When customers shop for insurance, they’re looking for a brand they can trust. The experience can be intimidating—often, it involves imagining the worst-case scenario around a purchase and the potential coverage they’d want should disaster strike.
It’s a vulnerable place for consumers to be and this means that an insurance company’s trustworthiness is essential. But establishing trust isn’t as simple as slapping a seal of approval on the brand. Today’s consumer behavior is driven largely by reviews from fellow customers.
With a little know-how, you can use those reviews to build trust in your insurance business and turn that trust into measurable ROI through increased web traffic, sales, and revenue. If you’re looking for ways to set your brand apart in the insurance industry, start with this guide to leverage the power of customer reviews.
In a 2022 survey of 1,000 U.S. consumers, 56% of people found reviews and ratings to be very useful or useful for choosing insurance providers.
Why every finance business needs customer reviews and testimonials
Great customer reviews create an ongoing cycle that benefits your business immediately, and in the long-term. Here’s how it works (and keeps working):
1. Build trust in your brand by collecting and responding to reviews.
Reviews are an opportunity for customers to publicly share what they love about your products, services, and customer experience. Reviews let potential customers know that you’re safe to do business with. Responding to those reviews proves that you care about your customers and their experience.
We connected with Kevin Boyer, Senior Director of Product Marketing at Zendesk, whose 2023 Customer Experience Trends report illustrates the importance of responding to reviews. "Our research found that customer reviews are pivotal in shaping reputation and driving growth. They're a gold mine of authentic feedback, providing customer insights that businesses need to evolve. Ignoring this feedback is a missed opportunity for insurance brands to improve customer relationships, innovate, and stay competitive. As customer support leaders, we drive business improvement when we listen, respond, and proactively address concerns raised in these reviews for ultimate customer satisfaction."
Responding to those reviews is made simpler thanks to Trustpilot’s integrations with Zendesk, Slack, Sprinklr, and a host of other tools. You’ll even save time with Trustpilot’s platform, which gives you all the stats you need in one place.
Once you have some reviews about your business, you can:
2. Attract new customers by using reviews throughout your marketing strategy.
Sharing good reviews attracts and converts new customers, turning brand trust into measurable ROI. Whether your goal is improving click-through rate in search results, driving more traffic with your emails, or converting more browsers into requests for quotes, social proof like reviews, star ratings, and testimonials can optimize conversion at every stage of the buyer journey.
To meet the expectations of the new customers you’ll attract with your reviews, you’ll need to:
3. Tap into the goldmine of consumer insights with your reviews.
People trust your insurance business. You’ve attracted more customers than ever. Now you need to understand what customers thought about their experience so you can build greater trust in your brand and start the cycle again.
Customer feedback, both from direct sources like surveys and indirect sources like reviews and chat logs can provide a wealth of insights to help you win, grow and keep more customers. Once you understand the interactions and journeys your customers are having with your business, across all channels, you can create better, more distinctive experiences driven by those insights.
Dan Brousseau is a Senior Director, Solutions Principal at Medallia, the leading vendor in enterprise experience management. Dan says, "review data is a rich and plentiful source of customer feedback and should be combined with other sources across channels to gain valuable insights into customer sentiment and what’s driving their satisfaction and disappointment." In fact, according to the Medallia Institute, CX Leaders (which are 2.8x more likely to hit revenue targets as compared to CX laggards) do just this, and over 30% of CX leaders capture customer feedback from external review pages. When done well, businesses can tap into a wealth of unstructured data to unlock meaningful understanding and make informed decisions to create memorable experiences that truly resonate with your customers.
Insurance businesses can take advantage of these insights with Medallia’s integration for Trustpilot, leveraging advanced AI to generate rich insights and improve customer experiences at scale.
How customer reviews improve organic SEO
Searching for the right insurance can feel downright daunting for many consumers, which leads many to start the process with a good old Google search.
That’s why the power of organic SEO is essential for your marketing strategy, and customer reviews can be a great way to boost it. These are key ways to use reviews to improve organic SEO:
91.5% of organic traffic goes to sites listed on the first page of search engine results.
1. Build strong off-page SEO by collecting reviews on a third-party platform.
Off-page SEO describes actions you take to build a digital footprint outside of your actual website, whether it’s adding credible backlinks to your pages, staying active on social media platforms, or creating a profile on a third-party review platform like Trustpilot.
2. Drive more referral traffic from your Trustpilot business profile.
In the crowded insurance space, getting a buyer’s attention can be a challenge. But, when someone searches for reviews of a brand or business, they’re likely to find that brand’s Trustpilot business profile page at the top of the search results because Trustpilot’s domain authority is strong. The more reviews you collect—and the more you enrich the content on your business profile page—the easier it will be for search engines to associate your brand with Trustpilot and feature your Trustpilot presence at the top of search results.
