Introduction

Technology is evolving every day. Every sector is enhancing its performance with the use of
respective technologies. There has been a special boom in the information technology in
recent years which has led to revolutionary change in the service industry. Insurance industry
being a financial service industry is not aloof.
In India, there are 52 insurance companies. Every insurance company has its dedicated
website today. Most of them have started doing a fair amount of business through online
channel. Since insurance in India is not perceived as it is perceived in the developed
countries, it is worthwhile to understand the nuances of online distribution of insurance and
the digital marketing aspect of this trade.
According to World Bank Survey of 2013, the percentage of internet users in India grew from
7.5% in 2010 to 15.1% in 2013 and further amounts to 243 million internet users in January
2015. There are around 145.6 million Indian users on social media platforms today and the
number is expected to rise up to 224.2 million by 2018.

These increasing numbers

themselves highlight the importance of digital and social media marketing in todays India.

Reasons for inclination of people for online purchase of

insurance:
Webpage:
The insurance companies have a separate web page for promoting their online insurance
services. The webpage provides almost all the details about the products and the features,
reason to buy, duration of the policies, sum assured and assumed bonus, etc., this online
facility increases the strength of the company in the digital space
Power shifts from seller to buyer:
Unlike traditional marketing, the power has been transferred to the buyer, will help them to
know, analyse, and make decisions based on the alternatives of policies.
Greater transparency:
Companies are maintaining greater transparency can be maintained in product details through
the websites. Customers will know about the new arrivals of products and the changes in the
policies time to time.
No agents required:

In online platform prospective buyers dont require the services of any agent to choose the
suitable product. They can choose their product easily through the web.
Web Aggregators:
Aggregators have own sites that will help the prospects to know the variations between the
policies will be given. They give some additional information about the products. They also
provide an option for comparison which helps prospects to choose a better product.
Better Pricing:
Online insurance products are relatively cheaper than those sold through tradition channels of
distribution. This gives customers a better value for money and can also allow a better cover
at same price which is definitely a win-win situation for the customer.

Digital Marketing and Social Media Marketing: From Insurance

Companys Prospective
Insurance is a high involvement product, as it is considered as an expense in India.
Consumers obtain information about insurance from advertisements, salespeople, family,
friends, neighbours and acquaintances. They perceive little difference among brands. So
involvement of the company in social media platforms has become a necessity for the
insurance companies. The major purpose visible from outside is the promotion or marketing.
But in todays era of advanced analytics, social media marketing and digital marketing plays
a much bigger role for a company than just promotion in form of social analytics.
Most buyers today have access to an additional source of information in the form of social
networking sites. Here, buyers share their brand experience, which is then accessible to a
larger audience. In the traditional insurance, customers are routed to agents on the basis of
their perceived business value, purchase history and status. Online social networks provide a

larger platform to socialize and exchange information and opinions. This renders the
traditional method of market segmentation almost meaningless.
Social analytics integrate, analyse and enable companies to act on intelligence gathered from
online conversations occurring across consumer oriented social media sites. Companies can
extract important insights, sentiments, hidden patterns, trends and unknown correlations from
customer-centric conversations and proactively act upon them to drive business outcome.

Main Attributes or Key Performance Indicators of a Social Media

Marketing are:
1. Brand awareness and reputation:
Brand awareness and reputation

Sharing of information - Number of conversations out the brand

Sentiment analysis analysis of sentiments of customers which may be positive,

negative & neutral about the companys products, using social analytics.
Social engagement engaging a number of people to talk about the your product or
analysing the people who are talking about all similar products from other companies
to assess the brand awareness.

2. Marketing program effectiveness

Social reach Aim to increase the total number of followers across all social

platforms. Launching new campaigns and ads to increase social reach.

Growth & Cost benefit analysis evaluation of Monthly & Quarterly growth of the

company and contribution of social media marketing and the cost associated with it.
Engagement analysis of total Number of Likes + number of shares + number of
blog comments per number of published posts. This will give an idea of effectiveness
of the campaigns. Engagement needs to be monitored for each social platform

3. Sales:
Sales can be judged on following two parameters: Leads generated Number of new leads through social channel / total number of

leads
Actual sales Number of sales coming from social channel / total number of sales

The social marketing exercise generally revolve around these attributes which can be
considered as the key performance indicators.

