If you’ve been in the insurance industry for any length of time then you know that there isn’t always a direct correlation between the amount of marketing you do and the sales you close in a week. You don’t get one sale for every phone call you make or flyer you send, which means you don’t get an immediate return on your marketing dollar.
Of course, that doesn’t mean you get no return—obviously marketing works in the long run or it would not be done. So how, exactly does marketing work if it doesn’t generally result in an immediate sale?
Taking Up Brain Space
Marketing of any kind works by placing your business, your service, and you in the minds of your potential clients. Your radio ads, direct mail pieces and follow-up calls all work to carve out a space for you in the subconscious of your prospects. Then, when they actually have a need for your service, they remember you from your tireless marketing efforts and, hopefully, call you.
Of course, some marketing efforts work better than others and some are viewed by prospects as annoying or pushy. That’s why finding the right marketing method is important.
Marketing with Newsletters
One of the easiest ways to stay on the minds of your prospects without being relegated to the “annoying and pushy” column is to send those who opt in a regular newsletter. Newsletters work in two ways:
First, they are a form of marketing that is not considered pushy, urgent or invasive. They get the word out about your business but do not aggressively ask for a sale.
Second, newsletters are valuable on their own as sources of information. Most marketing pieces do not have any intrinsic value. They are simply tools to create sales. Newsletters teach readers about the insurance they own, inform them about different types of insurance they may not have considered before, and can help bridge the gap between insurance as an intangible product and the tangible needs it can fulfill.
When you send a newsletter to your prospects you not only get the benefit of a consistent marketing effort that keeps you and your agency on the mind of your prospects, you also create value within the relationship that increases the likelihood of your prospects calling you for their insurance needs.
It’s time to enter the 21st century, even if you have to do it kicking and screaming; and by that, we mean it’s time to get a Twitter account. Wait! Before you start thinking that Twitter is only useful for finding out how Ashton Kutcher and Demi Moore’s relationship is going, you need to understand just how great Twitter could be for your insurance agency.
Twitter is one of the quickest and most effective ways of connecting with millions of people and developing a relationship with them. Sure, you aren’t going to become BFFs (uh, that’s Best Friends Forever in case you were wondering), but you can create a personable agency identity and sew the initial seeds of your relationship with millions of people who need insurance. Continue Reading »
With an email newsletter, you have many different items to manage in terms of newsletter delivery and getting subscribers to read it. First comes the technical aspects of your newsletter so that it actually gets into your subscribers’ email boxes and next are the personal aspects of your newsletter so you create a relationship with your potential readers.
Technical
Do not use words in the subject line that set off SPAM filters. Or ALL CAPS! know, I know, we keep saying this—but this is the easiest way to for you to make sure your newsletter gets read. Words to avoid:
Free
Income
Guarantee
Check
Money
Do not send your newsletter to email addresses that repeatedly bounce. ISP servers have many ways of identifying your email as SPAM and one of them is repetitive emailing to bad email addresses. Don’t worry if you are a subscriber of our email newsletter service, we automatically remove hard bounces for you.
Personal
Remember to check the email inbox that the newsletters are sent from. There may be email requests ifrom existing clients for service of their policy or emails from new clients requesting appointments or answers to questions. You may even have some Unsubscriberequests. Ignoring these shows that you are not accessible and creates an impression that you are not professional.
Be very clear when writing your subject line. You may have to get creative to avoid SPAM words but you have to create a subject line that clearly explains the content within the newsletter and gets people interested. Your subject line should tell your readers why they want to read your newsletter.
Do use an easy-to-understand From email address. Don’t try anything cute or creative like Insnewlttr4you@server.com. Instead, choose something simple like: newsletter@youragency.com. This makes your agency easy to recognize and ensures that you don’t end up in the junk folder.
Have you ever had one of those days when your email inbox is ominously…silent? You realize around 1PM that you haven’t received any emails all day. You think about how odd that is, and proceed to compulsively click the “Get Mail” button on your email program. If you’re really desperate, you resort to accessing another email account and sending yourself a test email…just to make sure it’s working. You do this because you know how intangible the email process is—so doesn’t that make you wonder what could go wrong with your email newsletter?
