Good Policy: Automation and Tracking is Aon’s Insurance For Success

(Direct) To get the best insurance, you have to be well informed. You need to have the all the information to get the protection best suited for your needs.

Insurers too, need information—about their customers’ demographics, businesses and activities. For Aon Corp., that meant putting automated processes in place to better track prospects and generate qualified for sales representatives.

Last year, global insurer Aon was looking for a way to pull together their marketing efforts in various product lines and countries, to create an international marketing plan. The Chicago-based company wanted to drive efforts at both the corporate and field level, and integrate the CRM and lead flow process.

Eloqua is working with Chicago-based Aon on several interactive fronts, including campaign management, e-mail landing pages, e-newsletters and automating efforts driving attendance at events, industry conferences and webcasts, says Paul Teshima, Eloqua’s vice president for client service and support..

Trackability was also a concern for the insurer, he continues. The company wanted to better follow results at a micro level (tracking new customer leads) and a macro level (how the campaign is performing in general, how it is meshing with the CRM initiatives, how many leads are generated and the return on investment of new leads).

Aon began testing Eloqua’s system last November, and officially rolled out with it in January, integrating it with the insurer’s existing SalesForce.com CRM platform. Eloqua has about 15 to 20 financial services clients.

The insurer’s client base is primarily business-to-business, with the highest percentage of customers in the risk management services niche. The company also provides insurance and re-insurance brokerage, management consulting and specialty insurance underwriting. Mid-market to large global companies are the typical audience, with risk managers or CFOs being the point of contact for the Aon sales force.

Aon—which reported net income of $213 million for the first quarter, an 8% increase over the period last year—has 500 offices in more than 120 countries, with 43,000 employees. The sales process normally takes anywhere from six months to three years, says Angela Kauffman interactive marketing director, Aon.

The goal of all the insurer’s direct and interactive efforts—online and off—is to generate qualified leads for the company’s sales reps.

Aon uses webcasts—often featuring outside experts—for brand building. Topics cover things like insurance captives, DNO (Director and Office Insurance) issues, or the pros and cons of setting up your own internal insurance company, and the risks in such a venture. The risk management line of business typically does webcasts once a month, while other divisions do them on a sporadic basis. A few thousand invitations are typically sent, with attendance averaging between 100 and 300 people. In the past, the attendee list was a hodge-podge of names generated by the sales force, with invites often forwarded through Lotus Notes to people reps thought might want to attend. There was no concise way to track and follow-up on attendee response.

Now, after invitations and follow-up e-mails are sent using Eloqua, those who attended the webcasts (and those who didn’t) are tracked using the Saleforce.com software; the actual webcasts are deployed using yet another third-party vendor.

A major goal for Aon was to get more out of trade shows such as the Risk and Insurance Management Society annual conference. Rather than just collecting business cards at such events, Aon is now able to send booth visit invitations prior to shows, and then use Eloqua to follow up after the events, says Kauffman.

Aon regularly does e-mail newsletters on topics related to the consulting and risk management lines of business, and is in the process of integrating those programs into the Eloqua system, to better track what is being sent and opened.

Having better integrated global efforts recently allows Aon to adopt a campaign that originated in Rotterdam for the U.S. market. The benchmarking effort set out to help prospects determine if they were over or under protected, and ferret out any possible sales opportunities on the three major product lines, DNO, property and casualty.

The first point of contact is direct mail, via a large poster sent in a mailing tube, with subsequent e-mail and telemarketing follow-up. “The goal is to get in the door to evaluate the programs they currently have in place,” says Kauffman.

Aon began by targeting the company’s 500 largest prospects in San Francisco, Chicago and Los Angeles last August, she notes, and is now rolling out the campaign to other areas in the U.S. The effort will likely lead to more interaction between international offices.