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.

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.

When someone unsubscribes from your email newsletter, you might spend some time wondering why. Was it something you said-or something you didn’t say? Turns out, it might have been both.

The Reasons Your Readers are Unsubscribing

1. According to eMarketer.com’s April 2009 survey, the number one reason why your subscribers are unsubscribing is because you are sending them irrelevant content. Now, the content you send may have been relevant to them at one time, but for over 60% of your unsubscribers, it isn’t any more. So how can you stop this from happening? The first step is to identify the common traits of your subscribers and send information that speaks directly to them. Another idea might be to send out an annual survey to find out what changes your subscribers are experiencing and then make sure you have articles in your newsletter that reflect these changes. Events like divorce, new additions, downsizing and retirement may all be experienced by your subscribers and if you strictly send out newsletters discussing buying a home, you’ll lose many of them.

2. Following at a very close second, the number two reason people are unsubscribing from your email is that you send them content too often. When you asked people to sign up, did you let them know you’d be sending newsletters weekly, monthly or quarterly? Have you stuck consistently to the schedule? Disclosing your planned distribution frequency and sticking to it will help you keep your subscriber turnover low.

3. The third reason people unsubscribe, according to eMarketer.com, is that they suspect you might be selling or sharing their address. Maybe they’ve gotten more spam since they opted in, or maybe they read something about this on a blog. Either way, they aren’t sure that you are keeping their information confidential. Be sure to add a disclaimer to every newsletter email that reassures them. Include your privacy policy, since general privacy concerns were the fifth reason for unsubscribing.

4. The fourth reason you are losing subscribers is because they don’t remember signing up. A remedy for this is to include their opt-in date on the emails you send.

Source reference: http://www.emarketer.com/Article.aspx?R=1007139

Having a newsletter is a great idea for any agency. A newsletter keeps you fresh in your client’s mind; it cements your reputation as an authority in the insurance industry; it points out holes in your clients planning that you can fill; and it educates your clients to help make them informed consumers. But what good is your email newsletter if no one opens it?

Here are some tips to help you fix your email subject line to increase your readership.

Need = Read

When you tell people why they need to read your email, chances are they will. You have to be careful when creating need that you don’t abuse the trust your clients have in you. You must make sure the need in your subject line is legitimate and is addressed by your newsletter. Some examples of need are:

• Legislation changes: If legislation is about to change that could adversely affect your clients, then use that information in your title.

• Time value: If there is a risk that the future value of your client’s money could be negatively impacted if they do not have the information you present in your newsletter, use that in your title. If you expect interest rate changes or premium increases that will adversely affect the power of their money, mention that.

• Suspense: Giving some intriguing details in your title and leaving the question of “How does this affect me” on your reader’s mind will compel them to read your newsletter.

Numbers and Lists

Numbers mean results—and results sell. Tell your clients about, “The $10,000 Mistake You Can Avoid” and they won’t hesitate to open your email. Make sure that you can back up the information you put in your title with facts or you might lose their trust.

When reading electronic media, many of your clients want short, simple, easy-to-read articles which can be given in the form of lists. Lists take very little time to read and are often less intimidating because they often break down complex theories. Titles like, “5 Reasons a Fixed Annuity is Perfect for Your Retirement” tell readers that they will get information they can understand, quickly read and that applies to them.

Anyone with an email address knows what spam is, and if you’re like me you absolutely despise it.  So as an email marketer, why would you want to risk associating your agency brand with that of a spammer?  Given the facts, I’m sure the majority of you wouldn’t.  Consider the following checklist to determine if you are following the rules.

The Permission Marketer’s Check List

• Do you have the recipient’s permission? – Before you send someone an email you need the person’s consent.  How do you get permission? If the recipient is a current client, ask the next time you talk to them. For prospects, request their permission to follow up via email before you leave your meeting.

  Rented or purchased lists are a no-no. The list seller will likely say you are buying an opt-in list.  But what did they opt-in for?  I’m going to go out on a limb, and say likely not insurance topics.

• Are you mailing too often? – This is a tough one for insurance agents. It’s not like you’re sending out a weekly flyer announcing various items on sale.   Since there’s no hard and fast rules, you need to use your best judgment.  Are your messages important enough, that people need to hear from you weekly?  If not, you should probably stick with mailing no more often than monthly.
• Is your content consistent with what the recipient signed up for? – If your subscribers signed up for a commercial lines p/c newsletter they’re likely not interested in articles on homeowner’s insurance.  If you do wish to cross promote to a different list, just send out an opt-in email requesting permission.
• Can the recipient easily unsubscribe? – Having an easy unsubscribe process is not just to prevent people from reporting your messages as spam, it’s a requirement.

