How to Market & Sell Pet Insurance

So you’ve heard that the insurance market is set to pass $700B gross written premiums this year and that changing consumer expectations are creating big opportunities for companies that haven’t traditionally offered insurance. Now what? If you’re ready to get started with offering insurance, your options fall into three general buckets: build and sell the insurance product yourself from scratch, partner with an insurance company to offer their product, or work with an insurance-as-a-service provider to offer white-label insurance products. So, which is right for your business? We’ll go through what’s involved with the top 3 options, as well as some pros and cons to be aware of. Your first option for offering insurance to your customers is also the most intensive: you can create the insurance products you want to offer, in-house. With this option, you would essentially create a business within a business: an insurance agency that operates as part of your company. As with most business-DIY options, the big advantage of building your own is that you can create exactly what you want. You’ll be responsible for the concept, design, operations, compliance, and tech, so you can approach each area in a way that centers your business needs. Building a new business from scratch is never easy, but insurance is a particularly difficult vertical to get into. It’s complex and heavily regulated, and getting started requires a significant investment of time and money. How significant? Here’s a quick overview of the steps you’d need to follow to create your own insurance products and offer them on your website. All in all, you’re looking at a multi-year timeline to build your insurance products in-house from scratch, with a considerable financial investment as well. And that’s not even considering the ongoing financial investment to maintain them - long-term program management requires significant resources. Besides just the effort involved, the long lead time for getting an insurance product to market means that by the time you get there, the market may well have changed. On top of time concerns, there’s another disadvantage you should weigh before going the build route. Everything we just covered about starting your own insurance program probably falls outside your company’s core business and specialization. What’s more, recruiting and hiring the right people to manage it may be significantly more challenging than hiring the right people for your core business. It’s often difficult to know what to look for when hiring for a completely different skill set, outside your core industry. Once you’ve brought all these new people on board, you’ll also have to manage them in an area where your core leadership has little experience. Consider whether the benefits of building it yourself outweigh the inevitable distraction of running an entirely separate secondary business within your company. Instead of creating an insurance product yourself, you might choose to partner with an established insurance company to offer your customers their product. In this scenario, you would have a link on your site for the customer to buy insurance. When the customer clicks it, they would be taken to the insurance partner’s website to buy the product from them. This is sometimes called affinity marketing, or click-through affinity. In this situation, you would be essentially acting as lead gen for your insurance partner. Your partner may pay you a certain amount per click, but after that you would not participate in the transaction. Your insurance partner would complete the transaction, collect the premiums, and own the insurance relationship with the customer. A click-through insurance partnership like this is both fast and simple to set up. After you’ve worked out the details of the partnership agreement, all you’ll need to do is add the link on your website to direct customers to the insurer. A partnership like this is also relatively low-commitment. Because you’re simply passing web traffic on to the insurer, you can later switch insurance partners or even remove the insurance option from your site altogether with a minimum of disruption to your business. The easy setup of a click-through affinity partnership also comes with considerable drawbacks. Because you’re just providing a link to your partner’s signup form, you lose control of the customer immediately after they click the link. Whatever comes after that is up to your insurance partner. If the customer has a negative experience during the process, it might reflect badly on your brand for offering the referral. Even if the experience is a good one, losing control of the customer comes with another big downside: you also lose control of the revenue. The insurance customer relationship will be with your partner, and they’ll collect the premiums. While a click-through partnership is a fast and straightforward way to connect your customers with insurance, it also removes one of the major benefits of offering insurance on your site in the first place. With this option, you won’t see the kind of regular recurring revenue that you would if your company were able to collect the premiums. Further underlining that it’s not your product (or your customer), with this kind of partnership you’ll have little to no input into the insurance product you’re offering. Your insurance partner will build, develop, and sell the products that best fit their business interests, which may or may not be a good fit for your particular customers. As just another marketing partner, you won’t have much influence to try and get a product created that closely matches what your customers need from insurance.  