URL is making life easy again for you and your clients with our direct-to-consumer tools. Join our webinar to learn about URL’s term life insurance direct-to-consumer quoting and application tools you can add on your website. This meeting is for agents and agencies with a website who want to:
- Add value for your clients
- Offer accelerated underwriting solutions for your clients (underwritten in minutes and days, not months)
- Increase life insurance sales without the need of walking the client through the application process, saving time for everyone
- Increase services provided to your clients and increase agency revenue
- Actively market and promote life insurance to your clients
Steve Clemens Hello, everybody. Thanks for joining us today at URL for our direct-to-consumer quoting and application tools for term life insurance. I'm glad you can make it and learn about some of the new tools available.
To start, the idea of purchasing life insurance online. We look at the statistics every year. One of the great sources for that is the annual insurance barometer study that's put on by Limerick and Life Happens. Something interesting has been happening over the years as we've been creeping up on more and more clients preferring to research and buy life insurance online.
In 2023, it was the 1st year that we showed more people preferred to research and buy life insurance online versus in person. 25% of all consumers expect to complete a life insurance application entirely online. Which is normal. If you go to our website and do a drop ticket E-application, a lot of those will just eventually send an email out to your client where they complete the application online.
Some of the carriers still do a phone call with the client, but it's a process that clients are more and more aware of and used to. For the first time, 32% of clients prefer to research and buy life insurance online compared to 29% prefer in person. So, for those of us who are meeting our clients’ needs for life insurance, we want to be able to provide both.
Both preferences there. We want to be able to have our clients meet in person if they choose. For other clients if they prefer to do everything online, we have tools for them to do that. You can utilize and take part in and use with your clients.
The top three reasons people prefer to purchase life insurance online, 66% because it's convenient, 61% the ability to research, and 59% said it would be faster and easier to do that online than to book an appointment, schedule an appointment, go to an appointment, and do everything with their agent.
Another thing to consider is if you're not using social media platforms to market yourself, the millennials, and Gen Z marketplace. Two areas where we've seen growth in the life insurance markets in the last couple of years. A lot of the growth has been driven from the millennials and Gen Z, not for our seniors out there in the marketplace.
If you look at it, for millennials, the biggest area where they go to for financial information is Facebook which is 68%, then followed by 64% with YouTube. If you look at Gen Z's, 70% are going to YouTube to find information, 50% on Instagram, which is number two, followed by Facebook number three. Keep that in mind.
If you're not currently using those platforms, I'd encourage you to take advantage of those platforms and use them. One thing we do each month at URL is in our monthly newsletter. We provide social media pieces that you can plug and play to use with your social media platforms every month.
If you're not checking out the newsletter every month. We'll put out a monthly day by day newsletter that you can put graphics to Instagram, Facebook, LinkedIn, etc. You can use this to get a social presence out there if you're not currently taking advantage of that.
Why sell life insurance? The top five reasons people purchase life insurance are to cover final expenses, replace lost income, transfer wealth, pay off debt and mortgages, and supplement retirement.
One of the most alarming things I see every year in this study is most people are not financially prepared for the death of a primary wage earner. The time it would take to feel that financial impact of the death of a primary wage earner, 10% of clients say that would be within one week's time, 44% say within the first six months, and 17% of those polled just don't know.
When you look at the statistics of the death of a primary wage earner, over half of those people surveyed would feel that financial impact within six months. Therefore, we're not doing a good enough job out there in getting that information to our clients that, “hey, we offer life insurance, and we can help protect your family. If you have the death of a primary wage earner, both wage earners and the family.” That's number two on the list. Top five reasons why people are purchasing life insurance to replace that lost income. Number four, to pay off the debt mortgage. That would certainly help circumvent some of those issues.
For those children who were born in 2017, by the time they reach age 18, it will cost a family on average $233,000 to raise that child to age 18. For families with a child, two children, three, four children. If something happened to the wage earners in that family, obviously that creates a huge financial impact.
What we want to do is not let tech companies poach our clients. There are many of those you'll hear on the radio, see on the Internet, on social media platforms, and on TV that are marketing direct to our clients for term life insurance. With a direct-to-consumer life insurance quote and application tool, we're giving that same type of experience to our clients for those who do want to have that online process.
Whether you're advising them of the amount of insurance that they have, they're going to your website, your social platforms to get a quote, maybe research and get something online. It's a good first step for many clients.
Two options we have here at URL that you can utilize are with Assurity life and with Banner life. Assurity life with our direct to consumer currently offers a term and accidental death option. Banner life offers their term. Both companies though require you as an agent to have an established website to utilize this and an active online presence. If you don't have a website currently, they're not going to give you this platform.
They expect you to have a website by this point. There's no sacrifice in commissions. If you're currently working with Assurity or Banner with URL. Outside URL by contracting with us to offer these direct-to-consumer platforms, you're going to get paid the same compensation as you would if you did a traditional sale with your client.
