Referral Marketing for Insurance Agencies

49% of insurance agencies say referrals are their top marketing strategies, but most do not have a solid strategy in place.

You’d probably agree that referrals are also your most important source of new business. But the real question is, how are you proactively asking for them and following up on referrals you get?

There are 4 pillars behind every great referral strategy, and without them, you’re not taking full advantage of this opportunity to grow your business even further.

Those four pillars include:

• Referral Program. Having a plan in place for how to gather referrals and giving your clients the right moments and reasons to send their friends and family your way.
• Website Page and Form. Your website needs a dedicated referral page with a simple form and details about your program.
• Marketing Alignment. Incorporate calls to action and link to your referral website page at key client milestones when the likelihood of them referring you is highest.
• Referral Management. Handling new referrals needs to be prioritized, with a workflow that ensures every referral is followed up on as quickly as possible.

I’ll walk you through how to check off all four of these on your list, so you can confidently move forward with a referral plan you can rely on and have more control over.

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Pillar 1: Establish a referral program.

It’s one thing to get referrals from your clients; it’s another to have a referral program that gives them even more reason to send their friends and family your way.

When creating your referral program, you’ll want to first develop a proactive outreach plan. Primarily, who to ask for referrals and when to make the timing right.

Depending on how your agency communicates with your clients, you can develop a script to use when asking a client for a referral by email, over a text message (after a relevant conversation takes place), and on the phone.

If you want a good starting place, I went ahead and asked Agency Revolution’s AI Sidekick to write up a script you can use, just replace the information in brackets with your client’s information and your business name.

This is {AgentName} from {AgencyName}. I hope you’re doing well! If you know anyone who might need assistance with their insurance, I’d be happy to help them. You can share my contact details: {Phone} or {Email}, or direct them to fill out our referral form here: {ReferralFormURL}. Thanks for your continued trust and support!

Feel free to take this and adjust, or come up with your own. The important thing is to have a plan in place and give your team the confidence to ask clients for a referral at the key milestones where it makes sense.

When to ask clients for a referral.

Those key milestones where your clients might be most willing to refer you are typically:

• After a client leaves a positive review for your agency.
• After a client renews their policy or signs up for an additional one.
• After your agency helps a client with a claim or service request.
• After a positive interaction between your client and your agency.

Remember, these are high points in a client’s experience with your agency, and there’s no better time to ask whether they know someone who could use a review of their current coverage.

And, another great place to incorporate an ask for a referral is on your email signatures. That way, at any point, if a client feels driven enough, they’ll follow that link and submit a referral. I will note that this also works especially well with a “review us” link, and the two can work together.

Now that you have your plan in place and how and when you are going to ask for referrals, the next step is to make sure you have a place for someone to send a referral to you.

Pillar 2: Make it easy for clients to refer your agency on your website.

Asking for referrals is great, but only if you have an easy way for someone to actually send you their information in the first place.

Because you’re already asking for a referral, the process to share their information as well as the person they are referring needs to be seamless.

What to include on your referral request form.

The best way to do this is to first set up a referral page on your agency’s website. The page should cover, at a high level, the details about submitting a referral. In addition, you need a dedicated website form that asks for the information you’ll need, so you know who sent them and how to reach the person they referred.

Here is the information you should have on your referral website form:

• Your Information. Include fields for the referee’s first and last name, email, and phone number.
• Referral Information. Include fields for the referred’s first and last name, email, and phone number.

Aside from the obvious, it’s important to know who referred them so you can kick off a conversation by relating to your client and how much you appreciate working with them for a more organic lead-in before diving into questions about their insurance needs.

Right away, that sets the stage for a personal approach from your agency and shows the level of service they can expect just by taking that approach.

Pillar 3: Include referrals in your client marketing workflows.

You are already communicating with your clients regularly. The key is knowing where a referral ask fits naturally into that flow, and, ideally, into the automated marketing campaigns you already have running.

If you are hitting one to two touchpoints a month per client, you are on the right track. Then, it’s just a matter of deciding where and how to include your ask for a referral.

How referrals fit into your existing client communications.

