24+ Essential iPhone Apps for Insurance Agents

​Insurance Information Apps for Insurance Agents

Kelly Blue Book

​There’s probably a lot of ways to use this app on the job, but one instance where it really comes in handy is when you’re trying to help a client decide whether to purchase collision and comprehensive coverage.  Faster than you could do on kbb.com, this app will give you a value for any car super fast. Bonus tip: take a screenshot of your client’s car value in this app by clicking the home and power buttons at the same time.  Then go to your photos and you can email it to them directly.

Life Foundation

This life insurance needs calculator from the Life Foundation is a great resource for helping a client determine how much they really need to keep their family afloat. There’s nothing here you haven’t seen before, but it’s a good tool from a great organization.  Bonus Tip: Recommend this app to a prospective client before meeting with them – it might put them in the right mindset going into the meeting and you don’t have to worry about them being pitched another company’s policy from the app.

Insurance Journal

Not too many bells and whistles with this app, but as one of the largest and most long-standing news publishers in the insurance industry, Insurance Journal is a great resource.  I personally use RSS feeds and Twitter to get information from Insurance Journal and I don’t use this app, but it seems to be pretty simple. It’s basically just news feeds, but I like the way they break down information into regions – since there’s already so much information on IJ it’s helpful to narrow it down in this way.

Insurance Discussions

This app is from the guys at Insurance-forums.net and it’s not bad.  Insurance-forums.net is the most active online insurance agent forum and this app does a pretty good job of allowing you to participate like you would on the website.  I’m not a big forum junkie and I don’t personally use this app so if you use it please leave some insights in the comments and I’ll update this section.

​Productivity Apps for Insurance Agents

Genius Scan

Pretty simple concept – you take a picture and it converts it to a PDF. If you’re in a bind and can’t scan an important document to send electronically to your client or carrier this app could help you.  It creates relatively high quality PDF documents simply by taking a picture.  This might actually help you more with carriers than clients.

Google Earth

Sometimes with property insurance, it’s important to be able to get an idea for the land and dwellings you’re insuring.  With Google Earth you can see things like swimming pools, sqauare footage, and proximity to water.  Can’t say you’ll sell another policy this year because of Google Earth, but it might make your life a little easier from time to time.

Cardmunch
​
​There’s a lot of apps out there like Cardmunch that let you take pictures of business cards and import the information to your contacts.  The added bonus here is that it’s easier to connect with people on LinkedIn and because of the size and resources of LinkedIn, I’m confident that it’s going to work as well as all the other ones.  This app can make taking that extra step with your business networking contacts an easy  process.

Dragon Dictation

​Known as the highest quality dictation iPhone app, Dragon Dictation converts your speech to text.  It’s not perfect, but I’ve found it generates text with less typos than most insurance agents I know can type.  You can speak into your iPhone and it’ll type out the words and send them as a text message, email, facebook status post, tweet, and a few other things.  If nothing else, this might work best as a way for you to communicate with yourself… If you have a brilliant sales idea while driving, you can speak it and email it to yourself while keeping your eyes on the road.

Evernote

This app lets you take notes, capture photos, create to-do lists, record voice reminders —  and makes these notes completely searchable, whether you’re at the agency, at home, or in the car.  It takes a bit of time to setup the account, but I know many people who swear by this app.  I don’t personally use it so I can’t say much… If you have any recommendations about it please add them to the comments below and I’ll update this section.

​Marketing Apps for Insurance Agents

Google Places

This is Google’s app that connects with their Google Places platform.  In case you don’t know, Google Places is the the product Google offers to business owners like you to provide information about your agency to both Google and the public. Because it’s Google, you know people are using it and it’d be worth checking out how your agency shows up in this app.  If anything is incorrect or incomplete, use Google Places on Google.com to rectify the situation.

WordPress

​If you run a WordPress blog (you’re reading one now BTW) this app will let you do a lot of the administrative functions of running blog.  I doubt you’ll be writing entire blog posts through the app but it is very useful for approving and responding to comments. Speaking of comments, why don’t you write one below?

Analytics Pro

If you use Google Analytics to track website visitors on your insurance agency website, this app is a great resource. This is the only app on this entire list that costs money but I still highly recommend it.  I’ve only paid for two apps on my iPhone and this is one of them. (The other was Angry Birds). I use this app several times each day and if you’re into tracking your website traffic it’s definately worthwhile

Seth Godin

​Seth Godin is a marketing author, speaker, and businessman and his app lets you read his blog posts.  He explores concepts relating to being different, being remarkable, providing engaging customer experiences and standing out from the crowd.  His philosophies are perfect for an industry like insurance because our products are so mundane and our competition is so heavy, it is absolutely necessary to find ways to seperate your marketing from the other 10 guys on your street selling the same thing.

