Insurance Firms Should Market More to Existing Policy Holders CMO Council Finds

"Insurance marketers must refrain from just looking at the surface measures of policy size and key accounts as the exclusive for retention marketing and reactivation strategy. The greatest opportunity to grow business resides within their own policy holder and agent channel base."

When looking into their existing customer pool, 22 percent of marketers are looking at customer lifetime spend and loyalty to the company, potentially missing an opportunity to look at lifetime value and opportunity. This tendency to overlook up-sell and cross-sell opportunities are further punctuated as only nine percent of respondents are leveraging communications to existing customers to up-sell or cross sell as part of a retention marketing strategy. Instead, marketers are looking to strategic account reviews that tend to only focus on the most profitable customers with the biggest portfolios, almost completely ignoring dormant, departed or disaffected customers.