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To get the best insurance coverage, you have to be well informed.

Insurers need information too — about their customers' demographics, businesses and activities. For Aon Corp., that meant putting automated processes in place to better track prospects and generate qualified leads for sales reps.

Last year, the Chicago-based firm was looking for a way to pull together efforts in various product lines and countries to create an international marketing plan. It wanted to drive work at both the corporate and field levels, and integrate the CRM and lead-flow processes. Automation was essential since Aon has a global marketing team of just 20 full-time employees, with supplemental help from people in local offices, says Angela Kauffman, the company's interactive marketing director.

Eloqua worked with Aon on several interactive fronts, including campaign management, e-mail landing pages and e-newsletters, and is helping to automate efforts to spur attendance at events, industry conferences and Webcasts, says Paul Teshima, Eloqua's vice president for client service and support.

Trackability also was a concern for the insurer. Aon wanted to keep tabs on new customer leads as well as return on investment from those leads, overall campaign performance, and how such efforts mesh with CRM initiatives.

Aon began testing Eloqua's system last November and officially rolled out with it in January, pairing it with the Salesforce CRM platform.

“Insurance traditionally is a difficult vertical for us because the [players are] later adopters. They're not [necessarily thinking about] generating new business all the time like Aon, which definitely is focused on lead generation,” Teshima says.

Besides not being technology oriented, another problem for insurers is that their resources and personnel are spread out.

“They're very distributed, so there's no global strategy [for getting] new swaths of business or developing new products,” Teshima adds.

Aon's client base is primarily business-to-business, with the highest percentage of customers in the risk-management services niche. The company also provides insurance and reinsurance brokerage, management consulting and specialty insurance underwriting. Midmarket to large global companies are the typical audience, with risk managers or CFOs the contact points for Aon's sales force.

Aon — which reported net income of $213 million for the first quarter, 8% over last year — has 500 offices in more than 120 countries, and 43,000 employees. Kauffman says the sales process normally takes anywhere from six months to three years.

The goal of all the insurer's direct and interactive efforts — online and off — is generating qualified leads for sales reps.

Aon uses Webcasts — often featuring outside experts — for brand building. Topics cover things like captive insurance and the pros and cons of setting up an internal insurance company (and the risks associated with that venture). The risk-management unit tends to do Webcasts once a month, while other divisions run them less frequently.

A few thousand invitations are typically sent, with attendance averaging between 100 and 300. In the past, the attendee list was a hodgepodge of names generated by the sales force, with invites often forwarded through Lotus Notes to people the reps thought might want to attend. There was no concise way to track attendee response.

Now, after invitations and follow-up e-mails are sent using Eloqua's system, those who attended the Webcasts (and those who didn't) are noted via Salesforce.com's software.

A major goal for Aon was getting more out of trade shows such as the Risk and Insurance Management Society's annual conference. Rather than just collecting business cards at the events, Aon can now send booth invitations prior to shows, and then use Eloqua to follow up after the events, Kauffman says.

Aon regularly does e-mail newsletters on topics related to consulting and risk management, and is incorporating those programs in Eloqua's system to keep up with what's being sent and opened.

The insurer's more integrated global work has allowed it to adapt a campaign that originated in Rotterdam, Netherlands for the U.S. market. The benchmarking effort was intended to help prospects determine if they were overprotected or underprotected, and ferret out any possible sales opportunities in the three major product lines — D&O (directors and officers liability insurance), property, and casualty.

The first point of contact is direct mail: A large poster is sent in a mailing tube, and e-mail and telemarketing follow. “The goal,” Kauffman says, “is to get in the door to evaluate the programs the prospect currently has in place.”

Aon began by targeting its 500 largest prospects in San Francisco, Chicago and Los Angeles last August, and is now running the campaign in other areas of the United States. If successful, the effort likely will lead to more interaction among international offices.

Now that Aon has some basic campaign management automation in place, the next step is to get more sophisticated about scoring leads, says Eloqua's Teshima. “Once you generate campaign activity and the amount of leads increases, you need the next level of automation to nurture those leads and get them to the sales team.”

Aon also will take the first steps toward making the automation process more multichannel, potentially working direct mail into the system. For example, Teshima says, if prospects aren't responding to e-mail, a postcard inviting them to a landing page with a trackable URL might be sent.

“The idea is to take advantage of one-off tiny batches of direct mail to see how they improve response in a campaign,” he says.