Thimble Broker Program and Broker Portal
A Program for Insurance Brokers to sell Thimble's flexible Small Business Insurance to their clients, powered by a portal to get clients insured in seconds.
SaaS
Channel
In May of 2019, our Head of Business Development’s set out to create Thimbles largest partnership channel- a network of Independent Agents throughout the country who would sell Thimble policies to their clients. The MVP we developed was a Broker Portal with the ability to send your clients an email with a referral link, a table to track commissions, and the ability to add ACH information to receive commissions monthly. On the day of launch, I sent cold email campaigns to a list of Independent Agents we had purchased. We monitored open rates and sign ups, discovering that cold email campaigns converted at a much lower rate than anticipated. We began to partner with platforms that had their own networks, and emails coming from them directly led to much higher conversion.
Now we had a small network of brokers, and the feedback was unanimous: brokers needed the ability to build quotes on their clients behalf. At the time our quoting process was only 4 steps, which we expected the brokers clients to do on their own. After conducting interviews it was clear that the broker < > client relationship was built on trust, and customers trust their broker more than themselves. Launching the ability for brokers to build and share a quote with their clients had a huge impact on the program.
The quote feature increased our broker activation rate (% of brokers with a sale) by more than 120%. Over the next few quarters we focused on developing new features, including:
The average broker policies have 36% more premium than other channels, due to brokers working with larger clients and living off of commissions. Thimble's Customer Acquisition Cost from paid marketing channels (primarily through SEM) is 4X the cost of Acquisition from the Broker Channel.