A relatively new third option is to work with a company that offers insurance-as-a-service, and white-label the insurance product they provide you with. If you aren’t familiar with insurance-as-a-service, it generally works like this: insurance-as-a-service providers are companies who have already done the work we outlined in Option 1 (Boost is one example). They’ll have all the necessary state licenses to create their own insurance products, and they will have already negotiated with licensed carriers to back those products. A good insurance-as-a-service provider will also already have built the necessary technology to offer an embedded insurance product experience. Your company can then sign on with the provider to offer one or more of the insurance products they’ve created, under your own brand name, on your company’s website or app. Unlike affinity partnerships, partnering with a white-label insurance-as-a-service provider doesn’t simply generate customers for someone else. Your company will be the one selling the insurance product, on your own website. The customer will buy the policy from you, and you’ll be the one to collect the premiums and own the ongoing customer relationship. White-labeling an insurance-as-a-service product offers many of the advantages of building it yourself, but at a fraction of the time and cost. Because your partner will have already done the heavy lifting on things like operations, technology, compliance, and capital, you can easily offer the right insurance products for your customers - and get to market in a dramatically shorter timeline versus trying to create an insurance company from scratch. A white-label insurance product also allows you to reap the full business benefits of offering your customers insurance: While white-labeling an insurance-as-a-service product is much faster and easier than building one yourself, it’s still more involved than simply adding a link to your website. Working with an insurance-as-a-service provider may take longer to implement than partnering with an insurer for click-through affinity since you will be building the full experience into your website rather than just linking out to an insurance partner's website. Selling white-label insurance policies also requires an important additional step: someone at your company will need to be licensed as an individual broker, and then sponsor a license for your company. You may recall this as Step 1 in the build process - the broker license is required to legally sell insurance, which your company will do with its insurance-as-a-service products. This sounds much more intimidating than it actually is. The insurance licensing process itself is relatively simple and straightforward. However, it does require additional effort from one of your employees (usually a senior executive who is unlikely to leave the company). The other good news is that not only is the licensing process easier than it sounds, but once it’s done, it’s done. You’ll need to maintain it with fees, renewals, etc, but you won’t need to go through the process again as long as that employee is still at the company. A good insurance-as-a-service partner will also help you with this step, so you can check the box and start offering insurance to your customers as soon as possible.  The insurance market is changing quickly, and there’s never been a better time for new entrants to take advantage of the embedded insurance opportunity. Depending on the route you take to get there, however, the cost, time to market, and experience for your customers can vary a great deal. When starting on the road to offering insurance, it pays to carefully consider your budget, your timeframe, and your business goals, so that you can choose the option that’s right for your company. Is insurance-as-a-service the right option for you? Boost can help get you started. Contact us today to learn more about your options for offering the different ways to offer insurance with one of our Boost product experts.

You may have heard that embedded insurance is a big opportunity to grow your business, but are your customers actually interested?  We wanted to get the story straight from the source, and so in Q4 2022 Boost surveyed 650+ US consumers. We asked about their experiences with insurance, how they felt about their current insurance options, and what mattered most in their insurance purchases.  Here are the top 3 things that we learned from our consumer insurance survey results. [See Full Size] In our insurance survey, a whopping 73% of consumers had either already bought insurance from a non-insurance brand, or would be interested in doing so. While price was mentioned most often, other reasons included brand loyalty and convenience. Trust was another important factor. 62% of respondents were interested in buying financial products from a trusted brand, rather than a bank. For millennials, the number went up to 95%. First movers might have an advantage here as well. 20% of our respondents had never been offered financial products from a retail brand - but they liked the idea. All this is promising news for companies outside the traditional insurance sphere who are looking to build revenue and customer loyalty with embedded insurance. If you can deliver the product and experience consumers are looking for, the appetite is there. It’s hardly a secret that convenience is crucial to customer experience in the digital age, so it comes as no surprise that it was important to our respondents. 59% told us that they’d be more likely to buy insurance if it were offered digitally, as part of a related transaction. Younger consumers were more likely to be enthusiastic about digital insurance: nearly 70% of respondents aged 18-29 were interested in buying insurance directly through a transaction on a retail website. For half of our respondents, embedded insurance wasn’t a novel idea. 50% had already bought embedded insurance at least once, at the point of sale in a related transaction. For many consumers, insurance is a long-term purchase. 68% of our survey respondents told us they’d had the same insurance provider for at least two years, and 10% had had the same provider for more than five years. For retailers, insurance could also be an overall boost to retention. 62% of respondents said that when a retailer offered protect-your-purchase options, they were more likely to be repeat customers. Learn more about offering embedded insurance in our free guide, or contact us to get started.

