The Internet has revolutionized the way we do business. But, more importantly, it has changed how insurance agencies market themselves. As a result, insurance agency web design has never been more critical than today.
Great Web Design
Creating an effective business website isn’t something that just happens; there is a lot of preparation and strategy involved. Of course, not all websites are made equal, but the following characteristics are what we pay attention to when creating client websites to achieve success:
- Good user experience (UX)
- Consistent contact information
- Responsive/mobile-friendly
- KIS (Keeping it Simple)
But, there’s far more behind-the-scenes work than a mere item on a checklist.
1. User-Friendly
Every website, specially designed to produce leads, must have an excellent user experience. Visitors should not have to search for information or be bombarded with content, visuals, buttons, navigation aids, or any other distractions that don’t immediately assist them in getting where they want to go.
Navigation, content, and purpose are three critical components of a successful user experience.
Easy to Navigate
A website that isn’t intuitively simple to navigate will probably drive visitors away, regardless of how excellent your content is.
Construct your insurance website with clean, simple-to-use navigation in mind, ensuring that potential customers (or returning clients!) can quickly discover the website content they’re searching for.
Good, clean navigation is like the bone structure of a website: make sure it’s sturdy and supports the material effectively!
Good Content
“Good” is one of those terms that we humans frequently use, influenced rather than accurately. That is to say, what one person thinks of as excellent may be seen as average by another.
You must concentrate on what your visitors see in terms of online content. If the structure of your site is navigation, then the substance is its blood and viscera. It’s essential to the whole website’s operation, and it has to fulfill its purpose while also ensuring that everything continues to operate smoothly.
Visitors to your site want to read content once they arrive. If they can’t locate what they’re looking for or the information isn’t well-written — or helpful — you’ll see a decrease in traffic. Create content that addresses the needs of your target audience and provides solutions to their problems.
In our world, “good content” refers to material that is both relevant and helpful to the people visiting the website and capable of generating high-quality leads for our clients.
Clear Purpose
The website’s goal, or whether it has one, is another question. It should if you want the site to be effective. Everything on the website (including content, navigation, images, and calls-to-action) must be the main objective.
Your insurance clients, once again, need web visitors to fill out a form or contact them. As a result, your insurance agency websites’ primary goal is to direct people to conversion.
2. Contact Info
Even though people search the web for information, many still like to pick up the phone and call instead of filling out a form or sending an email.
Make it simple for visitors to contact the insurance agency immediately, regardless of their preference for contacting methods.
You don’t want visitors to go to a different page to get contact information — use calls-to-action on other pages to let them know how to contact you.
Calls-to-Action
They claim you can take a horse to water, but you can’t force him to drink. That may be true on an insurance agency website, but it all begins with calls-to-action (CTAs). So make it simple for online users to understand what you want them to do.
The most common question people have when seeking an independent insurance agency is getting a quotation for services.
Visitors will be encouraged to contact the agency if you simply tell them to do so.
Conversion rate optimization (CRO) is a branch of internet marketing dedicated to optimizing conversion rates.
According to certain CRO experts, you must employ a specific color combination for the CTA button. So whatever colors you choose and whatever design you pick, make sure that CTAs are easy to see by using a color that stands out against the rest of the website’s aesthetic while still adhering to the customer’s color scheme.
So, in a nutshell, make CTAs simple to discover and understand. You should click on them without even reading the entire post first.
Contact Forms
The CTA button, of course, must take the user to something — and most often, that’s a contact form.
However, not all visitors want to contact an insurance firm in the same way. Contact forms are now so widespread across the Internet that it’s normal for them to be front-and-center for visitors to fill out while still providing additional options (such as phone numbers or even addresses).
As with other aspects of marketing, contact forms are more effective when they are kept simple rather than complex.
There’s a delicate balance to be struck between asking too many or too few questions on the contact form. Therefore, it’s critical to optimize lead generation forms to avoid asking for too much — or not enough!
Don’t overload people with too many form fields because it might be a deterrent, but also ensure that our insurance agency clients get all of the information they require to qualify their prospects.
Responsive web design is another internet element that is becoming increasingly popular worldwide.
3. Responsive Web Design
When responsive web design (RWD) was first discovered, many people thought it was another aesthetic fad.
Always seek to develop only responsive websites, regardless of the company or products offered.
Most people have access to the Internet nowadays, and they’re using it to get information from numerous devices — many of which are hand-held. Therefore, the need for a responsive website has never been greater.
Your content must be consumable via any device—including PCs, laptops, tablets, and smartphones—possible customers may use.
There’s more to RWD than simply being able to “show up” on a variety of screen sizes. For example, if a web developer doesn’t know how to construct a responsive site, you could wind up with one that looks nice on many devices but isn’t easy to use.
Your website should be mobile-friendly. However, the ability to test your responsive website on each and every mobile device, screen size variation, and so on aren’t feasible.
Fortunately, there are tools available to assist you in determining whether or not your website is mobile-friendly—for example, you can use Google’s mobile-friendly test.
Another major factor in being mobile-friendly has a website that loads quickly; you don’t want mobile (or any other!) visitors waiting and waiting while large photos load, then the navigation fills in, and so on.
If a site takes more than 5 seconds to load, you’ll lose traffic to a competitor’s site that loads faster.
Fast-Loading
“Going mobile” is all about convenience; no one wants to wait any longer. But, of course, that includes online content as well.
The faster a website loads, the more quickly visitors may access the material, and it also aids in SEO.
Here are some things to keep in mind that could cause site load times to be slow:
- Query strings
- Large image sizes
- Browser caching
- Not minifying CSS / HTML / Javascript
- Bad requests
So you can see that just pushing for a responsive website isn’t enough; there’s a lot of behind-the-scenes work that has to be done to make it a successful RWD.
4. Keeping It Simple
Insurance website design doesn’t have to be complicated: don’t over-think things. The client ultimately wants leads; therefore, create a website that delivers.
Don’t pay attention to bells and whistles, the newest fads, or flashy design features that aren’t relevant to the website’s objective.
Work backward from the site’s primary objective and move forward. There’s no need to make web design more difficult than it has to be; simply construct the site your customer requires to achieve their business objectives.
Excess is overkill.
Each customer is unique even with the insurance sector; therefore, we understand that a cookie-cutter solution will not work! Design websites to meet the demands of our clients. If they don’t require anything too fancy, we know a clean, simple website would be ideal for them.
In other words, if all that’s required is a basic web design to get the task done, don’t construct large, custom-built sites for our clients.
The Conclusion: Build it Right
Your client has a desire that you as an insurance agent can meet. So do it! Whether it’s health insurance or business insurance, well designed and responsive insurance websites can increase your website visitors and as a result also increase the rate of conversion.
Given that we’re talking about independent insurance agents, we know they want a website that helps them gain leads and is beneficial to their current customers.
Concentrate on excellent web design that incorporates great user experience, simple-to-find contact information, useful content, and the ability to operate effectively from any device. Keep it simple, above all.