The Assurity Life products, you have the term and the accidental death. Their level term plan comes in a 10-year program. We'll issue these ages 18 to 75 from $25,000 minimum death benefit to a million dollars on this online platform. Your clients do have the ability to take a return a premium option on the 20- and 30-year term with Assurity
It is fully convertible at the end of term. Not every online insured tech aggregator out there that has a term life instant decision platform that offers convertibility. They do provide instant decision or referred to an underwriter. Assurity also offers credit card payments monthly, which is pretty nice and unique in the industry.
And there's no paramedic exams. If your client quotes, the Assurity platform on term likes, it goes through the application process. They're going to either receive an instant decision of yes, you're approved, you are not approved, or it's going to be referred to an underwriter.
I can speak of this process. I took a policy a few months back on this process. I did not receive an instant decision. In my case, it was referred to an underwriter and two business days later they made their decision. I was approved for coverage at the preferred rate, and they took payment right there on the spot. I had coverage within two to three business days of that application, doing it completely without an agent, just through the online process.
It was a very simple process to use. Clients aren't going to have issues going through the application questions online and doing that. It is nice if you don't get that instant decision and that instant approval, it is referred to an underwriter reviewed quickly and then the decision is made.
Like I said, within about 2 business days, the accidental death plan is issue at age 18 to $75,000 dollars minimum death benefit to $350,000. The benefit of accidental death is there's and no health underwriting. If your client isn't healthy enough to qualify for traditional life insurance plans and they still have income replacement needs and want to protect that mortgage, it's better to have accidental death then nothing at all.
You will get instant approval on these credit card payments. No paramedic exams. Very easy process. So, this is a snapshot. If you can see what your website for the Assurity life platform would look like. It would have your logo at the top and says get a quote in minutes. Just put in your state information. The piece on the right is just the slide down menu that goes over what term life insurance is and how the process works.
Then your contact information is at the bottom. You will have a paragraph of what you want to say about your agency and information, your contact information on that page. So very simply, the client puts in their age, gender. tobacco status if they're in excellent, great, or good health, and they click next.
In this case, we plugged in good health, and it gives your client three options. In this case, it showed a quarter million, a half a million and $750,000 at different terms. You'll see at the bottom of each of those. It just says customize quote, which when you click on one of those, you can customize the quote and then make any changes you want. If you say, I want half a million, 20 year, it will automatically pre populate that monthly rate. If you want to choose it to a 30 year, 15 or a 10-year, same thing. You can make any adjustments and changes in death benefit. And length of term and the client can also choose their expand on coverage and add that return of premium rider and see what that cost would be.
So very simple. From there, they can just click on “get started” and start their application. With Banner life we have a program called quotes to apply. This is for the term product only with Banner, your level term plans are a 10-year, 15-year, 20 year. 25-year term, 30-year term or even a 35 and 40 year level term plan.
Obviously, depending on the client's age, will determine if they can get a 10 to a 40-year term. The minimum death benefit with Banner is $100,000. Assurity had a $25,000 minimum. Banner will go up to 2 million maximums with this process where Assurity caps at a million. Banner policies are convertible as well.
Banner offers accelerated underwriting and if a client cannot qualify for the accelerated underwriting or any lab free underwriting, they will order a premed exam. If you're proposed and short does not qualify for accelerated underwriting or lab free underwriting.
Banner, consistently in my 24 years doing this has always had extremely competitively. Priced premiums for your clients when you put them on our code engine at URLs website, they're most every time in the top three cells. Always at the top of the coding portals. Your clients will have an extremely competitively priced product with Banner Life.
So accelerated underwriting is different than instant decision and different than no pyramid. So once the information is received, the underwriter reviews, if it falls through accelerated underwriting, it gives that approval if it spits it out within a day. If they don't qualify for that, there is still another layer of lab free underwriting with Banner.
If your client has been to the doctor, their doctor in the last 12 months and had lab work done and a normal annual checkup. They can order those records from the doctor to review and bypass a premed exam. If they don't qualify for accelerated underwriting or lab free with the medical records, they’ll order a paramedic on your client, so they don't have to turn somebody away.
You do have a 25-year level term, a 35- and 40-year level term with Banner where you don't have those with surety. Same thing. You plug in your information, date of birth, height, and weight. A little different because you add height and weight with Banner. So, it's going to calculate if your preferred plus or standard.
It's going to spit out your quote as you can see here and very simply, there's a slide bar to increase coverage. Decrease coverage and change the term length so the premium up at the top will change. From there, they can click on the apply now button to get started. Very simple process.
So again, the requirement to use these will be to have an active website. What Assurity and Banner want is for you to actively market life insurance and your direct-to-consumer website.
So, to get started you would contact myself here at URL, Steve Clemens, on intent to using the Direct-to-Consumer tools. If you're not already contracted with Assurity or Banner Life through URL, we'd want you to do that. Obviously to be able to use the process our contracting is done online. We would just send you a link to get appointed with those carriers.
