As COVID-19 has forced many independent agencies to warm up to digitalization, there is an opportunity to work on improving your online marketing funnels, the essence of which is the client data that it generates.

Your funnel is the sales process or journey you guide your clients through after you find them online. Optimizing this is simply fine-tuning the steps you take to attract clients online and turn them into raving fans.

By analyzing online funnels, agencies can measure how they are being perceived on the online marketplace, what types of people they are reaching, why they became clients—or why they chose not to go further—and how their clients want to interact with them. Like a car dashboard, your funnel will self-diagnose and tell you what needs to be done to fix it.

Here's a three-step framework to supercharge your insurance marketing funnels:

1) Audit the funnel. A leaky marketing funnel is the second-most common cause for missed sales targets. A misaligned funnel is the first. Auditing your marketing funnel helps agency owners gain confidence by knowing their current sales scenario at both a granular and 30,000-foot view to address gaps and build upon what's working.

Even the best of funnels can be tweaked, tested and improved. When analyzing your leaks, make sure to audit each piece of your funnel separately. In both the online and offline space, this means auditing the engines you use to generate demand in your services, convert the interested people, and stay atop the latest in optimization techniques.

After you've identified your areas of opportunity, you can get started making improvements.

2) Maximize conversions. The next step in supercharging your insurance marketing funnel is to maximize your conversion opportunities.

In the online space, conversion rate optimization (CRO) is the art of analyzing how to increase conversions—the number of people who reach out to you for a quote—on your website. Whether online or offline, every insurance agent should be looking to improve the client experience so they take the next step.

Improving your client experience online will improve your conversion rate, thus helping you to generate more leads with the same budget. My favorite way to do this is by heat mapping my landing pages. Heat maps of how different audiences react to web content allow you to understand what is and isn't resonating with potential clients. By listening to their reactions, you can ultimately offer a better experience—which means more conversions from the same marketing spend.

Other methods to maximize conversions are A/B testing your advertising and landing page copy, utilizing call tracking and using a customer relationship management system (CRM). 

3) Create personalized experiences. Tailoring the client experience is the latest trend in digital marketing. Companies everywhere use data and analytics to give their clients what they want before they ask for it. As a result, your clients' expectations have risen and they are paying attention to their experience with you before and after they've become a client. One of the ways insurance agents can create a unique pre-client experience is through targeting the exact types of clients you want to work with online. You do this by positioning your advertising and search engine optimization (SEO) campaigns for the exact markets you want to reach and sharing relevant content with them.

After you convert an online visitor into a new lead, they are immediately routed to the CRM where the system builds data on the contact and segments them into the proper lead nurturing lists. 

Funnels are a living and breathing representation of your organization's sales assembly line. More conversions ultimately lead to more revenue. And every percentage increase in conversions impacts all your other marketing channels. As you continue to drive traffic from your marketing channels, optimization will help you turn more of those visitors into leads and leads into clients. 

Camille D. Bob III is a digital marketing strategy consultant and founder of Insurance Funnels, the No. 1 funnel agency for insurance. Download The Insurance Funnels Blueprint.