EJ's Blog

Have you ever thought of how much impact smoking has on your finances? Health Canada’s cost calculator finds that smoking half a pack a day can cost up to $2,500 per year. Meanwhile, on a nationwide scale, the Canadian Cancer Society reported that smoking generates $6.5 billion in health-care costs yearly. And the expenses don’t end there — not if you’re looking to get life insurance.

What does life insurance have to do with it? Your life insurance rate depends on how healthy you are right now. But it also depends on whether you’re putting your health at risk with lifestyle choices like smoking. Here’s how this costly habit can affect your life insurance premium.

How smoking can affect your life insurance premium

To start, let’s look at the basics of life insurance. You buy a policy that provides financial protection and pay for it with monthly or annual fees, called premiums. What happens if you die while the policy is still active? Your beneficiaries get a specific amount of money stated in the policy, known as the death benefit. They can then use that money to help pay off debts, mortgages, loans and other living expenses.

Basically, life insurance can help give your family financial assistance and security after you die. So, how do insurance companies put a price on that security? A lot of the cost of life insurance depends on your current state of health and your family history. But what’s one of the biggest factors insurance companies look at when assessing your health risk? Whether or not you’re a smoker.

Paula MacMillan is a Sun Life Financial advisor in Winnipeg. “The health hazards of smoking and the risks it puts on your life are well-known,” she says. So what happens when an insurance company reviews your life insurance application? “They’ll want to know if, among other things, you’ve been smoking cigarettes or using any tobacco or smoking cessation products in the past year.” Underwriting is when an insurance company reviews your health risks after you’ve applied for life insurance. This process lets an insurer calculate the coverage you’re eligible for. It also ensures your premium reflects the level of risk.

Simply put: Your risk level affects your premium. “Being a smoker puts people at a higher risk of smoking-related illnesses,” Macmillan says. “And this translates to higher premiums.”

How much more do smokers have to pay for life insurance?

Smoking comes with a price. But exactly how much higher are life insurance rates for smokers? “A lot of people I’ve worked with were surprised to find that compared to non-smoker premiums, life insurance rates can be much more costly for smokers,” MacMillan says.

For instance, let’s take a 30-year-old, non-smoking man with a $700,000, 20-year individual term life insurance policy. He might get quoted a monthly premium of $50.13. But if he turns out be a smoker, his monthly premium could become $98.01. And what happens if he takes up smoking before it’s time to renew his policy? Then he can expect to pay a lot more than if he had remained tobacco-free.

From her experience, MacMillan finds that it helps to show smokers what their non-smoker rates would be. “Just knowing how much they could be saving gives them one more reason to quit,” she says.

Who’s considered a smoker on a life insurance application?

Most insurers would categorize people as smokers if they regularly use tobacco or nicotine in any form. This includes the following products:

Cigarettes, cigars and cigarillos

Chewing tobacco

Smoking cessation products like nicotine gum and patches

Does vaping affect your life insurance?

An application might not ask about vaping. But many applications require medical tests. These tests can detect the nicotine in your blood or urine regardless of how you consume it. So if you vape, you could still be listed as a smoker.

Does cannabis affect your life insurance?

What if you’re a casual cannabis user, who doesn’t combine marijuana with tobacco? “Then you could fall into the non-smoker category for life insurance,” MacMillan explains.

But what if you’re consuming cannabis regularly or more than once a day? “Then it’s likely that you’ll pay a higher rate,” she says.

What happens when a smoker buys life insurance online?

“Online coverage can’t distinguish between smokers and non-smokers, so the rates are usually blended,” MacMillan says. In other words, you could pay somewhere between the smoker and non-smoker rates even if you don’t smoke.

What happens to your life insurance premium if you quit smoking?

Ready to butt out? The year you quit smoking, you’ll see a drastic improvement in both your health and your finances. In terms of your life insurance policy, you may be eligible for non-smoker rates if you can:

Sign a non-smoking declaration stating that you’ve been a non-smoker for the last 12 months. This means you no longer smoke, consume or use cigarettes, cigars, chewing tobacco, nicotine patches or gum.

Have a urine test to prove there’s no trace of nicotine in your system.

Confirm that there haven’t been any significant negative changes to your health.

MacMillan finds the last point could pose a problem in certain cases. “Insurers want to know what made you decide to quit,” she says.

What if you choose to quit because you’ve just had a serious health complication and your doctor advised it? “Then they’re not going to categorize you as a non-smoker,” she adds.

Let’s say you bought a permanent individual life insurance policy as a smoker. But you’ve decided to quit smoking after surviving a heart attack. At this point, your health still puts you in a high-risk category. This means your insurer is unlikely to remove the smoker rating from your policy — even if you quit.

Getting a premium reduction can be difficult if you have other health risks holding you back. But it’s still possible — especially if you quit smoking while you’re still healthy. Bottom line: If you can quit smoking, you can start saving.

CREDITS: Farhana Uddin

DATE: July 04, 2019

For the most part, there are two types of life insurance plans — either term or permanent plans or some combination of the two. Life insurers offer various forms of term plans and traditional life policies as well as “interest sensitive” products which have become more prevalent since the 1980’s. In New York State, the Department of Financial Services must approve any life insurance policy before a company can issue it to consumers and New York Insurance Law provides for standard provisions that must be included in every policy.

Term Insurance

Term insurance provides protection for a specified period of time. This period could be as short as one year or provide coverage for a specific number of years such as 5, 10, 20 years or to a specified age such as 80 or in some cases up to the oldest age in the life insurance mortality tables. Policies are sold with various premium guarantees. The longer the guarantee, the higher the initial premium. If you die during the term period, the company will pay the face amount of the policy to your beneficiary. If you live beyond the term period you had selected, no benefit is payable. As a rule, term policies offer a death benefit with no savings element or cash value.

Premiums are locked in for the specified period of time under the policy terms. The premiums you pay for term insurance are lower at the earlier ages as compared with the premiums you pay for permanent insurance, but term rates rise as you grow older. Term plans may be “convertible” to a permanent plan of insurance. The coverage can be “level” providing the same benefit until the policy expires or you can have “decreasing” coverage during the term period with the premiums remaining the same. If you do not pay the premium for your term insurance policy, it will generally lapse without cash value, as compared to a permanent type of policy that has a cash value component. Currently term insurance rates are very competitive and among the lowest historically experienced.

It should be noted that it is a widely held belief that term insurance is the least expensive pure life insurance coverage available. One needs to review the policy terms carefully to decide which term life options are suitable to meet your particular circumstances.

Types of Term Insurance

Renewable Term. Renewable term plans give you the right to renew for another period when a term ends, regardless of the state of your health. With each new term the premium is increased. The right to renew the policy without evidence of insurability is an important advantage to you. Otherwise, the risk you take is that your health may deteriorate, and you may be unable to obtain a policy at the same rates or even at all, leaving you and your beneficiaries without coverage.

Convertible Term. Convertible term policies often permit you to exchange the policy for a permanent plan. You must exercise this option during the conversion period. The length of the conversion period will vary depending on the type of term policy purchased. If you convert within the prescribed period, you are not required to give any information about your health. The premium rate you pay on conversion is usually based on your “current attained age”, which is your age on the conversion date. This type of policy often provides the maximum protection with the smallest amount of cash outlay.

Level or Decreasing Term. Under a level term policy, the face amount of the policy remains the same for the entire period. With decreasing term, the face amount reduces over the period. The premium stays the same each year. Often such policies are sold as mortgage protection with the amount of insurance decreasing as the balance of the mortgage decreases. If the insured dies the proceeds of the policy can be used to pay off the mortgage.

Adjustable Premium. Traditionally, insurers have not had the right to change premiums after the policy is sold. Since such policies may continue for many years, insurers must use conservative mortality, interest and expense rate estimates in the premium calculation. Adjustable premium insurance, however, allows insurers to offer insurance at lower “current” premiums based upon less conservative assumptions with the right to change these premiums in the future. The premium, however, can never be more than the maximum guaranteed premiums stated in the policy.

Permanent Insurance (Whole Life or Ordinary Life)

While term insurance is designed to provide protection for a specified time period, permanent insurance is designed to provide coverage for your entire lifetime. To keep the premium rate level, the premium at the younger ages exceeds the actual cost of protection. This extra premium builds a reserve (cash value) which helps pay for the policy in later years as the cost of protection rises above the premium. Whole life policies stretch the cost of insurance over a longer period of time in order to level out the otherwise increasing cost of insurance. Under some policies, premiums are required to be paid for a set number of years. Under other policies, premiums are paid throughout the policyholder’s lifetime. The insurance company invests the excess premium dollars

This type of policy, which is sometimes called cash value life insurance, generates a savings element. Cash values are critical to a permanent life insurance policy. The size of the cash value build-up differs from company to company. Sometimes, there is no correlation between the size of the cash value and the premiums paid. It is the cash value of the policy that can be accessed while the policyholder is alive.

The Commissioners 1980 Standard Ordinary Mortality Table (CSO) is the current table used in calculating minimum nonforfeiture values and policy reserves for ordinary life insurance policies. This table provides the minimum cash values that must be guaranteed in your policy.

The policy’s essential elements consist of the premium payable each year, the death benefits payable to the beneficiary and the cash surrender value the policyholder would receive if the policy were surrendered prior to death. You may make a loan against the cash value of the policy at a specified rate of interest or a variable rate of interest but such outstanding loans, if not repaid, will reduce the death benefit.

In 1984 a new federal tax law required that for permanent insurance to enjoy preferred tax treatment it must provide coverage up to at least age 95, limit the amount of premium that may be paid in relation to the face amount of coverage and establish a minimum ratio between cash value and face amount of insurance. Many permanent policies will contain provisions, which specify these tax requirements.

There are two basic categories of permanent insurance, traditional and interest-sensitive, each with a number of variations. In addition, each category is generally available in either fixed-dollar or variable form.

Traditional Whole Life

Traditional whole life policies are based upon long-term estimates of expense, interest and mortality. The premiums, death benefits and cash values are stated in the policy.