We'll set up the direct-to-consumer page for you with the company. Then we'd want to work on developing a marketing plan, how you can drive traffic to your website. And that's where you can contact our life marketing team, myself, Jason Collins, Matt Alina, and our team here for support on information and pieces to drive that traffic.
For anyone new to URL, a little bit of background. We are founded in 1986. We are independently owned. We have hands-on reliable service, interactive staff providing a full website and tech support for you. Our website, as you'll see, obviously offers consumer quoting tools, online applications marketing pieces for you to pull and use to then go to the field and market product.
We are a full-service brokerage, not just for life, but annuities, health insurance, Medicare, disability income, long term care, and employee benefits. We provide ongoing training to help you grow your business for those who truly partner with URL. We have an elite agent partners program we call Gemini which provides additional services, perks, bonuses, etc.
We'd love to talk to you more about that if you're interested in doing that. We have a formal referral department. If you're referring to business with us, we have a Compensation share program on those referrals. Depending on whether you're doing any of the markets that we do at URL, we have an internal team that will take that referral.
We code it to you as the broker, so our team doesn't overreach what the referral is. So, for instance, if you're referring a Medicare client to URL, our team isn't going to then cross market for life or annuities or whatever your primary market is. We're going to look at that referral to see what it is.
If you're referring to the life department, the annuity department, the Medicare areas. We look at that referral for that specific purpose. Our referral program is done by a team of enrollment specialists here who are salaried employees who will work with your client. Our Life and Annuity Marketing Specialists, you have me here on the Life side, as well as Matt Alina on Life and Jason Collins on Life and annuity.
If you're specifically looking for disability income Matt is your best resource. For DI, Jason is your best for single premium and long-term care needs. As is Cody Wilbert, who would be our top annuity specialist when you have annuity product questions. When you submit business, these are the lads who will be looking at your business and making sure your submitted business gets placed.
They'll take care of these applications from what we call submission to commission. On policyholder service needs as they come up change of beneficiary change of ownership, new forms. They'll take care of that for you. Rosemary handles all the life side of the business for agents with last names that start from A to L and Rachel handles the back end of the alphabet.
Maria is our annuity new business specialist. Anything on the annuity side, Maria would handle for you. For life, disability, long term care, annuity services while you’re working with us, if your clients want to work directly with you, not through a direct-to-consumer portal, just contact us. We really want to help you do a personal case and build on your illustrations. We're going to help you with that.
We'll provide you with those tools if you'd like to do that yourself or contact us and we'll design that and help design that for you and send you everything you need. When the applications come in, if they're not coming in via our online portals, we're going to review those, scrub those and make sure those are good to go in good order.
We provide specialized marketing assistance and template creation. If you have a special need for a certain segment of clients or for your clients in general, we can customize marketing pieces for you and your team. We offer software to help make you an expert. We provide many different software’s that are free to help you with your with your presentations and illustration support as well. We also help with sales and marketing forms that available at your fingertips on our website.
When you go to URLs website, you'd simply click on agents and then login. If you don't have a login, certainly register, but you'll have access to forms, marketing, online applications. Online quotes for term, universal life, indexed universal life, final expense, etc. From here, if you're not doing the direct to consumer and you're walking a client through, it's very easy to run the quotes. Simply on the right, click to apply, and go right to the online application or the online drop ticket application process.
The marketing materials for both life and annuity are in our life and annuity departments on the website. So just go there. There's a lot of great materials. If there's anything specific, you're looking for reach out to us because we can point you in the right direction. If you need a white paper on key person, buy cells, or a short video on something we can point you in the right direction.
We see a lot of specimen policies being requested for buy sell agreements. We have those on the website, financial calculators, whatever you may need there. I mentioned our Gemini program. Some of the benefits included in that are highest G. A. compensation packages, compensation matches, quarterly bonuses, we do a complimentary E&O program and we do give complimentary C. E. Credits each year right around the quarter of what your birthday falls within. If your birthday is coming up in April, you’ll be seeing an email from URL here shortly with up to 12 free CE credits.
Being a Gemini partner you have access to URL retreats and special events. We just had a Gemini partner agent happy hour in Lancaster, Pennsylvania last week, where we got together in a great location and venue. We have a VIP event coming up here in May, for more information on that certainly, reach out to our team.
We'll be happy to tell you more about that. Again, our Orion referral program, if there is a market that you don't serve, but your client is coming to you for help and support, you can always refer it to our internal team here to help you expand your market. Again, help your clients. URL will do the work.
We have expert W2 salaried staff that assist your clients with their insurance needs. It's an “a la carte” approach. You can use it when you want to. When you don't need to, you don't. You can do it yourself, obviously, for those using that program. We have a compensation share that provides peace of mind that your client's not going to a competitor out there in the marketplace to get what they need.
SYou may potentially be losing your key book of business with those clients. So great service to use. If you haven't used it, please reach out to Kelly Lucas, the manager of that department and she can tell you more about it. I appreciate you spending about a half hour with us here at URL learning about some online direct to consumer term options for your clients, and we hope you can use those. Thank you.