The Offering: Founded in June 1999, ePolicy.com Insurance Services, Inc. (ePolicy.com) is a B-to-B Internet company that streamlines the business insurance application and policy-writing process.

Target Audience: Currently, ePolicy.com serves over 23 million small businesses and solo practitioners. Typically, such customers are hard to service through traditional insurance brokers and agents.

Site Design: ePolicy’s Web interface lets SOHO’s purchase insurance quickly, minimizing one of the most hateful procedures in business (e.g. qualifying for financial services). “What makes us unique is that the qualifying criteria is in our engine,” says Richardson. “Right now there is no one else on the market.” “They are in and out and insured within about 15 minutes,” says C. Bruce Pfander, ePolicy’s Executive VP and Chief Marketing Officer.

Traffic Generation: ePolicy.com invests its dollars in a media mix targeting both online & offline vertical markets. Roughly, 60% of the marketing budget goes to online media while 40% goes to offline media.

ePolicy’s diverse marketing arsenal includes:

--1. Alliances with companies like Intuit, Inc. to market ePolicy via QuickBooks 2000 and QuickBooks Pro 2000, QuickBooks.com and the small business channel of Quicken.com. (According to Intuit, more than 2 million SOHOs use its QuickBooks product/service line.)

--2. Affiliations with associations, such as bar and accounting organizations

--3. Direct interactive marketing into vertical markets, including trade print advertising coupled with direct mail/email to both lawyers and accountants

--4. Database marketing to an existing prospect list.

--5. And last, but not least, horizontal marketing to the broad category of small business insurance buyers

“Only do [horizontal marketing] when you have enough aggregation of vertical markets. That is, when it makes economic sense,” said Nicholas A. Richardson, Vice President of Product Marketing for ePolicy.com.

Our Take: ePolicy’s unique selling proposition lies in simplifying a traditional application process that also results in savings to the SOHO customer.