When you think of all the events that happen in September, what typically comes to mind first? Kids are back in school? Maybe the temperatures start to dip as fall approaches (as someone who lives in sunny Southwest Florida, I have to rely on the word of others to confirm the fact that there are seasons other than “summer” and “slightly less-summer”). Perhaps we start to plan for the family get-togethers that take place during upcoming holidays. For those of us in the insurance industry, it’s worth remembering that September is also Life Insurance Awareness Month and it’s a perfect time to reconnect with your clients and discuss their current life insurance coverage.
Reaching out to your clients regarding life insurance doesn’t have to be difficult. In fact, Life Happens® is a non-profit organization founded by 7 of the leading insurance producer organizations that now receives support from more than 140 of the nation’s leading insurance and financial services organizations. Their mission is to make the public aware of the need for life insurance and related products, to promote September as Life Insurance Awareness Month (LIAM), and to create tools to make it easier for you to reach out to your clients to begin the conversation about life insurance. You can visit their site at www.lifehappens.org
Life Happens has put together a number of tools for agents to engage with your clients and help foster conversations about life insurance. Registering on their website is free and grants access to a limited number of their videos and graphics. For a small fee, their full library of hundreds of marketing pieces becomes available. This library includes videos, flyers, email templates, and even some research pieces.
This year’s campaign spokesperson is Danica Patrick and its focus is the “Journey to Financial Fitness”. The overall message of this year’s campaign is that Life Insurance is an important step in everyone’s path to financial fitness. Many of the marketing pieces and videos leverage her star power to emphasize the need for Life Insurance.
If you have a social media presence, the videos that are available are already formatted to post on Facebook, Twitter, and Linkedin, as well as be sent in emails. The paid subscription levels even offer a limited selection of the marketing pieces in Spanish and Mandarin. There is also an incredibly useful pre-constructed social media calendar that has a schedule of what marketing pieces to use at what time over a 6 week period leading into Life Insurance Awareness Month.
According to information gathered by LIMRA and the Life Happens campaign, only 59% of adults own life insurance of any type, yet 90% of households believe a family’s primary wage earner should have life insurance. Whether you’re a seasoned life agent, or someone who has never considered selling life products until now, I highly encourage you to visit the Life Happens website. Register for their portal, whether it be the free membership, or one of their other affordable membership levels. And most importantly, use their resources to engage clients and begin to have conversations about these products.
Most importantly, don’t forget that JSA is here with everything you need to help you offer Final Expense/Simplified Issue Whole Life products to your clients all year round. JSA has helped independent agents offer affordable Final Expense coverage (Simplified Issue Whole Life) for almost 50 years. We have easily implementable tools in place that make the quoting, app taking, and underwriting processes easy and efficient. Additionally the commission rates on these products are extremely favorable and policy retention among clients is higher than ever.
Life Insurance Awareness month is the perfect time to have conversations with your clients about their life insurance needs. The trained staff at JSA can help you initiate those conversations. Just remember, if you don’t talk to your clients about their life insurance needs, another agent will.