Off-page SEO considerations like relevance, trustworthiness, and authority carry more than 50% of the ranking factor weight, according to the experts at Moz.
This could be your competitive advantage since referral traffic is an often-overlooked, free source of qualified leads, and can improve your organic search performance.
3. Get more organic traffic by displaying customer reviews on your website.
Featuring customer reviews on key landing pages is easy to pull off with Trustpilot’s review widgets, and this small addition can improve how often your pages show up in organic search results.
That’s because reviews are a form of user-generated content, and UGC is SEO gold:
Reviews give Google more context for what a page is about and why it should surface for the user’s search query.
Ratings associated with your reviews help Google understand the value of your products and services. Google wants to prioritize quality for users.
Reviews add fresh content to pages that might not otherwise get frequent updates. Google looks for up-to-date information for the user’s search query.
UGC can bring a human-centered approach to dry or difficult topics, and can help alleviate anxiety around selecting the right insurance carrier while boosting your organic traffic strategy.
These elements work together to help Google understand your website. Over time, this can lead search engines to show your pages in search results more frequently and drive larger volumes of high-quality traffic to your site.
4. Rank for long-tail keywords with product reviews.
Collecting individual reviews on each of your insurance products can also amp up the SEO power on each of your offerings, and help you rank for a broader range of relevant keywords.
Customers leave reviews about your individual offerings; you put them front and center on your product pages. This improves your site’s visibility for long-tail search queries with no copywriting effort on your part.
Customer reviews enhance paid digital campaign performance
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Our Trustpilot survey shows that US consumers are more likely to make a purchase based on customer reviews than they are through TV or online advertising.
Customer reviews and star ratings can enhance your digital campaign performance on the channels that have the biggest influence on consumers’ purchasing decisions. Here’s how to take advantage of that fact:
1. Qualify for Google Seller Ratings to improve Google Ads performance.
A close relative of review snippets in organic search, Google Seller Ratings are a one-stop-shop for:
Adding a healthy dose of social proof to your paid search listings
Making your business stand out from the competition
Increasing click-through rate on your Google Ads campaigns
A higher click-through rate often leads to increased sales, and will usually improve your Quality Score, meaning you’ll get traffic at a lower cost per click and, in turn, a lower cost per acquisition.
Just keep in mind that whether Google Seller Ratings display on your paid search listings is up to Google’s discretion. Their latest guidelines stipulate that a business must have a certain number of reviews and a certain aggregate rating before those shiny gold stars will appear below your Google Ads.
Once you earn them, your Google Seller Ratings can appear in Google search results, Google Shopping listings, and on Google search partners’ listings.
2. Improve retargeting campaigns with reviews.
Retargeting campaigns use paid ads to re-engage potential customers who visit your website or social media profile. In the insurance industry, where consumers are searching for the best offerings and rates across competitors, retargeting can prove to be a powerful tool.
When deciding on a creative strategy for these retargeting ads, be sure to include reviews in the ad creative—you’ll see a performance improvement. This can look like:
Quoting an individual customer review
Using your overall rating in your ad creative
Highlighting how many customers have rated you highly.
You can highlight reviews in ad creative without design skills (or even an in-house designer) using Trustpilot’s social media Image Generator.
Use your customer’s voice to get more from email marketing
Email marketing experts estimate that the average person sends and receives 126 business emails per day. The average open rate for emails is just 22%. Cut through the noise of email marketing by letting the customer’s voice do some of the talking.
1. Boost email click-through rates by adding customer testimonials.
Whether you’re drafting a monthly newsletter or a dynamic remarketing campaign, highlighting a customer review that’s directly related to your offer puts the social proof your customers seek on full display and increases the odds that they’ll click-through to your landing page.
We spoke with John McBriarty, Technology Partnerships Manager at Dotdigital, a leading email service provider. In a 2022 survey, they asked consumers what makes them more trusting of a brand. The third most-selected factor was "The brand is rated highly on review sites (e.g. Trustpilot)” - beating out recommendations by friends and family. This trust-building ability means reviews can help drive better email conversions.
2. Let customer reviews do the talking in your welcome campaigns.
John adds that "Customer reviews in email campaigns have a unique ability to showcase your killer insurance products to prospective customers in the voice of existing customers. This can drive a sense of community, making your most dedicated customers an extension of your own marketing team. It's really hard to create marketing materials and content in-house that are as authentic as those created by your customers! We recommend showing them off to new contacts on your list as soon as you can. For example, right after a new visitor has requested a quote, when you know they’re considering your products but are still shopping around for a trusted provider.”