There are multiple ways to approach and sell embedded insurance, but the most effective approach is white-labeling. Not only is white label insurance the fastest and most cost-effective option, but it also keeps the insurance under your brand, expands your product offerings (and potential customer pool), and creates more points of sale with your customers which leads to higher retention rates. A white-label insurance product is one that’s been developed by one company, then rebranded and sold by other companies. White-label insurance can be used by insurance companies and insurtechs whose primary business is to cross-sell a variety of insurance products, or it can be used by non-insurance companies as an additional stream of income. An easy way to understand the concept of white-labeling is to consider white-labeled products that exist outside of the insurance world. For example, consider the Costco brand: Kirkland Signature. When you see food, paper towels, denim jeans, and various other items sold under the Kirkland Signature logo, you probably don’t think about the fact that they were most likely not produced by Costco itself. In most cases, they were manufactured in various factories by various companies, white-labeled, and then sold under the Kirkland Signature brand. The same can be done with insurance. A white-label, embedded insurance product is one that is completely integrated not only into your website so that your customers don’t have to leave your website in order to make a purchase, but it’s also integrated into your brand. Customers will have no indication that the product was not created by your company.  When it comes to the question of “white-label or build from scratch?” there are several benefits to white-labeling insurance products– namely, it will save you time, labor, and money.  In order to build an insurance product yourself, you would need to get licensed as an insurance agency, fulfill the requirements to become a Managing General Agency (MGA), create your insurance forms, rates, and underwriting guidelines, get a carrier to provide capital backing for your product, be appointed as a producer/agent broker by that insurance carrier, build technology to sell your product through your website, and finally create or outsource claims administration capability. And that is telling a long story short. All in all, you would be looking at a multi-year timeline. Building an insurance product from scratch would not only be lengthy and complex, but it would also be a considerable financial investment with long-term, ongoing expenses and maintenance required. Instead of hiring an internal engineering team, educating yourself on each state’s insurance regulations, requirements, and laws, and navigating the complicated process in-house, you can outsource that labor to a company that has already done that work for you. Without losing any of the benefits of adding an insurance product to your business, you can save yourself time, money, and effort.  Besides building from scratch, you could potentially work with an affinity insurance partner, where you would redirect your customers to the insurance provider’s website to buy the insurance product from them, but there are several downsides to that kind of partnership. First, you wouldn’t have the benefit of a trusted customer experience with your brand. In affinity partnerships, after your customers click through to your provider’s website, you lose ownership over customer relationships or brand management. Additionally, affinity partnerships primarily generate leads for the insurance provider, not for you.  White-labeling insurance can benefit both non-insurance companies who want to start offering embedded insurance, and insurtechs looking to add or expand their offerings. We’ll look at both scenarios below. For a non-insurance company, the benefits of adding white-label insurance to your offerings include increased revenue, greater customer engagement and retention, and competitor differentiation. White-labeled, embedded insurance is a big opportunity for your non-insurance business to build new streams of recurring revenue. In 2021 alone, the insurance market amassed over $700B in gross written premium, and that number is only projected to grow. 60% of consumers are looking to buy insurance from new entrants, which means that there’s never been a better time for companies outside the traditional insurance industry to enter the market. If your business could tap into even just a fraction of the insurance market value, it could lead to significant revenue.  Additionally, insurance premiums are recurring revenue, which creates lifetime customers, rather than one-time purchasers. When your customers purchase insurance through your website, they buy the policy directly from you, you collect the premium payments, and your business profits from the recurring income. And because the transaction will take place on your site or app, you will have full ownership over your customer experience and data, which helps you to better sell to them in the future. Following that train of thought is customer retention and experience. Insurance is a very “sticky” product with an average 84% customer retention rate. An important point to remember with embedded, white-label insurance is that you are not selling to new customers. You would be selling to the same audience with whom you’ve already invested effort and acquisition costs. White-label insurance gives you the opportunity to connect with your customers on a new level.  