AEGON RELIGARE LIFE INSURANCE COMPANY LIMITED

AEGON Religare Life Insurance is a joint venture between AEGON, Religare and Bennett,
Coleman & company. The tagline of the company is Life can surprise you be insured.
AEGON Religare Life Insurance offers a range of insurance products for financial planning
and life insurance in India. ARLI launched its operations in July, 2008. AEGON Religare
Life Insurance (ARLI) offers a complete product suite consisting of Term Plans, Health
Plans, Savings Plans, Child Plans and Unit-linked plans. AEGON Religare employs more
than 1500 employees, over 6,500 Life Advisors or financial advisors, with 70 branches across
the country.

DIGITAL PRESENCE OF AEGON RELIGARE LIFE INSURANCE COMPANY

LIMITED
AEGON religare has always been a pioneer in regards to digital media marketing. They have
always been very active in Social Media Optimization (SMO), Search Engine Optimization
(SEO) and Search Engine Marketing (SEM). In 2009 they came up with a portal
http://buyonline.aegonreligare.com, which purely relies on digital communication.
AEGON Religare's Online Insurance Channel reaches 172 cities. A number of products,
including AEGON ReligareiTerm, AEGON ReligareiMaximize, AEGON ReligareiHealth

and AEGON ReligareiGuarantee were launched to offer a complete product suite to the
online customer.
AEGON Religare has a balanced distribution network through Banc assurance, Direct Sales
Force and online products. This includes a direct sales force of more than 6,500 financial
planning advisers, in 70 branches across the country and multiple banc assurance partnerships
with private sector banks, co-operatives and regional rural banks. Through its distribution
setup and partnerships, AEGON Religare reaches customers in over 1000 towns and cities
across India.
SOCIAL MEDIA OPTIMIZATION
Abbreviated as SMO, social media optimization is the process of increasing the awareness of
a product, brand or event by using a number of social media outlets and communities to
generate viral publicity. Social media optimization includes using RSS feeds, social news
and bookmarking sites, as well as social media sites and video and blogging sites. SMO is
similar to SEO (search engine optimization) in that the goal is to drive traffic to the Web site.
AEGON Religare have their presence on many of the social media platforms like YouTube,
google+, twitter, LinkedIn, etc. The company has also been very active on social media
platforms like Facebook, twitter, google+, etc. We will discuss their efforts one by one.

Facebook:
The Facebook page of AEGON Religare shows continuous updates about the latest news in
the company and it also promotes various campaigns the company launches. Whereas on the
other side, if we go by the number of likes the page has are quite low, i.e., 63,275. AEGON

religare life insurance Company is very active on Facebook. On an average they post around
every third to fourth day, and on festive occasions like dushera, ganesh chaturthi, etc. They
even organise some contests for their customers in an attempt to make the conversations two
way and they also make sure to reward the winners in some way or the other like the winners
of the dussehra contest were rewarded with exciting gift vouchers. The company also shares
the links of the websites like www.mouthshut.com wherein the customers of the company
have given their reviews about the products and the services provided by the company. Thus
Facebook page of the company is quite interactive, they keep on asking general questions
about the life insurance sector to the customers. Also the customer base they have is
interactive.
The posts by the company do receive likes on a regular basis and these posts are also shared
by the people. On an average likes received by the posts can be figured at around 7-10 and so
is the case with sharing of the posts.
The company believes in keeping in constant contact with their customer base in order to
strengthen their relationship. For this purpose they never forget to wish their followers on
every occasions like Gandhi Jayanti, dusshehra. they also organise campaigns in relation to
awareness about cancer, smoking, consumption of alcohol etc. this serves a dual purpose for
the company as it portrays a very positive image of the company that they are very much
concerned about their customers and are sensitive enough to address such social issues.