Jeffrey Gitomer

​This guy is my favorite sales trainer/motivator. (yes – in my opinion he’s even above Z.Z.)  Gitomer’s straight to the point attitude without all the BS is a breath of fresh air in the “sales guru” industry.  His app lets you read his most recent articles and access a bunch of resources from some of his best-selling books including his 12.5 principles of selling from The Little Red Book of Selling.

InsuranceSplash Marketing Blog

​You’re reading it right now.  And I guess if you’ve made it this far you must see some value here… This blog is written by me, John F. Carroll, and I’m the CEO of InsuranceSplash. My goal is to provide actionable insurance marketing ideas to agents on a regular basis. We don’t have an app in the app store  yet, but you can add an app icon linking to our blog by clicking the “share” button (it’s a square with an arrow) in the bottom of your screen and tapping “Add to Home Screen”. Do it right now!!!!

TED
TED is an organization focused on spreading innovative and progressive ideas across the globe.  If you’re a cerebral-type, it’s a great app to get into because they provide 5-20 minute talks about the most interesting and progressive ideas in just about any topic.  You won’t find any tips about closing auto insurance policy, but you’ll find interesting information about subjects that may change your perspective on marketing, sales, and consumer psychology.

​Communication Apps for Insurance Agents

​Google Voice

​Google Voice gives you a new phone number to take phone calls on your iPhone or to be forwarded to any other phone.  You can give it out to people and it’ll ring on your phone. You can also control where this phone number forwards  to so it can go to your office during the day and to your cell phone in the evening, and then back to the office before you go to sleep. It doesn’t matter if you’re that dedicated or not, it’s still a useful tool and you can get a local area code phone number to use for free.

Translate

Not sure if there’s too much multilingual communication needed where you sell insurance, but you’re probably in the minority if it doesn’t come up from time to time. This app is pretty simple, you type what you want to say and it translates it into your choice of 50-60 different languages.  You can also speak into the microphone and the app will even speak back what you said. I don’t think you’re going to want to explain a variable annuity using it, but it could help.

​Social Networking Apps for Insurance Agents

Google+

For a service that isn’t exactly knocking the leather off the ball when it comes to signing up and engaging new members, Google+ is actually a pretty cool app.  Google+ might never take off as a way to engage an audience, but it seems like it can become very important for a local business like your agency, especially since Google Places has not become integrated with Google+. Stay tuned for more information about using Google+ help you get more quotes.

​LinkedIn

​The LinkedIn app is pretty good job of replicating what you can do on the full LinkedIn website.  I see the biggest advantage to it being that you have the app where-ever you go and when you make a good connection with a prospect in line at the bank or at a networking event, it’s acceptable to connect with them right there whereas trying to friend them on Facebook or enter their phone or email into your phone might come off a bit too strong.

Twitter

​There’s a lot of Twitter apps out there with a variety of pros and cons.  I use the one that is made by Twitter since I figure they have the most money and resources to invest in it and it’s the least buggy since it’s from the source. Can you do me a huge favor though? If you get this app can you please not use it to tweet 3 times a day about how people can call you for cheap insurance quotes?  I swear there must be hundreds of agents wasting their time with this!

Foursquare

Foursquare is a social networking app focused around locations.  It lets people “check-in” when they’re near your agency and they’re working a lot with local businesses like yours to help offer special deals and discounts to people who visit you.  The Foursquare audience leans toward young adults in urban areas.  If this represents your target market there might be an opportunity to drive some leads here.  I’ll write an article with some ideas in the future.

Facebook Pages

​I use this app to manage business Facebook pages that I run, but I can’t say it does anything really exciting that I can’t do with the regular Facebook app.  Right now you get a bit more fan interaction information than the regular app, but I’m going to stick with this app because with 100 billion dollars they ought to introduce some cool functionality soon… Or they’ll find more ways for advertisers to target me.

HootSuite

This app helps you manage multiple social media networks all in one place.  It’s currently known to be the most popular of the services that let you do this, but be warned – it not necessarily the easiest system for a non-techie insurance agent to use.  I’m not discouraging you from using it, but don’t expect it to be an easier alternative to working directly with Facebook, Twitter, Foursquare, etc.

​Insurance Carrier iPhone Apps

​I strongly recommend that you download every app created by the companies you sell for.

First of all, you should make sure your contact information is correct if there is an agent directory!

But the biggest reason for downloading these apps yourself is so you can understand how they work and convince your clients to download them too! The more connections you have with a client, the less likely they are to leave your agency and getting your app into their phone is a very strong connection. They’ll also have an easier time referring your agency to their friends since your info will always be on hand.  It’s also more likely that they’ll call in a claim sooner and without bothering you which should lead to an improved claim experience and less interruptions for your producers. These apps also may engage your clients and help them learn about a new type of insurance for you to cross sell.

These are all great benefits, but you can’t get clients to download the app if you don’t know what it does yourself. Plus, you won’t look too smart if they ask a question about it and you act like you’ve never heard of it before.

So do you know any iPhone apps that other agents could benefit from? Please add them to the comments below…

Source: Fusion Vegas

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