By now you have no doubt experienced our newly improved client portal, and we wanted to make sure you were aware of the upgraded features that are now available. The enhancements were based on your requests, and we hope you will take full advantage of some of the new features:
Add photos/images throughout the newsletter by placing your cursor in the spot where you would like an image to appear, clicking on the image icon, and then browsing for and uploading the image file.
Similarly, you can also upload files such as PDF or Word docs for recipients to download. First just add some link text, click on the insert link icon, and then either upload a new file or select an existing one.
Save multiple mailing lists within the system, and attach any list (or lists) to any particular newsletter with a few clicks of your mouse. You can also include additional custom fields on your spreadsheet (such as company name or any other data you wish to use) when uploading lists.
New reporting options. By clicking on the ‘Reporting’ link from the email tab in your client account, you will see a graph displaying all of your past open rates, compared to the sitewide open rates.
Create custom signup forms and select the newsletters available for signup.
Send your newsletters out on the day of your choice, rather than only on the 1st or 15th of the month. You can schedule these in 30 min increments. (Starting in August)
We continue to strive to provide an effective, unique, and user friendly service to our valued customers. Please feel free to contact us with your ideas and feedback.
In the pipeline, autoresponders and independent mailings.
The economy can be like a speed trap for your business. As soon as the economy starts to tank, your phone stops ringing and your business suffers. Initially, you may try to convince yourself that it’s a temporary dry spell. After a few weeks, you start looking at the calendar to see if today if a holiday. Eventually, you realize that this slump might be here for the long hall and you begin to think of ways to reduce expenses.
Ironically, one expense that many business owners consider reducing to cut costs is their marketing budget. As counter-intuitive as it may seem, your marketing budget is a big piece of the pie and for many agents, that means it has a big bull’s eye positioned over it; but a bad economy is the worst time to stop or drastically reduce your marketing costs. Why would you stop these sales-generating methods right when you need them most?
Reevaluating your marketing budget to allocate your funds to a more targeted and results-oriented method of marketing is a smart way to work your budget during a bad economy. One of the ways you can do this is by creating a website and starting a newsletter. By focusing your marketing efforts on highly targeted leads, you know you have quality prospects who are proactively looking for your help. They seek you out and contact you—which means no more frustrating cold calling.
When you combine the power of a well-written, educational and targeted website with regular newsletter mailings, you focus your budgeted spending on value-added marketing. This allows you to provide a service to potential clients through the very materials you use to generate sales—an extreme cost-saving measure.
Marketing does not become less important as your sales dwindle. Instead, it becomes increasingly vital. By marketing smart you not only save yourself money, you also increase your sales and create a winning formula for any economy.
Sometimes, marketing techniques reach a point when they are no longer as successful as they once were. In these days of racing technological advances, digital marketing techniques fall in and out of fashion so quickly, it can be difficult to keep up. With all this change buzzing around you it stands to reason that you might wonder if newsletters are still an effective form of marketing for your insurance agency.
Marketing Sherpa, a research firm that tracks marketing trends to figure out what works and what doesn’t, recently studied some technology decision makers to find out if they still read email newsletters. Turns out they do—in greater numbers than they read traditional newspapers and other print publications. In total, they found that 70% of these decision makers read emailed newsletters.
How to Make Newsletters Work for You
Seventy percent is a powerful number. So, what are the newsletters that these professionals read doing right? For one, they emphasized direct-response marketing using highly targeted articles. This is easy enough for you to do within your newsletter, as we’ve mentioned before in this post (Choosing the Right Articles for Your Newsletter) you simply need to choose articles that contain content applicable to the lives of your readers. As for direct-response marketing, as long as your name and contact information appear on your newsletter, you have that covered.
Another tactic the successful newsletters took was to make sure there was a website for the readers to visit. The newsletters were not the only form of marketing and information the firms were providing. They had a web presence that also informed and added value to their services.
Lastly, they chose high-quality content. The content was professionally written, interesting, informative and authoritative. In short, it was content that provided a value in being read.
The Power is Yours
Newsletters still stand as one of the most successful and often read marketing techniques around. They are flexible enough to be produced both digitally and in print, and they give you a platform to suggest a wide variety of products to your prospects. Whether or not yours works will depend on how well you execute it. We’ve given you the tools you need for a high-quality, informative newsletter, but it’s up to you to target it.
