Finance & Insurance Forms Are Money in the Bank

Consultants convert less often than other types of financial services.

If you’re banking leads, social gives more bang for your buck.

Form-fill pages in financial services get about a third (37.9%) of all their visitors as referrals, which basically just means direct links. Another third come from paid search ads (37.4%), while social media platforms send around a tenth (11.0%).

Referral traffic is tough for us to make recommendations about, since “get more backlinks to your page!” isn’t super helpful. (Though, sure, do that.) Search and social are easier to compare. Our data shows that visitors coming from platforms like Facebook or LinkedIn have a median conversion rate double that of people coming from search engines. 

Bottom line: If you’re spending on leads, think social over search.

 

If you want more conversions, skip the scare tactics.

If you asked someone to describe finance or insurance in one word, we’re guessing you wouldn’t expect them to say “emotional.” Right?

Well, that’s the word we’re using. (Uh-huh—“someone” was us all along.) Looking at the percentage of emotional words on landing pages, we see that finance and insurance have waaay more words related to negativity (+56.6%), anger (+54.9%), fear (+44.3%), and sadness (+43.0%) than the baseline for other industries. Not only that, but these sentiments have become more common over the past year.

And it makes sense. When it comes to money, many of our decisions come down to risk. What am I willing to lose? How do I protect myself if the worst happens? The trouble is that talking about these concerns usually doesn’t persuade your visitors. Sentiments like fear and sadness have a pretty clear correlation with a lower conversion rate.

 

You’ll get more leads if you only ask for an email address.

The finance and insurance industries have among the highest median conversion rates for form-fill pages (60.7% over the form pages baseline). Good news, yeah? Here’s the even better news: It could be higher.

For starters, your form pages have significantly more negative words (fear, sadness, anger) than those in other sectors. We explained earlier how these kinda sentiments seem to hurt page performance—so clean up your language and you could be lookin’ at a nice bump.

We also know that asking for someone’s name on a form-fill page correlates with fewer submissions, and that the top-converting forms tend to have only two fields. If you can, think about asking for just an email address then collecting the rest of the lead info later.