Aug 12, 2024 11:37:26 AM | 6 min read
Embedded insurance started to become a buzzword a few years ago, gaining initial traction and a lot of attention from tech investors. However, for many SaaS platforms and marketplaces, it has been a relatively undiscovered treasure. For the brands that caught on quickly, embedded insurance and protection have become a cornerstone of their customer experience and revenue generation. So, why is it that only now are more and more brands recognizing the power of embedded insurance?
Recent improvements are driving a seamless user experience while reducing the technical and compliance burden on the brands themselves. In this article, we’ll cover what the standard has been in embedded insurance integration and where the industry is headed now.
The Status Quo of Embedded Insurance Integration
The standard embedded insurance integration today is a link that is placed somewhere within a brand’s platform. This could be in the form of a button, a marketplace offer, or a checkbox in a purchase flow. It is meant to catch the eye of the user and get them to “add” an additional protection or insurance product to their cart. However, in most instances, it drives the user away from the brand they were transacting with prompting them to enter a checkout flow with the embedded insurance partner.
Stuck in the Click-Off Rut: Subpar Experiences That Drive Users Away
When brands “test the waters” of embedded insurance, it can sometimes come off like an advertisement. Usually, this results from the brand being hesitant to jump into the deep end of the pool (and that is fair). However, what they may not realize is that:
- If your insurance program isn’t relevant or needed, your users will be able to tell and are less likely to convert.
- If the experience buying drives them away from your platform, it feels disconnected from their experience and reduces conversion.
- If your embedded insurance program requires them to resubmit their information to a new vendor, they are unlikely to convert.
With a few changes to the type of program and the user experience you can turn the tide on a subpar experience, increasing conversion in the process.
Introducing Behind the Paywall Embedded Insurance: A New Era of User-Experience in Insurance
Let’s start off with the most basic view of behind the paywall embedded insurance. What is it? In simple terms, it is an embedded insurance offer from a reliable and trusted insurance provider available within your platform. No click-off experience is needed because the full insurance lifecycle can occur within your platform.
When we think about the possibilities here, that means that your users can:
- View an insurance offer
- Purchase a policy
- Add new exposures
- Manage existing policies
- Cancel a policy
- File claims
- View/manage claims
All within your platform. The best part? You aren’t on the hook for the technical lift - or the compliance lift. At least, not with the right partner. So, how is this achieved? At a high level, this is accomplished with an “i-frame” like experience. You and your team identify the place in your platform where it would make the most sense to offer an insurance option or you create a new tab “Insurance” that acts like an insurance hub in your platform. Then your partner provides you with a low-code integration (we’re talking about roughly 10 lines of code). Voila. An embedded insurance experience is now available.
When it comes to results, you should be asking yourself what you can expect to see from the integration - and we’ll tell you. There are four main areas you can impact: customer experience, customer retention, conversion, and revenue growth.
Key Areas of Opportunity:
Before we explore how behind the paywall can impact user experience, retention, conversion, and revenue growth we want to provide a caveat. The insurance you embed behind the paywall should be relevant to what you offer your customers. The more closely related the insurance you embed is to what they have come to love you for - the better your program will perform. If insurance is a requirement for your users, even better. You’ve spent time and money to build your brand’s reputation and acquire new customers, you want any insurance you embed to demonstrate that you know them and their needs. If insurance is one of those needs, you are in a great position to offer relevant coverage to them.
Customer Experience
There are two key elements that come to mind when creating an embedded insurance experience:
- When a user can stay inside your brand and compliantly purchase insurance it means that the full insurance lifecycle becomes a feature of your product. Most standard experiences act as a stand-alone product disparate from your relationship and platform. Connecting your platform experience with an insurance experience acts as a new feature set that your product and development teams didn’t need to build.
- Data is a key component of a seamless behind the paywall embedded insurance experience. It is one thing to offer insurance within your platform. It is a completely separate thing to make that experience seamless. What does that mean? Well, you have a wealth of data on your customers - it may be one of the largest assets you have. You can use that to your advantage when embedding an insurance experience. By creating data syncs with your chosen partner you can feed specific data sets to ensure that when your customers interact with your embedded insurance they don’t need to suffer through manual data entry - for data that you already know about them.
Retention
By delivering a positive experience for your customers, you are getting them to spend more time on your platform and connect your brand with their positive insurance experience, even if you are actually trusting a partner to deliver the experience. When customers spend more time on your platform and leverage you for more and more services it creates stickiness. For example, if you are a platform that offers 5 different modules it is much more likely to retain a customer that uses all 5 modules vs a customer that only utilizes 1 module.
Conversion and Revenue Generation
A natural outcome of embedding insurance is additional conversion opportunities.
- New conversion opportunity: Adding insurance provides one more point of potential conversion outside of your core product offers.
- Trust and peace of mind: Introducing an insurance element that reduces risk, and friction, or helps your users secure required insurance shows that you know their needs.
By embedding insurance in your platform, you can also earn technology fees from a partner for providing access to your user base. These payments can come in many forms, depending on your integration and program but the bottom line is that it is a new stream of revenue for your business that also keeps your customers happy.
Tinted Growth: Enhance Revenue with Behind The Paywall Embedded Insurance
When it comes to finding a partner to help embed behind the paywall, you want to ensure you have a partner you can trust to help with the growth of your business. We recommend viewing partners through three lenses:
- Technological capabilities: embedding behind the paywall is a technical feat, not one that your team needs to bear the burden of but you need to feel confident that the partner you select can provide you with a great technical product.
- Domain expertise: equally important to technical chops is understanding your business and more importantly what your customers want, need, and expect from an insurance product.
- Seamless UI/UX design: your embedded insurance can be a reflection of your brand and you want to make sure you select a partner that recognizes this and is willing to live up to a high standard. This includes a clear, easy purchase experience and a comprehensive post-purchase policy management portal.
If you are looking to work with a partner to embed insurance behind the paywall of your platform, the insurance experts at Tint are here to help. Connect with the team today if you have more questions about behind the paywall embedded insurance.