There are six basic variations of traditional permanent insurance:

Non-Participating Whole Life: A non-participating whole life policy will give you a level premium and face amount during your entire life. The advantages of such a policy are its fixed costs and generally low out-of-pocket premium payments. The disadvantage is that it pays no dividends.

Participating Whole Life: A participating whole life policy pays dividends. The dividends represent the favorable experience of the company and result from excess investment earnings, favorable mortality and expense savings. Dividends can be paid in cash, used to reduce premiums, left to accumulate at interest or used to purchase paid-up additional insurance. Dividends are not guaranteed.

Indeterminate Premium Whole Life: An indeterminate premium whole life policy is like a non-participating whole life plan of insurance except that it provides for adjustable premiums. The company will charge a “current” premium based on its current estimate of investment earnings, mortality, and expense costs. If these estimates change in later years, the company will adjust the premium accordingly but never above the maximum guaranteed premium stated in the policy.

Economatic Whole Life: An economatic whole life policy provides for a basic amount of participating whole life insurance with an additional supplemental coverage provided through the use of dividends. This additional insurance usually is a combination of decreasing term insurance and paid-up dividend additions. Eventually, the dividend additions should equal the original amount of supplemental coverage. However, because dividends may not be sufficient to purchase enough paid-up additions at a future date, it is possible that at some future time there could be a substantial decrease in the amount of supplemental insurance coverage.

Limited Payment Whole Life If you want to pay premiums for a limited time the limited payment whole life policy gives your lifetime protection but requires only a limited number of premium payments. Because the premiums are paid over a shorter span of time, the premium payments will be higher than under the whole life plan.

Single Premium Whole Life Single premium whole life is limited payment life where one large premium payment is made. The policy is fully paid up and no further premiums are required. Many such policies have substantial surrender charges if you want to cash in the policy during the first few years. Since a substantial payment is involved, it should be viewed as an investment-oriented product.

Interest in single premium life insurance is primarily due to the tax-deferred treatment of the build-up of its cash values. Taxes will be incurred on the gain, however, when you surrender the policy. You may borrow on the cash value of the policy but remember that you may incur a substantial tax bill when you surrender, even if you have borrowed out all the cash value.

Interest Sensitive Whole Life

While insurers guarantee stated benefits on traditional contracts far into the future based on long-term and overall company experience, they allocate investment earnings differently on interest sensitive whole life in order to better reflect current fluctuations in interest rates. The advantage is that improvements in interest rates will be reflected more quickly in interest sensitive insurance than in traditional; the disadvantage, of course, is that decreases in interest rates will also be felt more quickly in interest sensitive whole life.

There are four basic interest sensitive whole life policies:

Universal Life The universal life policy is actually more than interest sensitive as it is designed to reflect the insurer’s current mortality and expense as well as interest earnings rather than historic rates. Universal life works by treating separately the three basic elements of the policy: premium, death benefit and cash value. The company credits your premiums to the cash value account. Periodically the company deducts from the cash value account its expenses and the cost of insurance protection, usually described as the mortality deduction charge. The balance of the cash value account accumulates at the interest credited. The company guarantees a minimum interest rate and a maximum mortality charge. Some universal life policies also specify a maximum basis for the expense charge. These guarantees are usually very conservative. Current assumptions are critical to interest sensitive products such as Universal Life. When interest rates are high, benefit projections (such as cash value) are also high. When interest rates are low, these projections are not as attractive.

Universal life is also the most flexible of all the various kinds of policies. Because it treats the elements of the policy separately, universal life allows you to change or skip premium payments or change the death benefit more easily than with any other policy.

The policy usually gives you an option to select one or two types of death benefits. Under one option for your beneficiaries received only the face amount of the policy, under the other they receive both the face amount and the cash value account. If you want the maximum amount of death benefit now, the second option should be selected.

You generally pay a planned premium designed to keep the policy in force for life, and accumulate cash value, based upon the interest and expense and mortality charges you assume. It is important that these assumptions be realistic because if they are not, you may have to pay more to keep the policy from decreasing or lapsing. On the other hand, if your experience is better than the assumptions, than you may be able in the future to skip a premium, to pay less, or to have the plan paid up at an early date.

You do not have to pay the planned premium, but if you pay less, the benefit may be more like term insurance, which is only in force for a limited time and builds no cash value. On the other hand, if you pay more, and your assumptions are realistic, it is possible to pay up the policy at an early date.

If you surrender a universal life policy, you may receive less than the cash value account because of surrender charges which can be of two types. A front-end type of policy will deduct a percentage of the premium paid, while a back-end type policy will deduct a more substantial charge but only if the policy is surrendered before a specified period, generally 10 years but which could be as long as 20 years. A back-end type policy would be preferable if you intend to maintain coverage, and the charge decreases with each year you continue the policy. Remember that the interest rate and expense and mortality charges payables initially are not guaranteed for the life of the policy.

Although this type of policy gives you maximum flexibility, you will need to actively manage the policy to maintain sufficient funding, especially because the insurance company can increase mortality and expense charges. You should remember that the mortality charges increase, as you become older.

Excess Interest Whole Life If you are not interested in all of the flexible features of Universal Life, some insurers offer fixed premium versions called excess interest whole life. The key feature is that premium payments are required when due just like traditional whole life. If premiums are paid when due, the policy will not lapse.

With the premium level fixed, any additional or excess interest credited, or better life insurance experience, will improve the cash value of the policy. The premium level will probably be comparable to traditional whole life policies. Cash value may be applied to pay future premium payments. This type of product maximizes the deferred tax growth of your cash value.

Current Assumption Whole Life Current assumption whole life is similar to a universal life policy, but your company determines the amount of premium to be paid. The company sets the initial premium based upon its current estimate of future investment earnings and mortality experience and retains the contractual right to reevaluate its original estimates to increase or decrease your premium payments later. If premiums are increased, some policies let you decrease the face amount of coverage so that you can continue to pay the original premium. Current mortality and experience and investment earnings can be credited to the insurance policy either through the cash value account and/or the premium or dividend structure (depending on whether it is a stock or mutual company). Regardless, this type of policy has the following characteristics:

The premiums are subject to change based on the experience (mortality, expenses, investment) of the company. The policyowner does not exercise control over the changes.

The policyowner can use the cash value to make loans just as he/she would with any traditional ordinary life insurance policy.

A minimum amount of cash value is guaranteed, just as with traditional ordinary life insurance.

The death benefit does not fluctuate.

Single Premium Whole Life There are a few single premium life products, which determine the premium using the current interest rate assumption. You may be asked to make additional premium payments where coverage could terminate because the interest rate dropped. Your starting interest rate is fixed only for a year or in some cases three to five years. The guaranteed rate provided for in the policy is much lower (e.g., 4%). Another feature that is sometimes emphasized is the “no cost” loan. Companies will set the loan interest rate to be charged on policy loans equal to the rate that is being credited to the policy.

Variable Life

Most types of both traditional and interest sensitive life policies can be purchased on either a fixed-dollar or variable basis. On a fixed-dollar basis, premium, face amount and cash values are specified in dollar amounts.

On the variable basis, face amount and cash value are specified in units, and the value of the units may increase or decrease depending upon the investment results. You can allocate your premiums among various investment pools (like stock, bond, money market, mutual funds and real estate pools) depending on the amount of risk you are willing to assume in the hope of a higher return.

Traditional variable life provides a minimum guaranteed death benefit, but many universal variable life products do not, and should investment experience be bad, coverage will terminate if substantially higher premium payments are not made. Variable life is also made available on a single premium basis but if investment experience is poor additional premiums will be required.

Other Coverages (Variations on the Basic Plans)

>Credit Life Insurance

Although you can obtain credit life insurance (term) as an individual, it is usually sold on a group basis to a creditor, such as a bank, finance company or a company selling high priced items on the installment plan. The policy generally pays the outstanding balance of the debt at the time of the borrower’s death, subject to policy maximums. Debts covered in this way include personal loans; loans to cover the purchase of appliances, motor vehicles, mobile homes, farm equipment; educational loans; bank credit and revolving check loans; mortgages loans; etc.

When you borrow from an organization that has a group credit life policy, the organization may require you to purchase credit life insurance, or it may simply offer the protection as an additional service. In either case you must receive a certificate of insurance describing the provisions of the group policy and any insurance charge. Generally, the maximum amount of coverage is $220,000 for a mortgage loan and $55,000 for all other debts. Credit life insurance need not be purchased from the organization granting the loan.

If you are covered under a group credit life policy and you terminate coverage by prepaying or defaulting on the loan, or if the group policy itself is terminated, you may be entitled to a partial refund of the premium you paid so check your certificate. If life insurance is required by a creditor as a condition for making a loan, you may be able to assign an existing life insurance policy, if you have one. However, you may wish to buy group credit life insurance in spite of its higher cost because of its convenience and its availability, generally without detailed evidence of insurability.

Monthly Debit Ordinary Insurance Debit insurance

is insurance with premiums payable monthly which are meant to be collected by the agent at your home. In most cases, however, home collections are not made, and premiums are mailed by you to the agent or to the company.

There are certain factors that tend to increase the costs of debit insurance more than regular life insurance plans:

Certain expenses are the same no matter what the size of the policy, so that smaller policies issued as debit insurance will have higher premiums per $1,000 of insurance than larger size regular insurance policies.

In some companies, more debit policyholders allow their policies to lapse than is generally the case with policyholders of regular life insurance. Since early lapses are expensive to a company, the costs must be passed on to all debit policyholders.

Since debit insurance is designed to include home collections, higher commissions and fees are paid on debit insurance than on regular insurance. In many cases these higher expenses are passed on to the policyholder.

As a general rule the combination of smaller amounts, higher lapse rates and higher commissions and fees on debit insurance tends to make it more expensive than comparable regular life insurance plans.

Where a company has different premiums for debit and regular insurance it may be possible for you to purchase a larger amount of regular insurance than debit at no extra cost. Therefore, if you are thinking of debit insurance, you should certainly investigate regular life insurance as a cost-saving alternative.

