This article originally appeared on InsuranceNewsNet.com.

In the competitive marketplace, insurers are growing more savvy in their digital marketing efforts, driving website traffic in order to educate and differentiate with thoughtful online content. If they are successful, the website analytics will reflect thousands of monthly visitors that are beginning an insurance buying journey online. 

These are excellent marketing metrics, but how exactly does it translate into something meaningful (and profitable) to the frontline insurance agent? A vast majority – more than 90% – of website traffic is anonymous. A string of numbers in an IP address holds little useful information for the agent needing to make a human connection to cultivate future customers. 

Or, does it? 

Unknown Visitor or Gold-Standard Prospect?

Though most website visitors remain unknown, some things are clear. Their online behavior is a strong signal they are in the market for insurance products and currently researching options. These are more than casual consumers; they are warm leads with a high purchase propensity. Though it seems that you know little about your anonymous web visitors, many are actually gold-standard sales prospects.

Because they’ve found your carrier or corporate website on their self-led insurance journey, many things have been done right to this point. (SEO, an authoritative website, compelling content and brand recognition, just to name a few.) But at the end of day, these prospects need to “convert” – that is, they need to move farther in their journey from leads to customers. 

Data can provide the missing insights needed to continue meaningful interactions with these currently unknown prospects. Under-utilized data analytics techniques will light the path to a richly portrayed persona, eliminating guesswork and wasted effort. 

Illuminate Prospects, Then Convert to Sales

Effective marketing has moved beyond personalization. Hyper-personalization is what consumers expect today. The digitally-savvy understand, at least at a basic level, that companies collect information about them. In return, they want interactions that are tailored to their relevant needs and preferences. 

Using website pixels, IP matching, and third-party data appends, anonymous web visitors can be profiled to understand more deeply who they are. Digital behavior, demographics, psychographics, and media preferences come together to create a complete and robust picture that agents can use to align their outreach and messaging in personal and effective ways. Here’s what it looks like.

Watch a short video (1:13) about how anonymous website visitor targeting works

Turn IP addresses into home addresses. From your pool of anonymous website visitors, data tools can derive home postal addresses for about 25 percent of the IP addresses. So, if your carrier or corporate website has 10,000 monthly visitors, around 2,500 home addresses can be obtained each month. In most cases, it can be verified that the IP addresses belongs to a household mailing address with 95% accuracy.

Append with third-party data. Now, equipped with household information, third-party data models can layer in rich details such as age, income, children, channel preferences that bring the picture of these prospects into real focus. Would you rather have a generic lead, or a profile like this?  

Sophisticated city dweller: Boomer-aged couple 51-65 living in the city or a close suburb with a household income of $175,000-199,000. Owns an upscale home they have lived in for at least 10 years, and active on email and Facebook. 

Even more, additional data models can further synthesize prospect data to determine their likely preferred decision-making style. Do they like to research and compare options and read reviews? Or, are they motivated deal-seekers who are driven more by price than brand name? 

Analyze and segment. Now, your formerly anonymous website visitors can be organized along demographic, geographic, or behavior lines – or any combination of these factors. Group by shared characteristics such a zip code, potential product propensity, website pages visited, or decision-making style. 

Reach with highly targeted ads. Here, the rubber meets the road. As an agent, you will be equipped to have a very meaningful next interaction with your segmented prospect list. Send direct mail or IP-targeted digital ads with just the right message. For our sophisticated city dweller who is also a savvy researcher, reach with direct mail or a facebook ad with a message sure to resonate: “No need to look further. Our home insurance is what you’ve been looking for to protect your most valuable asset.”

Convert top leads into customers. Most campaigns executed this way will have sales conversions that are twice as high as non-data-driven follow-up methods. On average, from the 2,500 household addresses in our example, approximately 25 will become new customers. Even better, a straight line from effort to ROI can be drawn, because during the data gathering process tracking mechanisms can be enabled that provide detailed metrics. 

Don’t Just Acquire – Keep Customers with Data-Led Strategies

The story isn’t over after you’ve successfully acquired your new customer – it’s only just beginning. The data insights you’ve generated will continue to provide opportunities for personalized and powerful campaigns that are always driven by relevant customer needs. 

When it comes to customer acquisition and retention strategies that are effective and measurable, data is one of insurers most important strategic assets today.  As frontline agents face more pressure from market newcomers, it’s critical they are equipped with powerful modern tools that amplify what they’ve always done best: deeply understand what’s important to their customer and how to protect it through every stage of life.

Learn more about B2E’s MotusIP: Anonymous Website Visitor targeting or set up a complimentary discovery call to discuss what kind of results your business can expect. B2E is SOC2-compliant, third-party audited data marketing agency with the infrastructure, tools, and processes in place to maintain data integrity at all times.