When selling insurance, you want to always be on the lookout for new potential leads and the chance to form lasting relationships with them. What you need to avoid, though, is being seen as “spammy”, or otherwise annoying in any form of communication, including by email.
So, what are some great tips when it comes to email marketing for insurance agents, to help you make the most of this communication tool?
This article will list several of the best email marketing tips we have. By the end, you will know both what to do and what not to do to help you convert your long list of insurance leads moving forward.
Do:Â Define Your Audience
Make sure you understand the specific types of insurance leads you want to target. This can help you center your email marketing strategy on a specific demographic or client need.
As there are many different kinds of insurance policy options, the tighter the niche you can focus on, the better. It allows you to build up a personalized and engaging campaign for your target audience.
For example, make sure to target life insurance email campaigns at those who have the most likely characteristics to buy it. This will stop you from wasting your time focusing on those who will dismiss your offer, and help prevent your email ending up in a spam filter.
To empower you in this, make sure to gather as much information on your leads as possible. You should try to learn about their:
- Insurance needs
- Personal preferences
- Behavior
- Career
- Any other demographics
Each of these gives you more ways to create a focused campaign that is more likely to convert those who are in a specific group, even if that group is smaller.
As you interact with your potential audience, remember that you can continue to collect information on them. By updating your data and focusing your emails further, you can ensure any messages you send out stay relevant to their target audience.
Don’t: Forget to Secure Your Leads’ Data
Ensuring the privacy of your insurance leads is imperative if you want to build trust with any potential clients. At the same time, it can help you avoid legal issues when it comes to email marketing and user data.
When you send emails out, ensure you have a privacy policy in place. It should describe how you handle your leads’ data and offer reassurances about your intent to gather information. With the mere existence of this document, without even digging into its details, potential clients are more likely to trust you.
At the same time, not only do you need to talk about data security, but you must take action to protect it too. Put security measures in place to protect any information you collect. Also, use strong encryption to secure any data during both transmission and storage, to ensure you follow your state’s laws.
Then, ensure you deal with any potential unauthorized access or data breaches quickly and before they can become a problem. If data is ever stolen, make sure to be open and up-front about it after you deal with the issue. While it might impact customer trust, it is better than clients finding out later.
Do: Use Automated Tools
One of the few insurance marketing strategies that had a huge impact on the industry was the introduction of automation. It streamlined a huge amount of communication with leads, allowing people to focus on work that only a human could do instead. When companies received a large number of high-quality leads in a short time, it also helped with organizing them.
Software exists that can perform many of your day-to-day tasks with minimal input from you, including:
- Scheduling emails
- Follow-ups
- Collecting responses and engagement
- Analytics analysis
- Sending surveys
Based on the huge amounts of data coming in, you can then begin to:
- Send trigger-based emails after specific lead actions
- Automate drip campaigns to educate leads on insurance
- Learn of leads that need human engagement
- Monitor the performance of your email campaigns
Not only does this take a lot of work off your hands, but it also reduces the likelihood of human error. A computer is much less likely to send an email to the wrong person or forget to BCC a list of clients, after all.
Such tools can also collect data for you to analyze later. In many cases, it can even offer you an analysis and often catch trends you would not have otherwise been aware of.
Don’t: Neglect to Ask for Opt-in Consent
Clear communication about your email opt-in and opt-out process can help you build relationships with your leads. It fosters trust when they can have control over what they do and do not receive from you, and makes you seem more human.
Not only is asking for consent from leads helpful to help you build trust with clients, but it is also often a legal requirement. Many countries where international clients may live even have very strict rules that, if not followed, can lead to harsh penalties.
When you gather email addresses, make sure to inform people of what you are using them for, and to allow people to opt out of future messages. This needs to be a clear process, not use double-negatives, and if possible should explain how often you plan to send messages to the address.
In the emails themselves, you should also include the ability to unsubscribe. This does not need to be a large button and can be at the bottom of the email, in the footer, if necessary. So long as someone is capable of doing it, it should not be an issue.
By performing all these steps, you provide a foundation of honest communication with your client and encourage trust. Not only that, though, but you will also protect your business from litigation.