Modified Life Plan

A modified life plan is similar to whole life except that you pay a lower premium for the first few years and a higher than regular whole life premium in later years. This plan is designed for those who cannot initially afford the regular whole life premium but who want the higher premium coverage and feel they will eventually be able to pay the higher premium.

The Family Policy

The family policy is a combination plan that provides insurance protection under one contract to all members of your immediate family husband, wife and children. Usually, family policies are sold in units (packages) of protection, such as $5,000 on the main wage earner, $1,500 on the spouse and $1,000 on each child.

Joint Life and Survivor Insurance

Joint Life and Survivor Insurance provides coverage for two or more persons with the death benefit payable at the death of the last of the insureds. Premiums are significantly lower under joint life and survivor insurance than for policies that insure only one person, since the probability of having to pay a death claim is lower.

Joint Life Insurance

Joint Life Insurance provides coverage for two or more persons with the death benefit payable at the first death. Premiums are significantly higher than for policies that insure one person, since the probability of having to pay a death claim is higher.

Endowment Insurance

Endowment insurance provides for the payment of the face amount to your beneficiary if death occurs within a specific period of time such as twenty years, or, if at the end of the specific period you are still alive, for the payment of the face amount to you. Due to recent tax law changes many endowment plans no longer qualify as life insurance for tax purposes and are generally not being offered by insurers.

Juvenile insurance

Juvenile insurance provides a minimum of protection and could provide coverage, which might not be available at a later date. Amounts provided under such coverage are generally limited based on the age of the child. The current limitations for minors under the age of 14.5 would be the greater of $50,000 or 50% of the amount of life insurance in force upon the life of the applicant. The limitations on a minor under the age of 4.5 would be the greater of $50,000 or 25% of the amount of life insurance in force upon the life of the applicant. Juvenile insurance may be sold with a payor benefit rider, which provides for waiving future premiums on the child’s policy in the event of the death of the person who pays the premium.

Senior Life Plans

Senior life insurance, sometimes referred to as graded death benefit plans, provides eligible older applicants with minimal whole life coverage without a medical examination. Since such policies are issued with little or no underwriting they will provide only for a return of premium or minimum graded benefits if death occurs during a specified period which is generally the first two or three policy years. The permissible issue ages for this type of coverage range from ages 50 75. The maximum issue amount of coverage is $25,000. These policies are usually more expensive than a fully underwritten policy if the person qualifies as a standard risk.

Pre-need Insurance

This type of coverage is for a small face amount, typically purchased to pay the burial expenses of the insured. As previously mentioned within the discussion of monthly debit ordinary insurance, this coverage often carries a higher premium per $1,000 of coverage than larger size policies.

CREDITS: New York State

DATE: 2022

Life insurance can be an essential part of financial and legacy planning. When shopping around for coverage, you may come across various products that fall into two main categories: term life and permanent life (also commonly referred to as whole life). Understanding the essential differences between these two main types of insurance can help you make coverage decisions according to your needs and goals.

Remember that insurance products for groups, policies that cover a group of people under a single contract (e.g., coverage offered through an employer), can differ from policies sold to individuals. The following information below focuses on products as typically sold to individuals.

What is term life Insurance?

A term life policy is purchased to last for a specified period, such as 1, 5, 10, or sometimes as much as 30 years. Coverage expires when that period ends–hence the name–and therefore, a payout only happens if the insured’s death occurs during the specified period. If the insured person outlives the original policy period, coverage renewal may be an option, but the premiums may be higher.

How term life coverage works

A term life policy may be the most simple, straightforward option for life insurance for many people. A death benefit can replace the income you would have earned during a set period, such as until a minor aged dependent grows up. Or, it can pay off a large debt, such as a mortgage, so that a surviving spouse or other heirs won’t have to worry about making the payments.

When exploring life insurance options, you may encounter the word “cash value.” Term life policies do not build cash value. Your premiums go towards your payout, making costs for policyholders comparatively lower than for permanent life insurance. However, some insurers have created term life products with a “return of premium” feature, returning a portion of the premiums you pay if a claim is not filed before the end of the coverage term. These policies can be more expensive upfront than standard term life insurance.

There are different types of term life, including level term and decreasing term.

Level term life insurance offers a death benefit that stays the same throughout the policy.

Decreasing term life insurance reduces potential death benefits over the policy’s term, usually in one-year increments.

For more details on the different types of term life insurance, click here.

What is permanent or whole life insurance?

Permanent life, often called whole life insurance or cash value life insurance, provides coverage for the insured person’s lifetime as long as premium payments are in good standing. Unlike term life, these policies may build cash value, which a policyholder or their heirs can access under certain conditions. Premiums, as a result, can be higher than for term life policies. Whole life products include several subcategories, including real traditional life, universal life, variable life, and variable-universal life.

How does “cash value” work?

When you pay premiums for permanent life insurance, they go toward the cost of insuring you, your policy fees, and building cash value. In the case of traditional whole life, both the death benefit and the premium are typically designed to stay at the same (level) throughout the policy period. However, the costs to insure you can climb high as you age, especially when you live past age 80.

Charging a premium that increases each year would make life insurance unaffordable for many people in their advanced ages. Instead, the insurance company charges throughout the coverage period a higher premium than needed to pay out claims in the policy’s early years. The company invests this money and, as necessary, uses it to supplement the level premium to help defer the cost of insuring older policyholders.

By law, when these “overpayments” reach a certain amount, they must become available to the policyholder as a cash value, accumulating in a savings account. Under certain conditions, the policyholder can withdraw or take out a loan against the accumulated cash value. It’s important to remember that cash value is usually restricted as a living benefit, remaining with the insurance company when the insured dies. Any loans against the cash value may reduce the death benefit.

Term life or permanent life: which is right for me?

All permanent or whole life policies typically offer the advantage of coverage during your entire life but can charge higher premiums than term life products. Therefore, your death benefit can be smaller than with term life for the same amount of money. People choosing whole life are likely to prioritize certain features that fit with their individual financial goals, such as the ability to plan for consistent benefits and premiums and the potential for tax-deferred savings growth via the cash value component of their policy.

CREDITS: Insurance Information Institute

DATE: 2022

Any company that wants to connect with its target market and accomplish its marketing objectives must invest in marketing initiatives. However, planning and managing marketing initiatives can be challenging and time-consuming. Arete Automation comes into play here.

Arete Automation is an effective marketing platform that makes it simple to design and run marketing campaigns, monitor their performance, and access many resources to assist you in achieving your goals. Businesses of all sizes may use Arete Automation to engage with their target markets and develop campaigns that motivate them to take action.

You need a marketing platform like Arete Automation if you want to engage with your target audience and accomplish your marketing objectives. This user-friendly platform makes it simple to build and manage marketing programs, monitor their effectiveness, and access a wealth of tools to support you in achieving your goals. Businesses of all sizes may use Arete Automation to engage with their target markets and develop campaigns that motivate them to take action.

How to Use Arete Automation to Create a Successful Marketing Plan

Are you trying to figure out how to make a marketing strategy that will work? If so, you might want to think about using Arete Automation. You can accomplish your marketing objectives with the effective marketing platform Arete Automation. You can quickly develop, track, and optimize your marketing initiatives using Arete Automation l. You can also readily evaluate your outcomes. Additionally, Arete Automation offers you the resources and tools to develop effective marketing campaigns. Read on to discover more about Arete Automation’s marketing strategy if you want to build a successful marketing campaign.

Let’s first examine what constitutes an effective marketing strategy.

A strong marketing strategy includes the following essential components:

1. Identify your marketing objectives — Establishing an effective marketing strategy begins with identifying your goals. What do your marketing strategies want to accomplish? Do you want to boost brand recognition, produce leads, or enhance sales? Setting concrete, quantifiable goals that will enable you to monitor and evaluate your progress is possible after you are clear on what you want to accomplish.

2. Find out who your target market is by researching them. Who are your marketing campaigns’ intended customers? What needs and wants are there among people? Why do they do it? Your ability to establish marketing initiatives that are both effective and relevant to your target market will depend on your ability to do so.

3. Choose the appropriate marketing channels — The third stage is choosing the proper ones. You can use various online and offline marketing techniques to connect with your target market. Consider your goals, target market, and budget when deciding which channels are best for your company. After that, try out a few different channels to see which ones are most effective for you.

4. Create magnetic content: The fourth phase involves creating engaging content. Your content should be relevant to and valuable to your target audience. Your material should also be well-written and interesting to attract readers and encourage them to take action.

5. Promote your content — Promoting your material is the fifth step. Once you’ve produced excellent content, you need to expose it to your intended audience. Your website, social networking platforms, email marketing, and other internet channels can be a medium to promote your content.

6. Assess your outcomes — The last step is to assess your results. It will allow you to evaluate your marketing initiatives’ success and recommend improvements. Monitor your website’s traffic, leads, and sales to gauge your success. Additionally, get client feedback to determine what your campaigns worked and didn’t.

You can design an effective marketing strategy that will assist you in reaching your business objectives by using the methods listed below.

How to Use Arete Automation to Reach Your Target Audience

Let’s look at how Arete Automation can assist you in connecting with your target audience now that you know the components of a successful marketing strategy. As we’ve already mentioned, Arete Automation is a powerful marketing platform that gives you the materials and tools you need to build effective marketing campaigns. You can quickly develop, track, and optimize your marketing initiatives using Arete Automation. You can also readily evaluate your outcomes. Additionally, Arete Automation enables you to segment your audience for more precise targeting.

Making customized and targeted content is one of the finest strategies to engage your target audience. Arete Automation allows you to divide your audience into various categories, enabling you to accomplish this. By doing this, you may produce material that appeals to each demographic and distribute it via their preferred channels. Arete Automation further gives you solid tools for managing and developing your content. These tools make it simple to produce high-quality content that interests and converts your target market.

Email marketing is a fantastic method of reaching your target market. Arete Automation gives you the tools to design stunning and successful email campaigns to find and engage your target audience. Additionally, you can customize your email campaigns with the Arete Automation segmentation function so that each recipient sees pertinent communications. Your email marketing will be more successful and have a greater conversion rate.

