitive account information. We already know that (ahem, dad). Instead, the moral of the story lies in the clues that gave way to my dad realizing he’d been had – the typos, grammar errors, and bad page layout.

As the general public is becoming more experienced with the web, they’re getting more and more sensitive to the small clues that separate a quality, legitimate, website from a fly-by-night scam. One of the most important functions of your insurance agent website is to build trust. To succeed, it must look 100% professional. No matter what type of insurance you sell, as your visitors move through the process of doing business with you, they’re going to expose you to a lot of very sensitive information. They absolutely must trust you if you are going to get their business. If your website gives them any reason whatsoever to question your level of professionalism, you can expect them to move on.

Please learn from my dad’s mistake! If you want people to trust you, make sure your website reflects your professionalism.

And, by the way, in case you’re wondering how things turned out for my click-happy pops, looks like he saved himself by realizing right away that he’d been had. He spent the day yesterday at the bank where they had him close all of his accounts and open new ones. This time, luck was on his side.

Your customers buy insurance from you because they trust you. They know that you will meet their needs, act in a professional manner, and give them the attention and service they want. If a prospect doesn’t trust you, they aren’t going to buy from you. Sales, in a sense, is the process of developing enough trust with your prospects to ensure they will turn to you when they have an insurance need.

In the “old world” of selling insurance, building trust began with your appearance. As the saying goes, you don’t get a second change to make a first impression, and the first impression is largely visual. You needed to look professional. This meant having a clean haircut, wearing a well-pressed high quality suit, and showing up in a Cadillac. We all know intuitively what a trust-worthy professional is supposed to look like, and in the old world building trust was based largely on looking the part.

In the “new world”, most agents are never in the same room with your prospects. They visit your website, talk to you on the phone and exchange emails. But they almost never see you in person. That first impression is no longer based on showing up to an appointment in a shiny Cadillac and crisp suit. Our prospects don’t care what kind of car we drive.

First impressions today are based on your website. Your prospect starts building their impression of you the minute they type in your domain name. Does the site load quickly? Does it work in their browser? Is your page well-designed, clean, and on point? Do you provide informative and well written copy? Or, does it take 10 seconds for the homepage to come up? Do you have a broken image?

Built right, your website can “seal the deal” with your visitors before you even talk to them, showing them that you are someone they trust. But done wrong, your website destroys your chances by making a first impression that you are not someone they should trust. So save some money on the Cadillac, and instead make sure your insurance website makes the right impression.