Insurance companies can feel like that old high school “friend” who only calls when they need 20 bucks.
It’s a unique dynamic. As a consumer, you share all your intimate details with an insurance company at the beginning and then (hopefully) it’s radio silence, unless disaster strikes.
That means the first impression is make-or-break for insurance companies. It’s a delicate balance: they need to collect a lot of information to effectively underwrite the risk of a policy, but also make the user flow as seamless as possible to drive conversion. And with today’s legislation and economy making it difficult to raise policy prices, insurance companies need to improve both underwriting and conversion to stay afloat. So what’s an insurance company to do?
Experiment. That’s the key to success that we’ve learned from helping dozens of insurance companies improve conversion on their core forms. In this article, we’ll dive into the experimentation culture that innovative insurance companies like Lemonade and Next Insurance have adopted to achieve best-in-class conversion rates in these difficult times.
A culture of experimentation
Leading insurance companies are always trying out new questions in their application flow to see how much new data they can collect to improve underwriting without hurting conversion. They also test new ways to streamline the application UX and expand revenue through bundling.
Let’s go through a few examples of experiments that have paid off big time.
Lemonade: make Insurance simple
Lemonade, a consumer insurance company that provides rental, home, car and pet insurance, is the pioneer of the design principle of “keep it simple”. Their application flow only shows a single question at a time to not overwhelm users.
Lemonade also includes helpful information on how each question will be used to generate a policy. For example, for the “Do you own any valuable jewelry?” question in their renter or homeowners insurance flow, Lemonade explains “We’ll show you how to add those items to your policy later” to reinforce that they are collecting this info for the user’s benefit.
Lemonade: Make Insurance feel human
Lemonade also makes their application flow feel more like you’re chatting with a virtual broker, showing a photo of a virtual agent named Maya on top of every question. This helps increase trust and decreases drop-off.
After you get your quote, Maya turns into an actual chatbot on the bottom right that you can chat with and ask questions about your policy. This provides the intimate feeling of a broker at scale. In fact, their mobile app is entirely powered by a chat-like interface.
Lemonade: Insurance Bundling
A key revenue opportunity that many insurance companies are leaving on the table is bundling and cross-selling. For example, a user could get married, then buy a new home and a new pet. That’s the perfect opportunity to offer them both home and pet insurance!
Lemonade allows users to buy multiple insurance policies in one seamless UX. In the beginning, they show all the policies that Lemonade offers, and they provide a discount if a user buys more than one.
Users see a glowing “gem” animation when they select multiple insurance types: a gamification tactic that makes them feel rewarded.
Bundling helps increase revenue per user and decrease drop-off. Lemonade is able to ask less questions compared to a user filling out the flow separately for each insurance type, and they can also offers a single checkout page for multiple policies. Pretty neat!
Next Insurance: the “winback” campaign and personalized policies (Business Insurance)
Busness owners have a million things fighting for their attention. Next Insurance, a leading business insurance company, gets this. If a user leaves in the middle of their application flow and comes back, they are greeted with a large “Welcome back” banner with their business type, a basic quote range and the ability to continue where the user left off. This helps drive conversion.
Next Insurance also breaks down each company into very specific verticals like “Dance Instructor”, which helps the user feel like their policy is personalized to the needs of their business.
Root Insurance: automagically pulling which cars a user owns (Car Insurance)
The best UX is no UX: what if insurance companies could get the data they need without having users manually enter it all? That’s exactly what Root Insurance, an innovative car insurance company, does in their application flow.
A user just enters their name and home address, and Root automatically pulls the residence of that address and cars registered on that address using public records. No more looking up car models and license plate numbers! Then, a user can just select which residents they want to add to their plan, which cars to add, and done. They’re given a quote instantly.
Behind the scenes, Root is using one of many identity data providers (like LexusNexis) to look up this data in real time. And of course, if the data pulled from public records is outdated, users still have control to dismiss those suggestions and enter their data manually as usual.
One of Feathery’s auto insurance customers saw a 30% increase in conversion through a similar strategy of prefilling data from public records.
What about white-glove insurance (brokers)?
Certain types of insurance companies and products may not be the best fit for a fully automated application. For example, rental and auto insurance is typically sold directly to consumers, but bigger ticket purchases like homeowners insurance and life insurance are more complex. For these use cases, brokers play a crucial role as a trusted confidant to buyers to safeguard their most valuable investments.
However, white-glove insurance companies still require intuitive forms to help their brokers collect and record user information, provide the right quote to a prospect, and cross-sell other relevant products.
Off-the-shelf insurance quoting tools are outdated and often not flexible enough to the unique workflows and data requirements for modern insurance companies.
The best approach for insurance companies is to invest in building their own tooling for quote generation through no-code and low-code platforms (like Feathery). This allows them to develop custom flows that meet the specific types of data they need to collect but doesn’t require a dedicated engineering team to build (or relying on old-school paper forms).
How do I start experimenting as an insurance company?
Many of the insurance companies highlighted above choose to build teams of developers that write code for each change and experiment they make, resulting in long iteration cycles and lots of friction. Feathery allows your growth team to make these changes and run experiments directly, without needing to write code.
Feathery is the leading no-code form builder for powerful insurance applications. Our flexible designer allows you to create pixel-perfect interfaces that you can replicate 1:1 from your designs.
Feathery also supports advanced logic for running calculations and integrations that allow you to connect to any API. For example, you can prefill form fields from public records, send user data to your own APIs and get back a Insurance policy quote to show the user, and more.
Leading insurance companies like Quility and Jack Life Insurance power their core forms using Feathery, from lead generation & qualification to core applications to claims flows.
For example, Upfront, an auto lending and insurance company, saw a 42.4% increase in conversion with Feathery and saved hundreds of engineering hours.
To show how powerful Feathery is, we’ve recreated Lemonade application flow in Feathery in this video walkthrough below.
Try Feathery Today
Interested in trying Feathery out yourself? Feel free to clone the Insurance Form template to make changes. You can also schedule time with our team here and we’ll prepare a custom demo specific to your insurance needs, completely free of charge.
More Insurance Quote Templates (Home Insurance, Auto Insurance, Health Insurance):
Feathery also has 10+ Insurance Form templates for you to use. Here's a list of a few below across industries:
Home Insurance Quote Form & Application (The Zebra): this is a detailed, mobile responsive Home Insurance Quote Application inspired by The Zebra (a popular insurance comparison site)
Auto Insurance Quote Form & Application (The Zebra):this is a detailed, mobile responsive Auto / Car Insurance Quote Application inspired by The Zebra (a popular insurance comparison site). It goes into steps that ask the applicant for information about their vehicles, existing coverage, and shares the quote at the end.
Health Insurance Quote Form & Application:
This is a mobile responsive health insurance application inspired by the Healthcare.gov application (which provides Government Health Insurance). It has 3 sections: one about personal information, another about coverage (ex: HRA coverage) & life changes and the final section about confirming your details before submitting.
You can see Feathery's full list of templates here.
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