To sum up, Arete Automation is a powerful marketing platform that may assist you in connecting with your target market and achieving your professional objectives. You can quickly generate targeted and tailored content using Arete Automation, monitor your results and improve the effectiveness of your campaigns. Check out Arete Automation immediately if you’re seeking a strategy to advance your marketing.

Arete Automation Alternative

Many companies are switching from these platforms to Arete Automation due to the low cost and simplicity when comparing Arete Automation to Hubspot, ActiveCampaign, and Clickfunnels. A wise substitution for these other platforms is Arete Automation.

The Verdict

According to our Arete Automation review, Arete Automation is the only option if you search for an all-in-one platform to manage your sales and marketing initiatives. As we share our Arete Automation review, we want to emphasize that the system offers all the tools required to get going, including email marketing, lead management, and set up Arete Automation assistance. Do keep in mind that it can be a little intimidating at first. Due to its extensive functionality, there is a steep learning curve. But we have overcome that learning curve and are ready to assist!

To find out more about how we can assist you in creating a profitable online presence for your company, get in touch with us immediately. You may use our platform to generate more leads and sales with the assistance of our experts to set up your account and get going.

Here at ARETE AUTOMATION, you can reach out to more people and grow your network without having to do too much.

SIGN UP TODAY! www.areteautomation.com

#areteautomation #digitalmarketing #marketingautomation

As health insurance companies increasingly shift health care costs onto patients through high deductibles and coinsurance, more than one-third of insured Americans report spending more in out-of-pocket expenses than they could afford in the last month. That’s not how insurance is supposed to work.

Many patients may not know it, but there are tens of billions of dollars in rebates and discounts on medicines that are given to insurance companies and other middlemen. Too often, these rebates and values don’t get to patients who need them. As a result, some patients pay more for medicines than their insurance company pays.

Unlike government price setting, which threatens Americans’ access to crucial, breakthrough medicines, we should ensure the rebates and discounts insurers receive get passed on to patients at the pharmacy counter — not pocketed by the insurance companies, hospitals, and middlemen.

Putting an end to the pandemic and strengthening the system

A perpetual life insurance policy’s cash value is readily available for borrowing. The money can be used for any purpose and repaid anytime you choose, and a life insurance policy loan has comparatively low-interest rates. There are no loan restrictions or prerequisites (other than the amount of cash value). The drawback? You run the risk of losing your policy (and its cash value) if you don’t pay the loan’s interest, plus you’ll probably owe a lot of money in taxes. It’s simple to get cash by borrowing against your life insurance policy, provided you can make your payments on time.

Can you borrow against your life insurance policy?

How much can you borrow?

How do you take out a life insurance policy loan?

Pros vs. cons of taking out a life insurance loan

Does your life insurance coverage allow for borrowing?

The amount of money you would get if you surrendered your life insurance policy is its cash value. A portion of the premium you pay for a life insurance policy with a cash value, such as whole or universal life insurance, goes toward the cash value each time you make payment. The policy’s terms specify the interest rate, which is how the cash value increases over time. You can borrow cash from the insurer if your permanent life insurance policy builds cash value by using the cash value as security. This choice is usually only accessible until the cash worth of your life insurance policy has grown to a certain level, which might take five to ten years of premium payments. Due to the absence of a cash value component, term life insurance plans are less expensive than permanent ones. They cannot be used as collateral for loans, and if you decide to surrender a term life insurance policy, you will not be compensated.

How Much Can You Borrow from a Life Insurance Policy?

How much you can borrow from a life insurance policy varies by insurer. Still, the maximum policy loan amount is typically at least 90% of the cash value, with no minimum amount.

When you take out a policy loan, you’re not removing money from the cash value of your account. Instead, you’re taking a loan from the insurer and using the cash value as collateral. This is a significant benefit, as the cash value remains within the life insurance policy and continues to accumulate interest.

You don’t need to pay back the loan in a set period, as many other forms of loan are required. However, if you don’t pay the insurer the annual interest, which can be fixed or variable, what will add the interest payment to the value of your outstanding loan?

Length of the loan

You’ll get hit with compounding interest if your loan stretches over many years. And if the total outstanding loan exceeds your policy’s cash value, the policy will lapse. If this happens, you will lose coverage and hit a high tax bill if the outstanding loan exceeds the amount you’ve paid in premiums.

There is a risk in borrowing nearly the total amount of the policy’s cash value, so if you take out a policy loan, continually carefully monitor its size compared to your cash value. In addition, we would recommend making interest payments whenever possible.

How do you take out a life insurance policy loan?

The process of taking out a life insurance loan is straightforward. You fill out a form from the insurer and often get the money deposited in your account within a few days. You may need to confirm your identity, sign a confirmation document or provide a notarized confirmation before receiving your loan if:

You provided new account information to the insurer in the last month

The policy changed ownership recently

The loan exceeds a specific size, such as $50,000

Pros and cons of taking out a life insurance loan

Life insurance collateral loans are a simple way to get money on short notice with few restrictions. You must be very careful about managing the account’s cash value and paying off interest as required.

However, besides the risk of the policy lapsing, there are a few downsides to borrowing against your whole or universal life insurance.

There are no qualifiers for a policy loan.

You can borrow against your life insurance policy without having to meet the requirements for conventional loans. The loan does not reflect on your credit report because there was no credit check. You also don’t need to present any income documentation. You will need to provide identification and evidence of your loan request at most.

If you need money immediately, as for an urgent medical need, life insurance collateral loans might be a perfect alternative because there are no requirements or checks. They can also be used as a bridge loan while you wait for a loan from another source to be authorized. It usually works in your favor to repay an insurance loan as soon as possible. The loan’s interest accrues annually, and the policy will expire if the balance is too high. If this occurs, you would have paid premiums totaling thousands of dollars with nothing to show (no coverage). You can also owe taxes if the loan balance is more extensive than your paid premiums.

Another justification for repaying the policy loan is that the outstanding sum will be subtracted from the death benefit that will be distributed to your dependents after your passing.

Pay it back anytime

Although much has changed in the insurance industry over the past 325 years since the Amiable Society for Perpetual Assurance Office produced the first life insurance policy, the industry’s long-standing, reliable procedures have remained primarily unchanged. Insurers have logically concluded that since their industry is risk-averse, nothing needs to be fixed.

That formula makes a lot more sense when consumers aren’t primarily responsible for driving significant changes in the life insurance industry. Most people have little interest in it; only 15% of 1,000 customers polled in late 2020 rated life or health insurance as one of their top three financial priorities.

But therein lay the difficulty faced by life insurers: attracting new clients while keeping existing ones interested and involved. This is especially true for clients who don’t believe life insurance offers much value to their lives. It is simpler to recruit, keep, and engage those most likely to require insurance, but this exacerbates the issue of adverse selection.

The picture for life insurers is obvious once these considerations are taken into account, along with the rise of creative insurance businesses that have proven competent at acquiring clients through customized solutions and elegant user experiences. Insurance companies cannot rely on the industry to remain as it has over the past four centuries while functioning without severe upheaval.

The bright side is that they can count on having support as they go through this change. Working with industry newcomers to build a whole that is bigger than the sum of its parts is the best way to accomplish change on the necessary scale.

The Importance of Established Companies for New Ventures

What necessitates this alliance of forces? Legacy life insurers offer the extensive experience, sector knowledge, and resources necessary to function efficiently and create new projects that will produce the intended results; despite whatever inefficiencies have hampered them.

Unlike other types of insurance, life insurance is unique. The cost of a life insurance policy depends on a far more complicated set of factors connected to policyholders’ health and life expectancies than the cost of a home insurance policy, which can easily be insured a house based on its neighborhood, age, security features, etc. This increases the complexity of the actuarial tables used by life insurance and highlights the need for a steady hand when forming new business opportunities.

Reinsurers are the most prominent participants in the insurance industry’s historical legacy. These reputable organizations have a history of overcoming the particular difficulties facing the sector. They have the capital reserves necessary to handle the significant, individualized risk distribution that life insurance requires. In sharp contrast to the $2.7 billion insurance industry size, the whole reinsurance market was predicted to increase from $402 billion in 2020 to $435 billion this year — a growth rate of 8%. Although managing general agents (MGAs), which gives them the same rights as an insurance carrier, is advantageous for some insurance businesses, it’s obvious where the funding required to power customized insurance experiences rests.

The Importance of David in the Face of Goliath

How can established life insurance companies benefit from working with up-and-coming firms when they require the same established firms’ market power, financial resources, and industry expertise?

Although risk aversion is prized in the insurance industry, many life insurers may benefit from the innovation and risk-taking of startups to finally implement the necessary but long-overdue improvements that will boost customer acquisition and retention. A similar dynamic emerged in the auto sector, where the need for greater sustainability is opening the door to accessible, effective electric vehicles. Partnerships between established automakers and EV startups have greatly hastened this transformation.

In the world of life insurance, such partnerships typically aren’t complicated. Working directly with insurance firms that function as MGAs and use their technical capabilities to reach larger audiences allows reinsurers to circumvent insurance carriers.

In addition, new businesses play a critical part in helping established ones transition to the digital era. This is an urgent need in the life insurance industry. A 2018 Deloitte study found that only 11% of respondents who buy insurance do so digitally. However, research shows that digital purchasing options speed up and make it much more convenient for customers than drawn-out, analog processes.

Finally, startups provide the data-savvy attitude, tools, agility, and imagination that legacy firms need to develop excellent services and solutions as the insurance industry shifts away from static evaluation methods toward more dynamic approaches, such as rewarding and incentivizing policyholders to make healthier choices. An AI-driven assessment process, for instance, might be used to match applicants to various tiers of insurance depending on legacy-startup partnerships. The AI may foresee consumers’ requirements and lifestyle changes and present them with new policy options as circumstances change. Without startups by their sides, legacy insurers risk being disrupted and becoming another Kodak or Blockbuster — long-dominant industry titans that succumbed to competitors who were more creative and innovative.

Customer relationship management is one of the best fields in which market research can be applied. It enables a company to receive precise and insightful feedback on their performance, and through a variety of customer opinions, it enables them to comprehend how their target market feels about them. The subjects listed below are just a few where market research could provide insightful feedback:

Obtaining pertinent information for future market expansion.