Let’s say that you own a company that sells goods or services to pet owners, and you are looking for a way to deepen your customer relationships while increasing revenue. You can leverage your existing customer relationships to sell them pet insurance. As a non-insurance company, you would be able to white-label and embed the product directly into your website. Without ever having to leave your website, your customers can add insurance to their existing purchases. Because you have already done the hard work of building a positive, trusting relationship with your customers, the addition of this new, beneficial protection that they know they can trust can only increase their brand loyalty. White-labeling an insurance product is a great way to set your company apart from competitors within your industry and also from competitors in the insurance market.  As a different example, let’s say that you own a company that caters to pet owners and you take the initiative to sell pet insurance alongside your other products. Because pet insurance is still relatively new in the US, some of your customers may not even be aware that it’s an option. By offering it to them, you demonstrate that your company is forward-thinking and ahead of the competition. You can anticipate your customers’ needs and solve legitimate problems that they face as pet owners.  By selling insurance, you will also be entering a new market, which may sound intimidating if you are not familiar with the insurance industry. However, the good news is that you have an edge in that market too. Customers are far more likely to purchase from a company that they are already familiar with and trust than one that they’ve never worked with before. Because you would be selling to customers with whom you already have a relationship, you would have an advantage over traditional insurance providers marketing similar products.  For an insurtech, the benefits of white-labeling insurance include access to insurance capacity, a much faster GTM rate, and the ability to focus on serving your customer instead of reinventing the wheel. If you choose to white-label, you would have access to your partner’s insurance capacity. This is the maximum amount of value that an insurance program can insure, determined by the amount of capital available to cover its losses. Capacity can be difficult for many insurtechs to come by. The most practical option is to partner with an insurer or reinsurer who can provide what they need, but securing those partnerships can be challenging. This is especially true for insurtechs without established connections to insurance carriers. Getting in front of the right people at a carrier company and convincing them to provide the needed capacity can be a years-long process (which often ends in failure). As previously stated, building an insurance product from scratch is a long, complicated process. Partnering with a white-label insurance partner cuts all of that work and extra cost down so that you can get to market faster.  You could also partner with an insurance-as-a-service provider who would provide everything you would need to start offering insurance to their customers from technology to insurance capacity, operational infrastructure, regulatory approvals, and the embedded product itself. Insurance-as-a-service partners make the process even more streamlined and worthwhile. For example, if you were to work with Boost, an insurance-as-a-service company, instead of wading through a multi-year process to build a product yourself, you would experience a full-service partnership and get to market in as little as one month. Customers want convenience. Instead of getting every kind of insurance from a different provider, you can become a one-stop shop for their insurance needs.  An important aspect of customer engagement and retention for insurtechs is the ability to cross-sell. You need a variety of products that complement each other to encourage customers to buy more than one policy. If you work with a white-label insurance provider like Boost, you would have access to a wide variety of already-built products to choose from, so you can choose products that align with your business goals. You can simply select products that would cross-sell well with your existing lineup.   The more products, the more points of sale, and the stickier your customers. By engaging with them through multiple policies, your retention will naturally increase.   You don’t need to reinvent the wheel in order to sell a great insurance product that will appeal to your customers. In fact, it is much faster and more cost-effective not to. Whether you are a non-insurance business or an insurtech looking to expand its product lineup, white-labeling allows you to outsource the difficult, lengthy aspects of building an insurance product so you can focus on what really matters: growing your revenue, increasing engagement and retention, and setting yourself apart. If you want to learn more about growing your revenue with white-labeled insurance through Boost, contact us, or dive into building your insurance program with Boost’s Launchpad.