Welcome campaigns are your first opportunity to build a direct relationship with a future customer. It’s an ideal time to let positive customer experiences do the work:
Include a relevant customer review in each email, speaking to the customer’s specific interest. If they’re on the hunt for home insurance, include a review praising the array of home policies you offer.
For less personalized campaigns, focus on reviews that reinforce your key competitive differentiators, like your simple-to-use app or your best-in-class customer service or claims process.
Show off brand personality by curating some surprising or funny customer reviews.
3. Establish trustworthiness in the email header, footer, and subject line.
Every email you send should include proof of your trustworthiness. One easy way to achieve this is by including your star rating in your email template’s header, adding a customer testimonial in the footer, and leading with social proof in the subject line. For example:
"Here’s what customers are saying about our coverage."
"Thank you for making us a 5 star company."
"5 ways we’ve used your reviews to improve our customer service."
"Meet Kevin, our top insurance rep."
Improve website conversion rates by putting customer reviews front and center
Today, 89% of consumers check online reviews throughout their shopping journey. So, by the time a potential customer lands on your insurance business website, chances are they’ve already formed a first impression about it.
In an industry where shoppers can get overwhelmed with options, highlighting important metrics like customer satisfaction on your website can improve your conversion rate.
1. Use reviews to make a stellar first impression on your homepage.
When you improve the performance of your marketing campaigns by leveraging the power of trusted reviews, you’re likely to drive a lot more qualified traffic to your website. If your goal is turning more site visitors into customers, your website should be just as compelling as the marketing materials that led them there.
Even if the majority of your site visitors arrive via a specific landing page, there’s a good chance they’ll still want to check out your homepage,
especially if they’re unfamiliar with your brand.
Use customer reviews to highlight your business’s value propositions. For example:
Showcase the quality and quantity of your reviews. For example, “We received 2,365 reviews this year, and 95% of customers gave us a 5/5.”
Highlight the efficiency of the claims department, with reviews praising the speed at which claims are addressed.
Spotlight reviews that speak to the customer service of t
he insurance reps, using reviews discuss how easy and helpful they were to work with
2. Add review widgets to pages to make the buying decision easy.
Product reviews are more than an SEO secret weapon—they can also make conversions skyrocket on the product pages for your various insurance offerings. Here’s why:
According to Shopify, 79% of online shoppers trust information shared in product reviews as much as a personal recommendation.
Product reviews are 12x more trusted than the business’s own product description.
In short, showing relevant reviews on product pages makes it easier for hesitant insurance shoppers to decide which coverage or plan they want to buy.
3. Add star ratings to the site header and footer to make every page more trustworthy.
Depending on what they searched to find your business, customers can land on almost any page on your site from the SERPs. With this in mind, every page is an opportunity to convince them to make the critical decision to purchase, and adding your star rating to page headers or footers establishes your trustworthiness loud and clear.
4. Reduce your exit rate by adding reviews and ratings to key conversion points and exit pages.
Every journey has a start point and an end point—and if that end point isn’t the order confirmation page, you should take the opportunity to increase your conversion rate.
First, identify pages with high exit rates by checking out your exit page performance in Google Analytics and noting which ones have high traffic and a high exit percentage. With exit pages, it’s worth taking the time to look at the actual page and see if you can spot a problem.
For example, there may not be enough calls to action on those pages to keep people on the site. Or, the page could be a dead end for visitors. Are there any customer review sentiments that might help keep people on this page?
Trustpilot’s Review Tagging feature makes this easy. Tag reviews that mention unique features, filter reviews by those keywords, find a testimonial that raves about customer service or unique app experiences, and feature it on the page.
This tiny consideration could lead to a meaningful drop in your exit rate and more conversions down the line.
Grow your business by amplifying the voice of the customer.
If you made it this far, it should be clear that there are endless creative ways to integrate reviews into your marketing strategy to attract more customers and make sure they convert.
Reviews are at the core of a marketing strategy for insurance business growth. When visitors are coming to your brand from a vulnerable place, being able to communicate your trustworthiness quickly is ideal. That all starts with customer reviews.
If you really want to make the most of your customer reviews, focus on growing your review collection until your social proof reaches critical mass. This makes it easier to highlight your reviews across your marketing channels and eventually tailor your review curation to campaigns and product promotions.
So, the next time you approach a marketing campaign for your insurance business, ask yourself if customer reviews could boost performance results. You heard it here first: the answer is yes.