Prior to investing in product testing and production, determine whether a new product is feasible and likely to be accepted by consumers.

Determining the cost sensitivity of the target market.

Finding novel product features that will appeal to consumers and being aware of the advantages and benefits they may offer.

Identifying the hidden qualities that a product possesses and figuring out how to use those qualities to get them in front of customers.

Determining the extent to which customers are satisfied with the company, particularly with regard to performance, technology, quality, service, cost, and completion schedule.

Identifying the strong points to build on and the weak points to strengthen in order to ultimately increase customer satisfaction.

Creating a database of competitor information and using this database as a benchmark or reference based on customer feedback.

Identifying the main areas where the company outperforms its rivals and those where they lag behind them

Finding market trends and the causes behind them.

Discovering the causes of bad business and figuring out which regions are most affected.

Offering commercial solutions for common issues in all aspects.

Figuring out which purchasing channels customers prefer. Do they prefer making purchases online or in person?

Finding perspectives for the future.

In many organizations, managers and executives frequently interact directly with customers. Face-to-face interactions with customers result in few negative reviews because doing so could be embarrassing. In a similar vein, they are hesitant to offer compliments out of concern that doing so might reduce their leverage in negotiations with suppliers. Therefore, it is crucial for the company to conduct market research and analyze the real feedback that they are unable to obtain from the customers.

In other situations, where customers are not present in person, suppliers are unable to directly solicit feedback from them. Only agents or middlemen who are infrequently atomistic and do not understand the true meaning can provide them with direct feedback. More thorough and analytical data is needed to produce business results and conclusions. To obtain appropriate and trustworthy customer feedback, it is therefore always imperative to conduct accurate market research or surveys.

This market research is integrated into CRM systems like market intelligence and is based on current customer data. Because of the integration of this data, all organizational departments can access it from a single location. However, it is also verified to ensure that no department without the necessary access cannot access the confidential data. For instance, notifications of customer late payments should only be accessible by the accounting department and not by customer service departments that are open to the public. Despite being centrally stored in a single CRM system, the data is intelligently integrated and customized.

Definition of Life Insurance Claimants

A claimant or beneficiary of your life insurance is the person who will receive a specific sum of money in the event of your passing. When you purchase a life insurance policy, choosing an heir is an important step because it is the only way legally to designate who will receive the money if you pass away during the policy’s term.

If you are a beneficiary, you should understand how the policy pays out, your options, and anything that might make things more difficult. To find out more about naming or being a beneficiary of life insurance, continue reading.

What Is a Beneficiary in Life Insurance?

You can designate an heir, who may be a person or an organization, when you buy a life insurance policy. Also possible is having more than one. They receive a predetermined sum of money or a series of payments if they pass away during the policy’s term.

You can distribute the funds however you like as the policy owner:

One person can be designated to receive everything.

You can designate two or more people to split the total sum however you choose.

Your estate may have a name.

You can designate a trust to receive the proceeds from the policy if you have one or desire one.

When they pass away, some people prefer to leave money for a charity; you can mention any recognized organization you like.

If necessary, you can give names to your minor children. It helps to be aware that most states call for an adult guardian to oversee minor assets if you intend to do this. The process of choosing a guardian can be expensive and time-consuming.

It’s crucial to contact the insurance provider and present a death certificate if you are the beneficiary of a life insurance policy and your loved one has passed away in order to begin the payout procedure.

Making a trust or custodial account is one way to hasten this procedure. Your children’s money is placed in a trust, where a trustee will look after it until they are of legal age or the age you specified for them to inherit it. If you don’t specify anyone, the “de facto” beneficiary is your estate.

How Should Insurance Beneficiaries Be Known?

Make sure you give accurate information when naming people to receive insurance money. You’ll need to know things like their birthday, social security number, and contact information. Additionally, make sure everything is correct before submitting it by checking it twice. If there are mistakes, the wrong people might get the money, or your heirs might have to deal with legal issues.

Let’s take the example where you list “spouse” as your beneficiary. Two years later, you get divorced and remarry without altering your insurance policy. After your passing, both your current and former spouses might make an attempt to collect the money.

You’ve created a legal problem that could delay payout because the definition of “spouse” is ambiguous. One was your legal spouse at the time of your death, and the other was your legal spouse at the time the insurance policy was written. Along with all the legal fees, stress, and heartache that always follow fights over money, a fight over money is likely to take place.

Contingent and Primary Beneficiaries

It is frequently advisable to add one or more supplemental beneficiaries to a policy. If the primary beneficiary (or beneficiaries) passes away or cannot be located, a contingent beneficiary is a person who gets some or all of the money.

Note: If you list multiple people, specify how much money (in a percentage form) each one should receive.

For example, suppose you buy a policy with a $1 million benefit. You designate the beneficiary as your spouse. Your partner will receive the entire sum should you pass away while the policy is still in effect. However, you might pass away before your main beneficiary.

Your three adult children are added as contingent beneficiaries because you want to ensure that the money is passed on to your children. You include each of them in the policy and distribute the funds equally. In this manner, your children will each receive a third of the money after your passing, even if your spouse dies before you do.

Per Capita and Per Stirpes

The decision of whether to choose per capita or per stirpes when naming beneficiaries is another factor to consider. If no other contingent beneficiaries are listed on the policy and one or more of your beneficiaries pass away, these specify how the money should be distributed.

Per capita (“per head”) is frequently used as the abbreviation. This implies that you don’t have to describe every potential event in great detail. Instead, an equal portion is distributed to each of your living beneficiaries.

For instance, if you have three adult children and one of them passes away before you do, the other two will instead receive half of the face value each. If you choose per stirpes and one of your beneficiaries passes away before you do, the beneficiary’s children, if any, will receive their share.

A per stirpes arrangement would give your two grandchildren the one-third that your three adult children were going to receive, for instance, if one of your three adult children passed away before you and was survived by two children. One-sixth of the funds would be given to each grandchild.

Life insurance is a wise choice for estate planning. In light of that, it might not be the best course of action for you and your situation. Consider speaking with an estate planning lawyer, who can assist you in putting together a strategy to ensure that your loved ones have what they need after your passing and that your assets go to the people you want them to.

There may be a box to check on some beneficiary designation forms so you can choose per stirpes. If there isn’t a box, ask your agent if you can enter per stirpes.

Who Has the Authority to Alter the Life Insurance Beneficiary?

When submitting a life insurance application, name at least one beneficiary. It doesn’t follow that you can’t alter it later. If you are the owner, you always have the option to remove or add people. You might decide to appoint someone else because of changes in your life, for instance.

In the event of a marriage or divorce, you might want to appoint someone else. A good reason to review your policy is the birth of a child. Alternatively, you might have another justification for the change. However, if you designated a beneficiary as “irrevocable,” you will need to obtain their approval before making any changes (they must sign the policy change form).

Additionally, in some circumstances, your insurance provider or state may place limitations on who you can name. For instance, married couples who reside in states with community property laws might need the consent of their spouse before naming anyone else.

Note: Contact your insurer and ask for a “beneficiary change form” if you want to add or change an heir.

Do beneficiaries of life insurance policies have to pay taxes? A life insurance death benefit received as a lump sum is typically not regarded as taxable income. There are, however, some circumstances in which you might owe taxes.

For instance, any interest paid above the face value of the money if it is received as monthly payments or an annuity is taxable income. Additionally, if the funds are transferred to your estate rather than a specific individual, estate taxes might apply. The good news is that there won’t be any estate taxes assessed unless your estate is worth more than $11.7 million.

Summary

If the insured passes away during the policy term, a beneficiary of life insurance receives the death benefit.

Multiple beneficiaries, including primary and contingent beneficiaries, may be named, along with a person or trust.

Your beneficiaries must have accurate identification information so that they can be located and legal disputes are kept to a minimum.

The majority of life insurance proceeds are tax-free, but in some cases, a portion of them might be.

When was the last time you conducted a marketing automation audit? If your contacts are not converting to qualified leads, your marketing automation may be out of sync with the needs of your potential buyers. Improve your lead conversions with a marketing automation audit that uncovers missteps and gaps in your marketing content and lead nurturing.

What is a Marketing Automation Audit?

A marketing automation audit is an evaluation of your contact database, lead scoring system, marketing workflows, lead nurturing emails, and reporting. The purpose of a marketing automation audit is to determine whether or not your contact segmentation, lead scoring, workflows, and emails are moving contacts through your pipeline and helping you meet your marketing goals.

Marketing automation is essential to running successful inbound marketing campaigns. Well-run marketing automation not only helps you meet your marketing goals, it ensures your buyers enjoy a positive experience with your brand. Over time, your brand and your knowledge of your buyers will evolve. Your segmentation, content, and marketing workflows need to change as well.

If your contacts are not receiving the right content to help them move through the marketing and sales pipeline, it may be because:

Your brand messaging changed

You learned more about your buyers’ needs, but your segmentation is not aligned

You created more targeted content as you learned more about your buyers, but don’t use it in your lead nurturing

Your lead scoring doesn’t reflect your buyers’ behavior

Broken links and outdated content stop leads from moving forward

With all the moving parts in marketing automation, workflow errors are bound to happen. Regular marketing automation audits will help you spot errors and fix them quickly so you can continue delivering the right messaging and content to your buyers at the right time.

How Can a Marketing Automation Audit Improve Lead Conversions?

The goal of marketing automation is to leverage technology to move contacts through your marketing funnel from interested visitor to purchaser. Delivering the right content and the right time in your buyer’s journey warms up their interest in your product or service and helps them make a decision to purchase. A marketing automation audit ensures you are leveraging technology and data on your buyers and their needs to move them from contact to lead.