YouTube
AEGON religare has a dedicated channel on YouTube to promote the company. it consists of
various campaigns the company starts like "nothing will happen", "Kya aapko bhi KILB
Hai?" and along with such campaigns the channel also showcases videos of the actual

employees of the company who talk about the ease of working with the company, the work
environment and the job satisfaction they feel. Recently they launched a campaign called as
Nothing Will Happen on YouTube. They hired Mr. Atul Khatri, a stand-up comedian to
portray the mentality of general public in India. Atul Khatri in these ads act ignorant about
the risk life poses in daily life and in a sarcastic way highlight the importance of life
insurance in order to generate awareness among people. Basically these ads are for the
promotion of their product iterm which they say is for people who think themselves to be
immortals. Also AEGON Religare has Irfan Khan as their brand ambassador for targeting the
television audience in particular. For television they launched a campaign known as Do you
have KLIB? (Kam Insurance Lene ki Bimari). This campaign intended to increase
awareness among people about buying insurance cover sufficient for them in accordance with
their requirements.

Twitter:
The company joined twitter in February 2009 and since then have been vibrantly active on it.
The company has 1783 followers and 567 likes. On an average the company posts almost
every 3-4 days about various contests they conduct for their customers and to promote their
products. They started the campaign "salary ka insurance" to motivate people to purchase
insurance of their salaries to maintain the status and luxuries they enjoy in their current
financial state in case of any averse situations in future.

Google +
The company is exceptionally active on google+. If we talk about how active the company is
on google+, the company tries to be interactive to the general public by posing some

questions, asking people to share their views but it can be seen that they do not get the
desired response. The page has mere 312 followers and 242991 views. They post about the
events, their policy or plans and related to general facts like tribute to Dr. APJ Abdul Kalam,
etc. almost every other day and they also use the google+ arena for promoting their other
social media avenues they are active in, like Facebook, twitter, etc.

LinkedIn:
The company also has presence on LinkedIn, where they have 7241 followers. As the
company
has wider reach on LinkedIn as compared to other social media avenues, the response rate to
the posts by the company on LinkedIn are much higher as compared to other social media
handles.
Recently the company also started a new blog http://aegon.me/20jLLVLcarrying the message
making

lives

better.

As

per

the

stats

shown

by

www.webstatsdomain.org

aegonreligare.com is ranked 72,205 in the world (amongst the 30 million domains). A lownumbered rank means that this website gets lots of visitors. This site is relatively popular
among users in the India. It gets 97.8% of its traffic from the India. This site is estimated to
be worth$32633. This site has a good PageRank (5/10). Aegonreligare.com has 62%seo
score.
Thus we see that Aegon Religare uses the social media platform to a good extent to inform
and interact with the existing and prospective customers to create a better brand value.

BAJAJ ALLIANZ GENERAL INSURANCE COMPANY LIMITED

Twitter:
Bajaj Allianz has a big fan following of above 20000 on Twitter. There are around 15000
tweets on their twitter page. The speciality of their twitter handling is that they lead in the
fastest reply to any enquiry. Their average time to respond to a tweet is around three hours,
with maximum queries being answered in less than 15 minutes.

Avg. Reply Time

They are second most mentioned insurer on tweets in India which shows their penetration
among twitter users. In order to keep the followers connected, the company has a twitter
contest called the #twittercrossword , which is the most famous contest by any insurance
company.

#twittercrossword from Bajaj Allianz is the most famous contest so far amongst Indian Insurers on twitter

Bajaj Allianz GIC also leads in the number of replies to the tweets by all insurance
companies, which shows their dedication towards the customer service on social platforms.

References:
Few of the reference that can be accounted for are:
Aegon Religare official webpage- http://www.aegonreligare.com/
Aegon Religare official facebook pagehttps://www.facebook.com/AEGONReligareLifeInsurance/
Aegon Religare official twitter page- https://twitter.com/aegonreligare
Aegon Religare official LinkedIn page
Aegon Religare official youtube Channel
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AEGON_Religare_Life_Insurance
https://www.policybazaar.com
Bajaj Allianz General Insurance Company Ltd official websitehttps://www.bajajallianz.com/Corp/general-insurance/general-insurance.jsp
Bajaj Allianz General Insurance Company Ltd facebook page:
https://www.facebook.com/Bajaj-Allianz-General-Insurance-Company-Ltd309164549196093/
Bajaj Allianz General Insurance Company Ltd official twitter page:

https://twitter.com/BajajAllianz
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bajaj_Finserv
http://www.socialsamosa.com/2013/12/social-media-strategy-review-insurance-companies/