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.

1. 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.

2. 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.

3. 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.

4. 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?

1. 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.

2. 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.

3. 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.

4. 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.

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.

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.

There’s no question about it:  insurance agents have to stay in touch with their clients if they want their business to grow and thrive. A monthly or weekly newsletter, whether it’s print or electronic, is an extremely effective way to grab your clients’ attention and reinforce your customer relationships.

What makes a newsletter such a sharp marketing tool? When you distribute an eye-catching, informative newsletter to current and potential customers, it creates top of mind awareness for your business. That means the next time a client needs insurance or other financial services, they’ll think of your company first.

However, if you want to whip up a truly successful newsletter, you’ll need a few essential ingredients, including the following three elements:

1. A professional design: A substandard, badly designed newsletter will reflect poorly on your business. Think about it:  if you send your clients a thrown together, second-rate newsletter, they may assume your services are second-rate, as well. Consumers are bombarded with more than 50,000 marketing and advertising messages every single day. If you want to stand out from the crowd, you have to send clients a newsletter with a professional, sleek design.
2. Useful information: A newsletter that’s filled with nothing but fluff and sales pitches is simply not effective. If you want your clients to actually read your newsletter, you have to provide them with information they can actually use. When you offer valuable information to your clients through a newsletter, they’ll be more likely to come to you when they need insurance or financial advice.
3. Interesting, easy-to-digest content: Obviously, the world of insurance and financial services can be a bit dry and complex. When you reach out to your clients with a newsletter, you’ll want to keep the complicated financial jargon to a minimum. Although your newsletter articles should offer useful information, they should also be light-hearted and easy-to-read. Otherwise, you’ll quickly lose the reader’s interest, and they’ll end up tossing the newsletter in nearest trash can.

As you can see, creating a striking, informative and interesting newsletter is no easy task. If you want to send out a truly effective insurance newsletter, trust in the experts. Foresight Publishing can customize a dynamic newsletter to help you reach out to your clients and stay top of mind.