Completing the audit and making the necessary adjustments to your marketing automation system will enable you to:

Gather the necessary information on your contacts

Put your contacts in the right lifecycle stage buckets

Use tracking to determine contacts’ interest and engagement with your website and content

Deliver content to help qualified leads make a purchasing decision

Move qualified leads to either Sales or a purchase page

How to Conduct a Marketing Automation Audit

Before you begin auditing your marketing automation workflows, it’s helpful to gather data to pinpoint areas of concern. Statistics that indicate there may be issues include:

Low conversion rates or inability to track conversions

Low email open rates

High email bounce rate

High unsubscribe rate

Inaccurate data on leads in each lifecycle stage

Inaccurate lead scoring

Based on the data gathered, determine where you need to focus your marketing automation audit. This may include evaluating the following checkpoints in your marketing workflows:

Forms

Review the forms you are using to collect contacts, including forms on your landing pages and any pop-up forms used on your website. Make sure all your forms are working properly and are directing new contacts to the correct page after submittal. If your forms trigger an automated email reply, make sure the email reflects your current branding and opportunities to engage with you further. Ensure there are no broken links in your email replies.

Are you collecting all of the information you need from contacts, including information that will help you segment contacts based on interests and needs? Is the amount of information you are gathering aligned with their stage in the buyers’ journey? A blog subscription form will typically ask for name and email. Subscribers are generally not ready to give more information and may be deterred by lengthier forms. Downloading a case study, on the other hand, indicates the contact is considering your service or product. Contacts at this stage are willing to provide more details about themselves, such as their company, role, and interests.

Database Segmentation

Segmenting your contact database into subsets based on your buyer persona profiles enables more efficient and effective targeting. Audit your segmented lists to determine whether or not they are still relevant. You may have lists that were developed for one-time campaigns. To keep your lists current, archive any lists that are no longer used.

You may have lists that require a criteria update. Perhaps your lead scoring has changed over time. Look at the parameters for inclusion in your lists and make sure they are still relevant. Make changes as needed.

Segmentation can be streamlined by allowing your contacts to self-select their interests or by adding contacts to lists based on behavior monitoring and lead scoring. Set up workflows that add contacts to lists based on interest, behavior, and lead scoring criteria.

Lead Scoring and Workflows

Lead scoring moves your leads through your contact lifecycle stages and helps qualify leads for your sales team. Over time, you will learn more about your leads and the behavior that signals their interest in your product and readiness to engage further with your company. Also consider that you may add new ways for prospects to engage with you such as webinars, email campaigns, and resource downloads. Inevitably, your scoring criteria will change and your workflows will need to be updated to reflect those changes.

Review your content and the buyer personas and buying stage that each piece serves. Make sure you are delivering the right content to the right people based on their persona and lead score. You may need to edit your triggers and automation rules.

Conversion Points and Tracking

Are your contacts converting from contact to qualified lead at the expected conversion points? If your conversion rates are low, evaluate any issues with the content, timing, and messaging that are preventing contacts from moving through your sales funnel.

Metrics to track and analyze include:

CTA clicks

Form submission rates on landing pages

Open and click rates on emails

Demo requests

Content Delivery

Aligning your content to your contacts’ customer journey is essential to marketing automation success. Automating email workflows triggered by list, lifecycle stage, or lead scoring is at the core of marketing automation. During your audit, make sure you have set up your workflows to deliver content that answers your prospects’ questions based on their current lifecycle stage and leads them to engage deeper with your brand. If you notice that leads consistently drop off at a certain point in your funnel, evaluate the content you are delivering at that point in their journey and align it with their needs.

As your brand matures, you may find that some content assets outperform others. Look at CTA click rates and landing page form submission rates to determine which assets perform best. Also, analyze click-through rates within your eBooks and guides to determine whether or not your contacts are engaging further while reading the content.

It’s common to have an abundance of awareness-stage content and fewer consideration-stage and decision-stage content pieces. Where are your content gaps? Make sure you have consideration-stage and decision-stage content to offer your leads to help them develop trust in your brand.

Email Marketing

Marketing automation software enables email drip campaigns to be sent to contacts. It’s crucial to evaluate the performance of your email campaigns regularly so you can make adjustments as needed. Look at your email open and click-through rates. They will indicate whether or not your emails are well-designed, use effective subject lines, and include engaging copy. A/B testing subject lines, copy, and calls-to-action in your emails can help you refine your email marketing campaigns.

If you notice a low open rate or high bounce rate on your emails, they may be landing in your subscribers’ spam folders.

Another item to check in your marketing automation audit is email frequency. How often are you emailing your contacts? Do different segments receive emails at different frequencies? If your emails are underperforming, consider optimizing the frequency and timing of your emails.

If you currently don’t send a welcome email sequence to your new contacts, consider automating a SOAP sequence that focuses on building a relationship with your new prospect, creating trust as well as interest in your brand.

Contact Database

The goal of marketing automation is to help you connect with engaged prospects and nurture your relationship with them before, during, and after they make a purchase. If you notice a low engagement rate on your emails, the issue could be poor database hygiene. If your list is bloated with contacts that have hard bounced or who are no longer interested and have disengaged from your email campaigns, it will affect your email metrics.

HubSpot explains, “Email senders with high rates of opens and clicks look more trustworthy to email security filters. And most email accounts, including Gmail, automatically filter out emails that recipients aren’t opening or clicking.” Learn how to improve your email deliverability here. It’s a good practice to cull your contact list periodically and archive or remove any contacts that have not engaged with your emails in recent months.

How Often Should You Conduct a Marketing Automation Audit?

A marketing automation audit is not a one-and-done event. Make it part of your quarterly marketing performance analysis to identify issues and gaps that are preventing you from optimizing your lead conversions.

Credits by: Rhonda Bavaro

Date: Jun 3, 2021

Customer relationship management, or CRM, is a system that handles the administration of a business’s contacts with previous, current, and potential clients. By automating sales, marketing, customer service, and technical support, CRM software combines the complete customer relationship cycle.

CRM software is a tool that unifies the variety of organizational tasks needed to implement customer relationship management while automating the many and discrete components of the customer relationship management lifecycle.

Additionally, the CRM software controls how the company interacts with its clients throughout the whole customer management lifecycle, including, among other things, cold calling, customer acquisition, and customer retention. The notion of CRM and CRM software are critically examined in this research study from a variety of angles.

Background of CRM

CRM was first introduced in the 1970s when firms began to place a greater emphasis on their customers than on their products. Database marketing’s introduction in the 1980s set the groundwork for the CRM paradigm, and the development of consumer focus groups prompted the adoption of CRM by SMEs (Small and Medium Enterprises) Since its implementation ensured that firms could gain significant advantages, CRM as a concept and trend became extremely popular in the 1990s.

Numerous improvements to CRM systems were also made during the 1990s timeframe. The road was paved for the introduction of CRM to enterprises and consumers when the business world began to embrace the internet in the 1990s and consumers began to use it heavily in 1995.

With the information age in full swing at the time, the demand for CRM software spiked in the preceding decade. In summary, it can be concluded that CRM has been steadily and cautiously accepted by businesses since the 1970s and has continued to this day. It has since evolved into a piece of software that every company must have.

CRM: What It Means and Why

CRM is important because it revolutionizes the customer relationship process by integrating the complete customer management process and automating the customer life cycle. As has been mentioned above, what makes CRM particularly important is the use of IT and software to automate the customer relationship process, as well as enhanced customer management through a holistic approach rather than a fragmented one.

It is impossible to exaggerate the importance of a CRM system given how extensively both the business world and the consumer base use IT. Additionally, CRM provides firms with exponential returns because it expands their customer base statistically and improves their customer relationship management process qualitatively.

CRM’s Advantages and Disadvantages

The use of a CRM system has a variety of advantages, including improved customer management, greater customer acquisition, effective customer retention, and improved prospecting for both acquiring new clients and re-engaging existing ones.

The crucial thing to keep in mind about a CRM system is that it creates synergies across the customer relationship cycle, increasing the productivity and efficiency of the staff members handling client connections. The returns from old, existing, and new clients are also higher since the CRM system integrates the complete customer relationship lifecycle and automates the various customer management operations (sales, marketing, customer service, and technical support).

One of a CRM system’s key advantages is that it streamlines the client retention process and encourages more repeat business, which is always a sign of a thriving and successful business. The CRM system also ensures that there aren’t many mistakes made during the customer connection management process by automating customer touchpoints and enhancing the physical customer relationship effort.

Last but not least, the enterprise-wide automation of all tasks and procedures that many businesses actually implement helps the CRM subsystem to give decision-makers a bird’s-eye view of the customer relationship process, empower and enable them with more visibility over the process by giving them data and useful information.

The biggest drawback of a CRM system is that it may lead to redundancy in the customer management process due to double labor and the inability of sales and marketing staff to adapt to the automation.

The CRM system may increase complexity, which, if improperly handled, can result in chaos and a lack of preparation for crucial operations in the sales and marketing lifecycle, which is the next drawback.

However, those factors are crucial if you’re looking into life insurance. Your inquiries will be addressed in this post, specifically:

What constitutes a life insurance policy’s essential components? A life insurance policy is a contract between a person and an insurance provider (or legal entity). Every life insurance policy is unique, and every state has a different set of rules that govern insurance contracts.

The insurer: Only a select group of organizations are permitted to offer life insurance, and state insurance regulators oversee these organizations. The person or organization that owns (or “holds” the policy is referred to as the policyholder. Examples include a family trust or a company. The policy has two options for coverage: either the holder or a third party. The individual whose life is insured is known as the insured. The sum that the insurer will pay out upon the insured’s death is known as the death benefit.

The recipients of the death benefit are known as beneficiaries. It can be distributed proportionally among many different persons and entities (for example, three children could each receive 30% and 10% could go to a charity), or it can all go to a single person (for example, the surviving spouse). The duration of time the insurer agrees to provide a death benefit is known as the policy length. This can be for a set period of time, like 10 or 20 years, or it can be permanent, meaning that as long as premiums are paid, the policy will be in effect for the insured’s whole lifetime. The monthly or yearly payments required to maintain the insurance in force are referred to as the premium. monetary value: Whole life insurance and permanent life insurance both feature a cash value component that accrues over time2 and can be withdrawn or used as collateral for loans. Term life insurance has no cash value.

What are the different kinds of life insurance policies, and how do they work?