Think about the key milestones in your client communications. The list probably goes something like this:

• Welcome kit for new clients after signing up.
• Renewal reminders and thank you messages.
• Follow-ups to claims and service requests.
• Client appreciation messages.
• Account and policy reviews to ensure proper coverage.
• Cross-sell and account rounding outreach.
• Survey asking for an NPS rating and a Google review.

In each of these scenarios, there’s an opportunity to include a referral request. Not all of them need to, and you don’t want to oversaturate how often you ask for them, but finding the right balance.

Put referral requests on autopilot.

Take a look at the regular communications you already send to clients, and pinpoint the moments when they are most satisfied with your agency.

If your agency has a special way of hand-holding the client through the claims process and making them feel taken care of, you might be able to include a request for a referral after all is said and done, once you’ve fully handled the claim process for them.

Or, if you are already running a campaign to ask for a review, the logical next step after someone gives you a 5-star rating is to ask them to consider sending over any referrals they might have in mind.

This will be different for everyone, but there will be at least a few key milestones you can identify and build a referral ask into.

And because you are following up on a previous communication with a client, you have the added context to organically include this ask for a referral in the follow-up.

Or, with the power of audience segmentation, you can pull together a list of clients that fit a certain criteria and send out a dedicated campaign to them over the course of the year, asking for referrals and putting that on auto-pilot.

The premise is this: tie in asking for referrals where and when your clients are most likely to engage and follow through.

You can do this manually so that your team knows to ask for a referral after a good interaction, or even to include it in their email follow-up.

However, the best approach here is to automate it. What this does is personalize it in terms of timing and ensures that any of your clients who are your supporters and take action (even something as simple as renewing their policy with you) have the opportunity in that follow-up to ask for a referral.

Pillar 4: How to stay on top of client referrals to increase success rates.

Now that you have your referral program planned out, you’ve set up your website page and form, and you’ve incorporated it into your marketing communications at key milestones, you’re done, right?

Well, that’s just the foundation.

How and when you follow up on referrals is everything.

Getting referrals is great. Acting on them quickly is what actually turns them into clients.

Here’s the best way to think about it. Remember, referrals are typically going to be a stable source of new business, and there is generally going to be a higher level of interest on their part. You also have the connection to their friend or family member who referred you to them.

Now that the stars are aligned, what happens if you fail to give them a call back right away, let alone that day (or longer)?

Yes, referrals have a higher chance of becoming a client in most cases, but the best approach is to treat these referrals as if that client brought that person into your office, ready and willing to hear you out. You’d no doubt drop what you are doing and put the attention on them.

Keep referrals moving with a Pipeline workflow.

This is where you’ll need to set up a workflow or Pipeline system to manage the referrals you get so your team can stay on top of them, and also follow-up with the client referring them if needed to thank them.

If you have your form set up, you’re going to get an instant notification. That notification should be what kicks off your follow-up process, where your team can jump into action to contact them as soon as possible.

However, that’s typically not the problem. The bigger issue is the follow-up after making initial contact.

This is where your Pipeline comes into play. With a workflow like this, you can create action items for your team to reach out in “X” number of days to check in and see if they are ready to move forward. Because, without these reminders, there’s a good chance that referral falls off and they find coverage on their own.

Here is how the agencies we work with put this into action.

The result is a process that is seamless for the person referring, frictionless for the person being referred, and simple for your team to stay on top of.

The moment a form is submitted on their Forge website, for example, they not only get a notification to their email about a new referral lead, but, because they have their forms connected to their Fuse client communication platform, it automatically creates a lead with the details, ready to be assigned to an agent.

From there, that agent will have an action item to reach out to the referral and move them into the next step of the Pipeline, and so on, adjusting follow-up due dates, adding notes from conversations, and finally marking them as (hopefully) closed won at the end of the process.

With this follow-up system in place, and with the assistance of automation and technology, agencies have a foolproof way to stay on top of referrals and actually make it harder to miss a referral than to see it and stay connected.

Turn your referral strategy into a system that works for you.

Building a referral ecosystem does not have to be complicated, but it does have to be intentional.

When you have a clear program in place, a website that makes it easy to refer, communications that ask at the right moments, and a workflow that ensures nothing falls through the cracks, referrals stop being something that happens to your agency and become something your agency actively generates.

That is the difference between hoping your clients talk about you and building a system that consistently makes it happen.

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