Insurance Blog: 11/2/08

Poi Boy Fire Staff Dance

Creative work from http://www.personalaccident.co.uk

If you are a small insurance company making your own promotional material feel free to post it as a comment on our website. For everyone who posts a video, we'll send you the guru's bible on viral video online marketing - for free!

More Than - Less Than?

Hmmm.. at a time when other insurance companies are increasing their online spend More Th>n today announced

"As we near the end of 2008 MORE TH>N have reviewed their marketing budgets and concluded they will need to suspend MORE TH>N annual and single travel products will be suspended until further notice."
In addition the commissions across the MORE TH>N programme have been reviewed and slashed making it very unattractive for publishers to bother with them

wonder what's going on at RSA then?

Labels: more than, rsa

Income Protection Insurance - Claim Exclusion & Excess Periods - confused?

If you like me are one of the many millions of people who've recently rushed out and bought some unemployment insurance in the form of Income Protection Insurance, you may be confused about the all important claiming part of the policy.

This centres around the Claim Exclusion Period and the Claim Excess Period.

So here's an explanation of the difference:

Claim Exclusion Period.
Nearly all policies have a wording which excludes claims for unemployment for 120 days or four months from the inception date when you took out the policy. This period is to prevent fraudulent claims from people who knew they were going to be made unemployed. The exclusion period means the period of time that you will need to be unemployed or disabled before you qualify for claim payments. The qualification period options vary by policy are always detailed on the income protection insurance policy documentation.

Claim Excess Period
Not to be confused with the exclusion period, the excess period is a period
of time from the day you make your claim until the claim is eligible to be paid
out. It varys considerably by income protection policy and longer excess periods
generally mean cheaper premiums. This may not always be in your best interests,
so many of the independent income protection insurance suppliers now offer polcies
which have 'back-to-day-one cover'.

But what exactly is 'back-to-day-one cover'? It means that claims are paid back
to the very first day of your claim for benefit.

For example,if you take out cover and then made a claim on the 1st of May you
would wait until the 31st of May before receiving any benefit but the payment
would be for the entire period you are unemployed or disabled from the 1st of
May. So effectively you get benefit as soon as you are eligible for a claim
and there is no 'excess period' in which you can't claim benefit.

Shop around
Income Protection Insurance is one type of insurance where it really does pay to follow the maxim 'shop around'.

With so many offerings and variances in benefits and premium
rates, on the market it can get confusing, however the better Internet sites
now make the process quick and easy and should not deter you from purchasing
this modern essential

More information on UK Income Protection Insurance can be found here.

Labels: income insurance, income protection insurance

Personal Accident viral marketing video

It might not be to everybody's taste but viral marketing has been one of the major success stories on the Internet.
Insurance companies with their massive marketing budgets have been slow to catch on and rely on multi-million pound campaigns featuring nodding dogs and flying pigs to get their brand across.
Hurrah for youtube.com and step forward mortgage protection company Personal Accident for grabbing the initiative with the following silly - but very watchable, if not PC ad for hazardous sports accident insurance.

Whether you think its crap or not, it demonstrates the viral capabilities of video, accessible to everyone from their mobile phones and more importantly, while all the big budget insurance players are wasting their money on TV ads and trying to get to the top of search engines, they've missed the point that more people visit myspace.com and youtube.com than visit Google these days.

Social marketing is becoming more important daily and those pioneers will grab a large share of the personal recommendation market.

Labels: accident insurance, insurance marketing, Internet Marketing, mortgage payment protection insurance