There are two basic types of life insurance: Term and permanent life insurance. A term life insurance policy provides coverage for a specific period of time, typically between 10 and 30 years. It is sometimes called “pure life insurance” because, unlike the permanent policy or whole life insurance, there’s no cash value component to the policy — once the term is over, there’s nothing left.

Permanent life insurance provides coverage that lasts your entire life. Unlike term, it’s not a “pure life insurance” product because it includes a cash value component that helps make coverage last while the insured is alive and premiums are paid and while providing other financial benefits. A portion of your premium dollars grows tax-deferred over time — but the entire death benefit is immediately payable from the first day you have the policy. The cash value, on the other hand, may take some years to build up to a significant amount.

There are two main types of permanent insurance: whole and universal life. Whole life insurance is simpler — the premium remains the same for life, the death benefit is guaranteed, and the cash value grows at a guaranteed rate. Universal life insurance can be less expensive, but the premiums, death benefits, and cash value growth rate can vary, making the policy more complex.

What advantages do people receive from life insurance at various times? Most adults should consider getting life insurance because it may be a potent weapon for safeguarding their financial confidence and, more importantly, the economic trust of those who depend on them. However, you should consider what kind of financial protection you require at this time in your life before purchasing a policy.

Questions and answers about life insurance What is the price of life insurance? Depending on the type of insurance (i.e., term or permanent) and all the factors that can affect your life expectancy, including age, weight, health, gender, lifestyle, occupation, and risk factors like smoking, the cost of a policy — for a particular level of death benefit — can vary significantly.

In your 30s, a lot can happen. You might be planning a wedding, beginning a family, or searching for your first house to purchase. But have you given life insurance any thought?

In your 30s, life starts to get quite real. You might settle down, get married, start a family, own a home, and bring home the golden retriever you’ve always wanted. That is a lot. Because of this, now is a wonderful time to begin making plans for the future of your family.

Even though it could be difficult, you might need to think about what would happen to your family if something happened to you. The decisions you make today may have a profound impact on the people you care about the most.

In your 30s, consider buying life insurance for the following five reasons:

You Need to Pay Your Monthly Bills

Your life is a series of monthly bills.

Your salary is probably heavily invested in these costs, which may include your rent or mortgage, auto payments, utilities, credit card bills, and student loans. Despite all odds, you’ve been able to save some money for that Blink-182 reunion tour, but your finances are still tight. Another reason a life insurance policy can be a good idea is this one.

How will your family assist in paying off your mortgage or outstanding loans after you pass away? Your loved ones’ ability to pay the bills you leave behind may be aided by a life insurance policy.

You Have a Family to Support

To create their own families, many are delaying parenthood till they are older. It’s possible that your grandparents and parents were married and had children when they were in their 20s. But more people today are delaying marriage until their 30s or later. Why not, then? It’s simpler than ever to play the field and wait for that ideal match thanks to dating apps like Bumble, Hinge, and the rest.

In fact, women in their early 30s are giving birth to more children than those in their 20s for the first time ever.

Does that circumstance ring a bell for you? If so, you might want to consider what will happen to your family when you pass away. Purchasing life insurance in your 30s could provide your family with financial security in the future.

You are Financing your Kids’ Education

No matter if you’re talking about a four-year college, associate degree, or vocational school these days, getting a credential is very pricey. And it won’t get any simpler with soaring tuition costs. Even enrolling your children in a public, in-state school can be expensive: the average yearly cost after accounting for tuition, room and board, fees, and other costs is more than $20,000.

Most people’s personal funds just won’t be enough to pay for their education. Although they are an option, student loans could leave borrowers with long-term debt.

If you are unable to provide for your children on your own, the payoff from a life insurance policy may help.

Insurance may be more affordable when you’re young

Age is one of several variables that insurance companies take into account when determining premiums, but it is one of the most crucial. With all the health tracking apps, recreational sports leagues, and 5ks with pals, young people frequently have fewer health issues, and insurers are aware of this. That might work in your favor.

Purchasing life insurance when you’re still young may enable you to locate a plan that both suits your financial needs and your urgent demands. For those in their 30s, a term life insurance policy is frequently the best option. Compared to a whole life policy, coverage quantities are frequently higher, and costs are created to be reasonable. It’s frequently the best kind of life insurance coverage for a 30-year-old.

Your Loans were Co-signed by Your Parents

Without a perfect credit history, getting a loan to establish a business or purchase a new home is difficult. You might have asked your parents to co-sign your mortgage or other loan, like many other 30-somethings. In the event that something were to happen to you, they would still be responsible for making those payments.

The use of marketing automation can help move deals through the sales pipeline and provide highly targeted messages. Customer relationship management (CRM) may collect and organize your client data. What transpires when these two systems are joined and their features are used?

Learn how to use marketing automation and CRM together in the best possible manner and how much value they can add to your company. We also include five real-world use-case samples so you may get ideas. After this article, you may sign up for a free trial of the all-inclusive CRM solution Pipedrive.

There are many benefits to combining marketing automation and CRM. It enhances the relationship between marketing and sales, makes it possible to understand client behavior better, raises the caliber of leads, and helps to conserve resources.

A fundamental understanding of both systems is required to comprehend how this is feasible; it goes like this:

Marketing automation is made to automate repetitive marketing processes like sending emails and push alerts. Thanks to automation technology, you can get data from different sources and use it in marketing efforts.

Marketing automation makes it possible to communicate with customers in a timely, precise, and focused manner. One use of automation technology is to move prospects through the sales funnel and into conversion. The respondents to our global marketing automation survey ranked better message targeting and a higher marketing ROI as the two most important advantages of marketing automation.

You may manage your company’s relationships and interactions with clients and prospects using a customer relationship management (CRM) solution. For instance, it keeps track of a person’s history of purchases and how long they have been a customer.

CRM aids in precisely segmenting clients, planning sales operations, enhancing customer service, tracking deals, and streamlining procedures.

CRM already contains all client data; thus, connecting it to marketing automation is essential to bring data into the automation system. However, the benefits of CRM and marketing automation go far beyond just supplying sources for consumer contacts.

Since data is imported and exported between systems, nothing is lost along the way.

You may be confident that there are no obstacles to the free flow of data.

You don’t need to keep track of communications with a single customer across various channels.

Sending automated communications to various segment groups pulled from CRM will be possible. The customer’s activities are added to the data in CRM when the marketing actions have been implemented. You’ll find additional advice for this further in this article, so keep reading!

Individual Customer Communication

Message personalization is essential since it increases the likelihood that the recipient will reply. However, 55% of marketers believe they lack the data and insights necessary for efficient personalization. Customer information is kept in multiple systems at once.

The problem can be solved using marketing automation and CRM to send triggered, customized, and personalized communications based on consumer behavior. You can customize your communications using specific consumer data points, such as prior purchases, closed and won deals, interests, business information, etc.

The picture of client behavior becomes more explicit as more systems are connected to automation. All potential actions, such as newsletter clicks and website visits, can be compiled into the customer’s CRM profile.

As a result, sales may communicate strategically, and customer interactions are more productive. Marketing gains a clearer understanding of the messages that resonate the most with leads and the information they find most useful.

Streamlined customer service and increased sales

You will be able to better service your present and potential consumers due to the integration of marketing automation and CRM. You may more readily look into and evaluate client behavior to inform your future decisions.

As a result, you may send marketing communications to your customers at the proper time they would find interesting, increasing up- and cross-selling and customer happiness. The sales cycle may also be reduced as a result of consistently meeting the needs of clients and prospects at the right moment.

Giving points for a prospect’s behavior is possible with contemporary automation technology. Sales understand that a lead is warm enough to be approached after a particular threshold of points is met. In the best-case scenario, sales have a ton of information in CRM about the prospect’s behaviors and want before making any calls or sending any emails.

How to get started

We now know why it is crucial to combine these tools, but how to achieve so is still a mystery. The steps are listed below.

Purchase the equipment. Invest in top-notch products that are already integrated.

Organize the steps. Bring sales and marketing together to map out the entire purchase process, make notes along the way, and determine necessary actions. Add pre-sales marketing, sales touch points, and new customer onboarding to the roadmap.

Arrange the customization. Choose the data points you’ll utilize to tailor the customer experience. There are several options, including geography, age distribution, the types of things bought, and the volume of purchases. Use subscription forms, for instance, to ensure you gather all the required information.

Develop automated work processes. Start developing the automated workflows for various tasks, such as rekindling the customer relationship, onboarding, and warming up the lead. Use our free guidebook of marketing automation examples as inspiration to improve your business.

Examine and adjust. After developing and launching the automation, you must keep an eye on the outcomes and, if necessary, tweak them. You can experiment to see how the results change if you tweak the automated letters’ headlines, content, or scheduling.

Examples of real-world usage cases

Let’s look at a few instances where marketing automation and CRM have increased sales.

Onboarding

CRM as a data source

Email/push notification channel

Trigger: First purchase or new sign-up

One of the most common marketing automation applications is onboarding, and CRM gives the procedure a lot of strength.

When sales record a deal as won in CRM, marketing automation receives a trigger to begin the onboarding process for the new customer. Educate and instruct your customers while assisting them in using your items.

You can start to drive more purchases later in the onboarding messages. Running a referral campaign, as Dropbox did, is one clever method to accomplish this. Dropbox grew by 3,900% in just 15 months by giving users who invited their friends to use the platform free data storage.

Upsell

CRM as a data source

Message: Email

Customer segment: devoted customers

Customers that make several purchases show interest in your business and are frequently prepared to make additional purchases. They are a fantastic segment group for your upselling campaign because of this. The required information can be extracted from CRM, such as a list of clients who have made at least three purchases from you.

Send an appealing coupon together with a tailored campaign letter. Set a deadline to ensure that customers respond quickly, and make it obvious what benefits the offer will bring to the recipient and why they should take advantage of it.

Customers who didn’t purchase the first email can be reminded that the campaign ends in three days after a few days have passed.

The upsell campaign also provides a possibility for more precise segmentation. If a consumer doesn’t purchase the campaign, you can separate them into platinum-level customers and lower their status.