Any agent with insurance email marketing experience knows all about spam filters. You can follow all the rules and still find some of your emails lost in cyberspace. Even with a permission-based mailing list, you’ll still encounter emails getting trapped in spam filters.

Unfortunately, there is no easy fix to stay clear of spam filters. Understanding how they identify spam, however, can help you minimize their effect to your email newsletter campaigns.

To ensure maximum delivery of your email newsletters, avoid these common mistakes:

· Usage of obvious spammy phrases, like “Money back guarantee” or “100% Free”

· Excessive use of exclamation points!!!!!!

· USING ALL CAPS, especially in your subject line

· Multiple font colors, or large fonts, where unnecessary

· Messy non-compliant HTML code

· Mail is nothing but one large image

While certainly content is key in determining whether an email is marked as spam, we also take preventive steps on our end to maximize delivery for our agent clients. As an established email marketing service, Foresight Publishing has been accepted into feedback loops with ISPs like AOL, Hotmail, Comcast, Yahoo and others. Whenever an email recipient from one of these ISPs reports an email as spam, we’ll alert you right away so you know someone blocked your message. Additionally, we also automatically remove these subscribers from your mailing list(s).

Avoiding spam filters when sending out legitimate emails can take considerable effort on your part. However, watching your open rate grow by just a few percentage points could do wonders for your email marketing.

Insurance agents new to email marketing are usually surprised when only a portion of their email newsletters are opened. “Hey, these are my clients why aren’t they all reading my messages?” Don’t worry it’s not that they don’t like you, you just need to help them see the value in your communications.

Consider these tips for increasing the likelihood of getting your emails opened:

1. Make it easy to subscribe. Prominently display a newsletter signup form on your agency website. When meeting with clients and prospects ask for permission to send them your email newsletter.

2. Use a known “From” name. Do your clients know you by your name or agency name? Or perhaps you should blend the two like so: John Smith @ ABC Insurance <john@abcinsurance.com>.

3. The subject line is prime real estate. Something like ‘ABC Insurance Monthly Newsletter’ is boring. ‘6 Ways to Lower Your Workers’ Comp Rates’ is likely to be more enticing. Make sure to mix it up often.

4. Avoid SPAMMY words and punctuation. Words like FREE and punctuation like !!! are sure to get your email delivered straight to the junk folder.

5. Use images sparingly. Images can result in your email message taking longer to load. In addition, many users have images turned off anyway.

6. Personalize every email. When capturing email addresses be sure to ask for at least the person’s first name too. This way you can personalize the message with the recipient’s name.

7. Don’t bury your contact info. Make sure your phone number, email address, and website are readily available. Keep in mind that to comply with CAN-SPAM every message must have a physical address shown too.

8. Encourage recipients to add your email to their address list. If they whitelist your email, you’ll never go to junk.

9. Re-consider the attachments. Many people won’t open attachments for fear of getting a virus. And some corporate servers will strip the attachments anyway. If you have to include an attachment consider uploading the file to your web server and then linking to it rather than attaching.

10. Avoid purchased or rented email lists. If you don’t have permission to email these people, it’s SPAM plain and simple.

11. Offer one-click unsubscribing. If someone wants to remove their email from your list, give them an easy way to do so. You’d much rather them unsubscribe, then report your email as SPAM to their ISP.

What’s considered spam has changed in recent years from unsolicited email to unwanted email. Understanding what consumers consider spam and why they report emails as spam are key ingredients in effective email insurance marketing.

Consider the findings of the “Spam Complainers Survey” completed by Q Interactive and MarketingSherpa last year:

Most consumers don’t have a clear definition of what constitutes spam:

• 56 percent consider emails from known senders to be spam if the message is “just not interesting to me.”

• 50 percent of respondents consider “too frequent emails from companies I know” to be spam.

• 31 percent cite “emails that were once useful but aren’t relevant anymore.”

Consumers also use their ISP’s report spam button to mark messages as spam that don’t necessarily fit the bill. Nearly half of respondents (48 percent) provided a reason other than “did not sign up for email” for reporting an email as spam.

Respondents cited various non-permission-based reasons for hitting the spam button:

• “The email was not of interest to me” (41 percent).

• “I receive too much email from the sender” (25 percent).

• “I receive too much email from all senders” (20 percent).

Ever wonder why people unsubscribe from your agency email newsletters? According to the chart below from Marketing Sherpa, 58% of respondents stopped reading or unsubscribed from email newsletters because they felt the content was irrelevant.

Conclusion: Your clients work with you for your expertise.  As an example, if you specialize in providing commercial lines insurance to restaurants, be sure your newsletter content caters to this target audience. It’s likely this audience wouldn’t be interested in a newsletter focused on the construction market.