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April 18, 2011 at 08:00 PM
Younger consumers may look for information about life insurance online – but real people and real life events continue to be the major triggers for those searches.
Andy Ferris of the Chicago office of Deloitte Consulting and Lucian Lombardi of LIMRA, Windsor, Conn., delivered that message recently during a presentation at the latest Life Insurance Conference in Las Vegas.
The conference was sponsored by the American Council of Life Insurers, Washington; 
the Society of Actuaries, Schaumburg, Ill.; LIMRA; and LIMRA’s sister organization, LOMA, Atlanta.
Sessions covered topics such as social media strategies, electronic application processing systems, and recruiting the next generation of sales professionals.
Ferris and Lombardi talked about the implications of socioeconomic trends for life products and distribution.
One trend they discussed was consumers’ growing reliance on the Web.
Ferris and Lombardi reported, for example, that LIMRA has found that the percentage of life buyers who said they had studied individual product information online increased to 52% in 2009, up from 38% just 3 years earlier.
Increasing consumer use of the Internet would be good for life insurers, because the cost of an average transaction is $6.41 per telephone call, $2.03 per e-mail, and just 51 cents per Internet encounter, Ferris and Lombardi said, according to a copy of presentation materials provided by LIMRA.
But Ferris and Lombardi showed another graph that suggests the generational shift to the Internet might be slowing.
LIMRA found in 2009 that consumers in each generation were more likely to expect