Birthday presents

CRM as a data source

Channel: SMS/email

The customer’s birthday is the trigger

On their special day, remember your customer with a thoughtful gesture! In B2B marketing, the first purchase anniversary is celebrated, whereas, in B2C marketing, the customer’s birthday is honored.

Set the automation to regularly monitor the CRM for persons with birthdays coming up in the next ten days. Send these clients a personalized note to commemorate the forthcoming event.

Being proactive while sending anniversary texts is a fantastic idea because many of us like to organize the celebration in advance. The customer is more likely to accept your offer if the benefits are clear in advance.

Reawakening Inactive Customers

CRM as a data source

Channel: SMS or email

trigger: circumstance

Encourage your passive customers to do business with you once more. Get a segment of customers from CRM who haven’t purchased in a specific amount of time. Send them individualized messages to reacquaint and entice them to return to you.

It’s crucial to convey the value in these messages as well. Show the customer the advantages of coming back to you. For instance, you may SMS customers and offer them a complimentary delivery.

Although this automation chain has a different target market, it is similar to upsell automation. The automation can be carried out in the background and repeated monthly or on any other schedule that works best for your company.

Return the data to CRM.

CRM and marketing automation needs to communicate back and forth. You must ensure that the data isn’t just delivered to the CRM; it is also pulled back from the automation platform.

Giving the contacts scores depending on how they respond to your marketing communications is a practical technique to ensure this. You can award different points to contacts at various points throughout the automation chain, such as one point for viewing the message, five points for selecting the aggressive CTA, and so forth.

The scoring system allows you to distinguish between hot and excellent leads. Every morning, send all contacts with lead scores greater than 5 to sales using CRM filtering.

Try the CRM that Increases Closing Rates by 28 Percent on Average

Everyone dreads seeing the dreaded “phone number” section while online filling out information to acquire immediate life insurance quotes.

Why do so many people find that objectionable?

Because you are aware that your phone will ring endlessly until you answer and that you will be added to a call list. Once you respond, the salesperson on the other end won’t stop until he has persuaded you to buy something you didn’t need at a price higher than what you originally desired.

That isn’t how things ought to be. You are, after all, seeking rapid life insurance rates. You don’t want to wait for a commission-based salesperson to call you back at a time that is inconvenient.

In the end, “quick quote” websites that want your phone number do so because it will benefit their business, not because it will make your life simpler or your shopping experience more pleasant.

You won’t have to worry about that inconvenience if you hunt for your quotes in the appropriate location.

We eliminated all the anti-consumer tactics we saw on other websites when we created our fast quote engine, including the requirement for your phone number. Instead, we concentrated on gathering the necessary data we require to offer quotes that are more accurate than those you will find elsewhere online.

If you don’t wish to keep your quotes to refer to them later, we don’t even demand an email address from you — fewer speed bumps and no later regrets.

Of course, we’re pleased to assist you there if you wish to be contacted. We have in-house experts available to chat with you if you give us a call. However, doing so is voluntary, and you’ll never be asked for your phone number. Furthermore, our agents don’t receive commissions significantly sets them apart from other agencies.

Do you know how you feel when a used car salesperson talks to you? This can also occur when you try to get life insurance since many will attempt to upsell you on whole life insurance. Whole life insurance is useless and more expensive when compared to term life insurance. On the other hand, commission-based agents receive a more extensive check.

It seems to sense that customers are hesitant to share their phone numbers.

CRM technology has advanced steadily in the B2C market due to the recent rapid expansion of eCommerce retailers and mobile shopping. The majority of significant CRM system suppliers now provide a variety of features specifically designed for the e-commerce sector, which they have identified as one of the trendiest business models. If you are interested in learning more about the advantages of CRM for eCommerce and retail business, you have come to the correct spot.

1. Customer Segmentation

My feed is immediately overwhelmed with highly relevant sponsored advertising as soon as I go through my social media accounts after researching search engines, and I end up clicking on most of them. You have likely had the same experience. Social media shows us the advertisements we are most likely to click on since it has learned our search habits. Wouldn’t you want the same relationship with your customers if you were running an online retail business?

Sales agents can interact with clients most effectively by viewing customer groups organized by gender, interests (fashion, gadgets, etc.), spending history, and other factors.

2. Having access to the most pertinent data

How many visitors to your website abandon the page without making a purchase or paying for the things they added to their cart?

The average cart abandonment rate is a staggering 68.81 percent, according to Baymard. You may take action to turn these visitors into customers with a carefully thought-out CRM implementation in your retail firm!

3. Time Management Techniques

It turns out that sales representatives can only devote 11% of their time to active selling. Problem-solving and administrative tasks take up the majority of the time.

A CRM Customization for eCommerce can automate several self-service procedures, freeing your agents’ time to concentrate on their primary duties. Enterprise processes must now be more intelligent, and the easiest way to do so is to hire a CRM consultant before choosing a system.

4. Centralized Use of Social Media

We bet you are not operating an internet retail business without actively managing your social media profiles.

eCommerce traffic is primarily generated by paid advertisements and social media recommendations. Customers ask questions on social media, and how you respond to their questions affects how they view your customer service.

Consumers who complain on social media in 42 percent of cases anticipate a 60-minute response time. Through our Social Media Integrations, our clients have better-managed response times. You can also use the potent tools that many CRMs offer their clients. For instance, Salesforce Marketing Cloud is a game-changer for marketing in any eCommerce organization.

5. Payment Info

It can be challenging to analyze payment data if your site accepts various payment channels. You can handle everything using CRM, from billing and invoicing to payment failures. Even better, you can incorporate a payment gateway into your CRM.

CRM’s advanced analytics can monitor payment trends, giving you the power to examine:

● Best sources of income

● The most valuable clients

● Several measures you may use to tailor your offerings

6. Order Administration

Lead generation through revenue generation is all included in the order management process. You can see and take action on each product’s order placement, order processing, shipment tracking, delivery, and customer feedback.

Order management is one of the most critical features in a CRM for e-commerce. CRM for Startups can also help you organize your firm and increase productivity if you are starting out.

What You Need to Know

Some clients who want more cash have life insurance.

Some of those clients could sell their policies to investors.

Agents and advisors could help the clients find out how much the policies are worth.

As we head into autumn, it’s helpful for agents and advisors to perform a broad assessment of their annual goals and modify their sales and marketing strategies accordingly.

Based on conversations with producers, agents, advisors, and clients, here are resolutions for increased sales, fees, and better client relationships in our current unpredictable market.

1. Cut costs and gain income.

What’s likely drove the need for some mid-year course corrections were the changes in the financial markets.

While we may have started the year with optimism, the economy has taken some major turns, and inflation and rising costs are hitting seniors hard.

We are getting a lot of calls from agents whose senior clients are telling them they are worried about rising prices.

Many seniors are trying to figure out how to continue to maintain their lifestyle as they age during retirement.

They desperately want to feel more financially secure.

Seniors are looking at their life insurance policies and wondering if they still need the coverage.

Children are grown, or perhaps the reason they bought the coverage has changed. Some clients have lost their spouses, gotten divorced, or decided they no longer need the coverage.

As living costs go up and portfolios shrink, they start to feel the pinch.

And because seniors have been through recessions before, they likely know it might be a few years before things turn around — so they start to question why they have their current coverage.

In situations like this, it’s a missed opportunity, and potentially a disservice to the client, to fail to inform them about their options.

The secondary market for life insurance policies is strong right now, and no clients should let their policy lapse without first securing a policy appraisal.

It can be “found money” and an opportunity for agents to earn some extra cash.

Freeing up funds from an underperforming policy can create a windfall of new investment opportunities — putting money in motion.

2. Work smarter, not harder.

Each year, and frankly always, we need to strive for maximum productivity from our relationships and our plans with clients.

We need to maximize our sales capacity and our sales efforts with our clients and prospects.

One way to accomplish this is to always be on the lookout for ways to sell multiple products to clients and therefore earn more fees by, yes, working smarter and not harder.

My advice to agents and advisors is to add a life insurance policy appraisal into their overall toolkit.

A policy appraisal is a simple way to work smarter.

It’s easy to get started as all that’s needed is some basic client information and an in-force illustration which can be quickly analyzed to determine the value of an existing policy and if the case will qualify on the secondary market — without getting your clients involved with the traditional “life settlement storm” of paperwork.

A policy appraisal can help clients identify a new income stream to assist with retirement planning.

And it is important to note that even if the client is not ready to sell their policy, the agent or advisor has brought them an option that they can revisit in the future.

For clients who choose to move ahead, agents and advisors can earn aggressive fees and there are no licensing requirements.

A policy appraisal offers an easy way to keep conversations advancing with clients, and a way to earn additional fees by working smarter.

Client’s love selling a policy on the secondary market because oftentimes they don’t realize that their life insurance is an asset.

They view it as a liability and don’t think that they can get any additional value from it.

They assume that the only option is to let a policy lapse and that they will walk away with nothing.

The secondary market is incredibly active right now, and many opportunities exist to work smarter, not harder.

3. Take a systematic approach.

Another, popular conversation I have with agents and advisors revolves around the goal of creating a reason and a way to reach out to clients systematically and regularly.

My suggestion is to use a policy appraisal as a “door opener.” Agents and advisors can approach clients with a financial option that many were unaware of.

It gives them a reason to call a client who they may have not heard from in a while or who is tough to pin down.

A policy appraisal brings forth an opportunity for a client that might trigger a phone conference, zoom call, or face-to-face meeting.

Agents can bring something to the table and do it in a systematic way that can be repeated for senior clients across their book of business.

For clients who do not know about the secondary market for life insurance, the policy appraisal offers an opportunity to educate them and bring forward a previously unknown option.

Just as a client would want an appraisal on an asset like a house, car, or expensive piece of jewelry, a policy appraisal sets the value so that the expectations are properly set for a potential sale.

As the year moves on, it will be critical for agents and advisors to remain nimble and react quickly to the financial challenges that clients are facing.

Agents and advisors can truly help clients in need while earning fees by adding policy appraisals to their sales process.

I wish you a prosperous remainder of 2022 and hope that you meet and exceed all your goals for the rest of the year.

CREDITS: Wm. Scott Page

DATE: August 24, 2022