Spam Emails
While ultimately the recipient’s email server will make the determination on whether your email is spam or not, there are some preventive steps you can take beforehand:
Avoid using spammy words like free, guaranteed, etc. And ALL CAPS is a big no-no!
Maintain an up to date, permission-based mailing list. Don’t assume that you have permission to market to someone via email because they were a client 5 years ago. If you send your newsletter to people that haven’t granted you permission to do so, there’s a greater chance they’ll hit that little spam button in their email program. The more recipients that hit the spam button, the worse your email reputation. Similarly, if someone asks to be removed from your mailing list, do so immediately.
Blocked Emails
Some email servers graciously block emails from addresses that do not appear in their client’s email address book. This means your newsletter may show up in their SPAM file even if you haven’t done anything to set off the SPAM filters.
Avoid this by: Asking your subscribers to add your email address to their address book when they sign up for your newsletter.
Bounced Emails
At some point in our emailing lives, we’ve all gotten that error email that says one of our recipients couldn’t be found so the email couldn’t be delivered. This is called a bounce because it means your email never got into the box you wanted it to go to and it just bounced right out of the email server and back to you.
Avoid this by: It is possible that the subscriber gave an invalid email address or that their email box is full. Unfortunately, there is nothing you can do about this but remove their email address from your list. Before you do so, make sure you do not have an error in the email address. Some common errors include:
If you aren’t keeping your clients happy and informed, there are thousands of other agents waiting in the wings to fill in for you. The one trick up most successful agent’s sleeves is building loyalty. When you work to create client loyalty, you take action that keeps clients happy with your work and the information you provide and makes them say “not interested” when approached by other agents. One of the easiest and most effective ways to create loyalty with your clients is to offer a newsletter.
Newsletters provide professional and informative content.
We’ve said it before, we’re saying it now—and chances are we’ll say it again later. Content is king on a website, blog or newsletter. If you aren’t giving your readers content that informs and engages, you are going to breed contempt instead of loyalty.
Newsletters show how dependable you are.
Believe it or not if you set a schedule for your newsletter releases, your clients will notice. When you fail to deliver on that schedule—they’ll notice that too. By making yourself dependable in a small way, you show that you will be dependable in more important matters as well.
Newsletters give you a platform for communication when times are tough.
Clients are likely to be fearful when there are negative news stories about insurance companies—even if their insurer is not mentioned. It’s almost impossible to call all clients every day something happens that might concern them. A newsletter allows you to keep in touch with clients during the bad times, choose articles that will calm their nerves, and shows that you have the courage and dedication to deal with the issues head on.
Newsletters separate you from your competition.
Not all agents or agencies offer a newsletter to their clients. In fact, some agents have very little, if any, communication with their clients after they sell a policy. Many of your clients will have dealt with this type of agent in the past and will be grateful for your level of communication and accessibility via newsletters. Not only will that help keep them loyal, but it’s something they’ll tell their friends about when they complain about never hearing from their agent.
Pictures are a great way to help your newsletter content resonate more strongly with your readers. Pictures can help explain your perspective on the subject matter of your articles and give assistance to visual learners in really understanding your content. Of course, you can also use pictures to provide comic relief and to help pique your readers’ interest. But without hiring a designer, how do you know which pictures to pick and where to get them?
Choose pictures that tie into the content somehow. Try not to be too obscure, you don’t want your newsletter to be a puzzle to readers. For instance, if you have an article about filling out forms, you can choose stock photographs of forms with pens, piles of papers, or something similarly connected. Don’t choose a picture of a hamburger because you personally like to eat hamburgers while filling out forms—that will only confuse your reader.
Find pictures that you have a right to distribute. You can visit the Library of Congress (http://www.loc.gov/index.html), Every Stock Photo (http://www.everystockphoto.com/) and morgueFile (http://www.morguefile.com/) for free photos with few (if any) usage restrictions. Be sure you check each picture you attempt to use and verify that you have permission to distribute it on a newsletter.
