When it comes to choosing a product or service, your customers ultimately want convenience, relevance, choice, and most importantly, a trusted brand like yours. Building that trust goes beyond simply providing the products they need; your customers also want a brand they can feel invested in.
That trust between an organization and consumer is the driving force behind affinity group insurance. There are many insurance carriers who devote big budgets to direct marketing in an effort to attract more customers. With affinity sales, they can leverage partnerships with trusted brands to access their member or customer bases with a greater return on investment.
Keep reading to learn how affinity group insurance works, and how brands can leverage their customer bases to expand their product offerings and drive revenue.
What is affinity group insurance?
Traditionally, affinity insurance sales are associated with affinity groups. An affinity group is a group formed around a shared interest or common goal, to which individuals formally or informally belong, such as an alumni association or employee group. Picture the discounts members receive as a perk for being part of a credit union, employee group, professional association, or alumni association.
Using this model, insurance carriers, brokers, and membership organizations have built profitable partnerships by combining their brands, resources, and audiences. Still, there are more ways to group individuals than just by their professions or alma maters. Advances in consumer data make it easier to understand consumer desires and group customers by persona types to supply them with the products and services they truly need.
A new kind of affinity
While affinity insurance usually conjures images of getting a discount for being a member, it doesn’t mean the model only works for member groups. Affinity groups could also include more loosely grouped consumer segments, such as shoppers at a particular retailer or people who share similar interests.
Rather than relying on one organization’s membership to find an audience, companies can use customer data to create interest groups and develop custom offerings. These consumers may not think of themselves as being part of this affinity, or know much about others in their group, but they have something in common: the brand.
Examples of how this could look in practice include:
- A major retailer uses data to identify customers who frequently purchase pet supplies, and creates a campaign to offer them pet insurance.
- An online discount site adds insurance to its product offerings for members already keen on finding a discount.
- A travel company adds the option to purchase travel insurance when customers book through its site.
Benefits of offering affinity group insurance
Many brands may not realize that affinity group insurance is a viable option for them simply because they don’t think of themselves as being an affinity group or a member organization. However, if a company has a customer base that cares for and likes its brand, it has an affinity group.
Some of the benefits these brands can realize by offering affinity group insurance include:
- Growing their product offerings with products that everyone needs.
- Increasing brand value and customer loyalty.
- Doing more for your customers beyond the core transaction.
- Enacting a new way of driving revenue they may not have previously tried, or even considered.
With affinity group insurance, there are many possibilities to offer people the right product at the right time. By taking a broad interpretation of affinity, and implementing insurance software to help along the way, brands can leverage the trust they’ve built to keep customers happy and drive more revenue.
Contact us to learn more about how affinity group insurance can help you leverage your brand to retain customers and drive revenue.