Do: Use Analytics to Iterate Your Approach
In the modern day, using analytics is a mandatory step in ensuring you understand how well your emails are impacting your leads. By leveraging the data you receive, you can start to make better decisions and iterate on what you communicate over time.
The information you can analyze is almost non-exhaustive but includes details such as:
- Email open rates
- Link click-through rates
- Bounce rates
- Conversion rates
- Unsubscribe rates
- Which emails get more engagement
- Which emails are opened multiple times
By engaging in A/B testing, you can start to find the types of messages that perform the best over a long period. That way, you can start to pivot your communication so that you get the highest level of conversion.
You should also try to look into what the UX of both your email and any website you use is like. Having a poor user experience could leave your potential clients confused and unsure of what they need to do to engage with you.
Don’t: Leave the Reader With No Call to Action
A call to action is a button or link that is appealing to your lead and makes them want to interact with it to continue their journey. It often needs to be visually appealing, or at least have text that draws someone in and makes them want more.
For example, at the end of this article, you will find the following section:
“So, if you think you need help with lead generation, schedule a meeting today and find out what we can do for you.”
Here, we want the reader (you) to schedule a meeting with us to learn how we can help with the lead generation process. The step we want you to take is to click on the link that takes you to a page through which you can contact us.
It offers a clear message, boosted by the text that came before it that described our position as a number-one insurance marketing company. It also shows you how we are relevant to your needs, and allows you to continue your journey into becoming a customer.
Using such a link, you can also track the rates at which people click through to your website. This will help you understand how effective both the email and the Call-to-Action (CTA) are, and allow you to write them better in the future.
Do: Engage and Educate
No matter whether you sell many types of insurance or focus on only one, you need to ensure your potential clients understand them. This can help them make an informed decision on what they should buy from you, as well as make them feel like they are more in control.
As such, make sure that any information you provide in an email campaign is clear, relevant, and understandable. It should build trust in your client that you not only know what you are talking about, but that you are someone they can work with.
As well as educating them, you can also offer interactive elements in an email. These might include insurance premium calculators, or surveys to gather more data.
If a client uses a premium calculator, you can then offer a call to action at the end to encourage them to make the most of the deal they saw. Or, if you put together a survey, it could contain hints as to why you are uniquely placed to offer the client a better insurance deal. This is likely to encourage them to lean into what you offer and either investigate further or contact you for more information.
Don’t: Get Caught In a Spam Filter
There is no point in sending a lot of emails out if they are all going to end up in a filter. That neither helps you nor the potential client.
Look into best practices when it comes to formatting your email. You want to appear as trustworthy as possible, and that means ensuring you have:
- A high-quality visual style
- Useful content
- Correct spelling and grammar
- A balanced text-to-image ratio
Please note that this list is not everything. There are many guides out there that can help you build a better email and avoid losing out on high-quality clients.
Do: Update Your Contacts Often
A stagnant contact list can start to really hit you as you send out email after email, only to get very low engagement. Having up-to-date data on your leads gets around this issue and means that any decisions you make based on analytics are more accurate.
As such, now and then make sure to run through the email addresses and remove all contacts who do not engage in any way. This is especially important when it comes to email addresses that don’t open emails. This way, you can focus on the people who are more likely to make use of them.
Don’t: Ignore the Potential of Referrals
Leverage the power of client referrals. Encourage your more satisfied clients to refer others to you. You can even offer benefits for doing so, such as deals like a cash incentive, a free gift card, etc.
You can even use these as success stories in future emails, showing off how these referrals help everyone involved. This can inspire even more use of a referral program and a snowball effect that results in several new converted leads.
When you attempt this, make sure to make the whole process as easy as possible. You want to make the path to success simple enough that someone could do it with a few key presses. This way, people can do it while still having a conversation with the person they want to refer and will not end up distracted from the process.
Experts in Email Marketing for Insurance Agents
Every email you send carries with it the potential to forge a new connection or break existing bonds. Knowing the way to differentiate these can be akin to an art form, so you will need all the help you can get.Â
TR King Insurance Marketing is a leader in empowering email marketing for insurance agents. We have the leads you need to help you achieve real revenue growth. So, if you think you need help with lead generation, schedule a meeting today and find out what we can do for you.