Pick good pictures. Sounds like a no brainer, right? Well, think again. While you may not be looking for a photo shot by Herb Ritts, when using free photos you are often using amateur photos. You should choose those that are not out of focus, don’t have confusing or unpleasant Photoshop effects, and aren’t distracting. Photos that look too clumsy or unprofessional will detract from the professional look of your newsletter.
Use photos that are not offensive. Your newsletter photos should not show any offensive items, words, postures, hand gestures or body parts. When looking for photos, be sure to look at everything in the picture—not just the center—so that you don’t miss any hidden offenses.
In these days of political correctness and overly cautious legalese, many agents think their newsletters must toe the line of boring to keep them out of trouble. This concern with doing the right thing can create newsletters that are uninspired, stale and so safe they might be used as floatation devices.
Well-written newsletters with evergreen content and viable solutions can be interesting to your readers while still serving as a sales tool if you know what steps to take to keep them from boring your readers.
Use your newsletter as a tool for prospecting—not an announcement board.
Chances are your reader is very interested in articles that can improve their quality of life, educate them about financial security and wealth accumulation, and help them make informed decisions. What they aren’t interested in are the everyday workings of your office or insurance companies. Now, A.M. Best and Standard & Poor’s ratings changes are the exception since those help to cement the insurance companies as trustworthy and reliable.
Help your clients identify with the newsletter by including some testimonials—from people like them.
Nothing will move your potential clients more than seeing testimonials from people in similar situations who worked with you on a problem’s solution. Be sure to ask your former clients for testimonials that you can print in your newsletter. Ask them to thoroughly discuss the problem they had that you resolved and get their permission to print it with their name.
Provide your clients with actionable steps—ones that they can easily take with your help.
Your clients want to know how to fix their problems. They want relatively painless solutions that you can help them with. Make sure your newsletter articles explain the solutions you can offer and give your clients some knowledge base and help them to understand why they are viable solutions.
We have added another new feature to our email newsletter program that many of you had requested in the past. You can now choose any day of the month to send out your e-mail newsletter.
To select the perfect day and time to communicate your message, we have added a new button at the top of each proof that says Schedule Mailing (see screenshots below). Enter the day and time you would like your newsletters to go out, and they will begin to be delivered at requested timeframe. Just be sure you’re happy with your proof first!
Please note that if you select a week-end day, the newsletters will go out on that day. If you do not specify a time, the default time will be 6am EST.
Once you have scheduled a monthly newsletter for a certain day of the month, the system will default to that mailing day in the following month, unless you decide to choose another delivery date again.
If you want to keep things as is that’s fine too. Note that in the past, if the 1st or 15th fell on a weekend, we sent your newsletters on the following Tuesday. Now, in this case, your newsletters will be sent out on Monday morning unless you change your mailing date.
Every day, whether they like it or not, your clients are bombarded with news about the troubled economy. They sit and watch as CEOs are replaced, new policies are discussed, and stock values rise and fall. Some of these events are truly cause for concern and others are simply fear mongering tactics used to create news channel profits. But the fear mongering doesn’t just create profits for television stations and it isn’t just perpetrated by the television station your client favors; it is also used as a tactic of other agents to help turn your client into their client.
Through selling fear to your clients, another agent could convince them that the insurance company you sold them a policy for will not be able to pay claims or they may convince your client that the policy you sold them does not offer the best value or benefits for them. If your client is uninformed, they may easily buy into the propaganda.
The only way to combat this is through educating and staying in touch with your client on a consistent basis. Depending on the size of your client list, you and your staff may not be able to call each client regularly to stay in touch, so you must find other methods of creating consistent, valuable contact. By educating your client often with newsletters, blogs, and websites, you help to create a strong foundation of trust and education within your clients. This foundation can help them avoid the lure of an agent who capitalizes on fear.
In addition to providing a resource that helps keep your client persistency up during a bad economy, the regular contact provided by newsletters and a strong web presence helps your client feel connected to you and gives the impression that you are available to them as a resource—not just as a salesperson.
Help your clients feel safe and secure—as though you are their life raft on the choppy water of this economy. Stop their roving eye and help them avoid the complications that can accompany unnecessary insurance policy changes. Provide them with an easy to create educational resource that keeps you available and in demand.
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.