When you start a direct marketing campaign, you must design the perfect pitch. Think about it, you have one shot to dazzle your potential client with your copy. With the amount of money you spend on designing the campaign, writing the campaign, printing and mailing it—that is one risky proposition and if you haven’t chosen your target market properly or haven’t crafted your message perfectly, that’s a lot of money wasted.
Instead of opting for an advertising method with such a limited scope, why not consider a newsletter as your direct marketing campaign? With a newsletter, you can reach a wide variety of prospects with a single printing. Not only do newsletters give you multiple pitches within a single mailing, they also add value to your service—can you say that about your last direct mail campaign?
Newsletters educate and inform while selling the need for the insurance products you carry. Thanks to their format and the way their content is written, they are considered more of an information tool than a sales piece. This can help you build trust with your prospects. Because newsletters don’t look like the average sales postcards and brochures, they have the power to reach those people who normally throw away direct mail marketing pieces without a second glance.
Direct mail isn’t the only way to capitalize on the advertising power of a newsletter. When you meet with a potential client, what is your leave-behind piece? How about a newsletter? Not only can it help your potential client decide to go with you as their agent, it can also make them start asking the kinds of questions that lead to additional sales. “Do I need an annuity?” “Maybe we should consider EPLI coverage.”
No matter how you look at it, a newsletter is the most flexible marketing tool your agency can have. It’s good for prospects, good for potential clients and good for existing clients. It adds value to your service while introducing need into your client’s thought process.
We all know that newsletters help create opportunity for your agency. They keep you in the client’s mind, display your industry knowledge and show that you are invested in keeping your clients educated and informed. Unfortunately, if you choose the wrong articles for your newsletter, you risk not just a deleted email or unread newsletter, but being seen as a pest and a spammer by your client.
Who is Reading Your Newsletter?
In order to choose the right articles for your newsletter, you need to know who is reading it. Think about it–if you are a 50-year-old male heading toward retirement, you wouldn’t want to read an article about how women graduating from college can ace their first job interview, would you? Your clients are no different. They want content that is pertinent to their lives, or where they want their lives to be.
Look at your audience. How much do you know about them? Are they from one general age group or gender? Or is there a wide variety of people, ages and life stages accounted for? Make sure you have the appropriate mix of articles to appeal to each of your subscriber groups.
What Do You Want Your Newsletter to Accomplish?
What is the end goal you’d like to achieve from the distribution of your newsletter? Do you want to sell your existing clients new products? Do you want your clients to recommend you to their friends to buy products similar to the ones they bought?
If your goal is to sell your life insurance clients an annuity, don’t fill your newsletter with life insurance articles. Instead, put one or two life pieces in the newsletter and pick annuity and retirement information for the rest. If you want to be known as the life insurance guru in your town, then pick life insurance articles that mix practical, widely known information for much of the newsletter and include some more complex life insurance information and strategies for the other articles. If you’d rather focus on selling multiple products to families, choose articles that deal with the concerns of new parents and homeowners.
Your website is more than just a way to attract new clients to your services. Your website serves as your sales department, your education library, your public image, and more. By keeping your website updated and filled with relevant information that showcases your knowledge and accessibility, it can be used as a tool to create trust between you and potential clients.
How Updates Create Trust
Updates show that you are accessible. How many clients have had difficulty reaching their agent after the policy is issued? You are on your site on a regular basis and this creates the impression that you are easy to reach and attentive.
Updates illustrate your continued efforts to stay informed. This helps your potential clients understand your investment in your career and the industry.
Regular updates on your website are done for anyone who views the website and are not subject to a fee. This no-charge value that you add to your site shows an altruistic desire to educate.
Ways to Update Your Site
Most of the content on your site is carefully crafted sales copy with keywords perfect for search engine optimization (SEO), a call to action that compels clients to call you, and evergreen insurance information. If you aren’t comfortable updating this information without losing the value of your SEO and call to action, add a news section or blog to your site. You may even create a small area on your front page dedicated to these updates. This takes little time to update and provides a consistent area for repeat visitors to look for updates. Make time to update or “tweak” your website at least monthly.
If looking for news is more difficult than you want to deal with, simply set up your Google Reader to pull all articles or blog posts with certain words in them that are used in your industry. This will help you save time in researching and will give you instant access to relevant information.
For a small charge, you can even purchase articles from us to use on your website. Learn more about this service.
