Insurance agents and companies are always looking for new ways to attract new business and keep their existing customers. Email marketing is the right tool for the job.
Insurance email marketing helps agents increase customer retention, boost lead generation and conversions, and streamline communication strategies. It’s surprisingly easy to get started once you know the basics.
What is insurance email marketing?
Email marketing is sending promotional email messages to a list of interested subscribers who provide their email addresses. It’s a form of direct marketing to your customers and potential customers. The goal of email marketing is to engage audiences and drive sales.
Email marketing for insurance agencies may discuss the agency’s offerings, welcome new customers, or share deals on insurance policies. It’s a valuable way to connect to current and potential customers while communicating your brand identity.
Not only that, but it’s proven to work too. For every dollar spent on email marketing, companies average a return on investment of $36. In other words, investing in insurance email marketing pays off big time.
Building the foundation of your agency
Before you launch email marketing campaigns, you need to establish your insurance business. The stronger the foundations of your insurance agency, the easier it will be to promote it with email marketing.
Starting an insurance agency
If you’re still in the early stages of starting your insurance agency, these steps can help set you up for success down the line.
- Develop a business plan that describes what you plan to offer and how you will manage the business. Include realistic estimates of revenues, costs, and profits.
- Save or find the necessary start-up capital for the agency.
- Decide how you’ll organize your business — as a corporation, partnership, limited liability company, or sole proprietorship. If you’re unsure which option is best, consult legal and tax professionals for advice.
- Obtain a license to sell insurance in your state. You will have to complete a set training schedule and pass a licensing exam.
- Choose your agency name. This step allows you to get creative and have some fun naming your business. Just make sure the name is easy to spell and search online so customers can find you without any problems.
- Register your agency with the state. Unless your agency is a sole proprietorship, you’ll need to get a tax ID number first.
- Obtain any necessary permits, such as a general business permit, depending on your state and local regulations.
- Buy insurance for your insurance agency. It may sound ironic, but you will need insurance to protect your insurance agency. Liability insurance and errors and omissions insurance are both common choices for insurance companies.
Growing an insurance agency
Once you establish your agency, it’s time to grow it into a successful business. So, what is the best way to advertise insurance?
Several digital marketing methods are very effective for marketing insurance agencies. Social media marketing, for example, can help you build brand awareness and get customers interested in your insurance agency. Paid digital ads on social media or search platforms can also offer strong results but typically require a higher upfront investment.
Email marketing for insurance agents may be the best way to grow your insurance agency. It’s very achievable, even for business owners who have never run digital marketing campaigns before, and cost-effective, which is essential for new businesses.
Developing an email marketing strategy
Before you start drafting your first promotional email, you need a solid strategy. Here are some factors to consider:
Set goals and define roles
The first step in any marketing campaign is setting your goals. What do you hope to accomplish from this campaign? How will you know if you have reached those goals?
Some common goals for email marketing campaigns include:
- Boosting brand awareness
- Driving traffic to your website
- Strengthening customer relationships
- Improving customer retention
- Generating new leads
- Driving conversions and sales
- Upselling and cross-selling products
- Keeping customers engaged
Your goals will help you shape your campaign and plan for future marketing efforts.
At this stage, you should also designate roles in the campaign. You’ll need someone to design the emails, write the actual messages, plan and schedule the emails, and track your results. Make sure everyone knows what parts of the campaign they’re responsible for so you can hit the ground running.
Write a marketing plan
Write a plan for your campaign based on your goals. For example, you might plan to send an email newsletter to your subscribers once a month.
In your plan, include the topic of your campaign, the recipients, how frequently you’ll send messages, and your method for tracking results. This plan should outline all the steps of your email insurance marketing campaign to keep everyone on the same page.
Choose the right software for email marketing
Sending promotional emails the same way you send regular email messages can work, but it’s not the best way to run a campaign. Instead, take advantage of email marketing software to save time and take your campaigns to the next level.
Email marketing software can help with every aspect of your campaigns, including writing, designing, and tracking your messages. Constant Contact, for example, includes AI-generated content to help you craft messages with just a few keywords. It also has hundreds of professional pre-designed email templates you can customize just by dragging and dropping elements like text and images.
Track your results in Constant Contact’s user-friendly dashboard as your campaign progresses. You’ll find tons of insights that can help you optimize your campaigns further.
Launching your email campaign
Once you’ve planned your strategy, it’s time to get started on your campaign.
Build your subscriber list
To get the most out of your campaigns, you need a solid subscriber list. More subscribers mean more people who might engage with your messages and eventually purchase insurance from your agency.
Consider offering rewards to entice customers to share their email addresses with you. If you offer them something like an exclusive discount, they are much more likely to share personal details.
Choose the right email type
You have many different options when choosing topics for your emails to subscribers. Mix and match them according to your campaign goals and customer preferences.
Here are the most common life insurance email marketing examples:
- Email newsletters
- Lead nurturing emails
- Welcome emails
- Transactional emails
- Automated/triggered emails
- Cold emails
Use marketing automation software
Unfortunately, the behind-the-scenes work of executing marketing campaigns isn’t very glamorous. It involves many repetitive tasks, like entering customer contact information and tracking marketing data.
Instead of wasting time and energy handling those tasks yourself, you can get marketing automation software to do it for you.
The benefits of using this software include:
- Cost savings
- Time savings
- Increased productivity and efficiency
- Improved campaign effectiveness
- Better personalization, thanks to automated data analysis
The software automatically handles simple, repetitive tasks for you so you can focus on the big picture of promoting and running your business.
Measure and optimize for better results
The only way to know whether your insurance marketing campaigns are working is to track your results. Measure key performance indicators such as:
- Open rate
- Click-through rate
- Unsubscribe rate
- Conversion rate
- Bounce rate
- Subscriber list growth
- Spam complaint rate
- Return on investment
If any of these numbers are below your goal level, make some adjustments to your next campaign. Even a simple change like using a larger call to action button can dramatically affect your results. Keep fine-tuning everything until you’re getting the results you were looking for.
Best practices for insurance email marketing
Email marketing is easier than it sounds once you get the swing of it. Just keep these best practices and tips in mind:
Understand your audience
Try to learn as much as you can about the target audience for your marketing emails. Who are they? What are their problems and concerns? What do they have in common? Surveys and data collection can help you find out.
Diversify your email content
No one wants to read a slightly different version of the same email once or twice a week. Vary your email content to keep readers engaged and speak to customers with different preferences.
Choose the right message frequency
It may be tempting to try out lots of different messages on your customers to see what sticks, but it’s important to avoid overloading their inboxes. Send messages regularly, but not so often that you overwhelm your customers.
To keep your subscribers happy, let them choose how often you contact them. Offering that choice will also help reduce the number of spam reports you receive.
Types of email marketing campaigns
There are two main strategies involved in email marketing. Most companies will use both in some form, so it’s useful to understand how they work as you launch your campaign.
Lead generation and nurturing
Email marketing is the ideal way to generate and nurture insurance leads. If you can get customers interested in your emails, some of them will be willing to click on your call to action button and provide more information. All you need is relevant, engaging email content and a form to collect details from leads.
You can also generate referral leads through email marketing. What’s better than landing a new customer? Landing a customer who helps bring more customers to your business.
Send an email encouraging existing customers to refer a friend. If you offer rewards through a referral program, customers are more motivated to refer their friends and family to you.
Once you have your leads, nurture them with more email messages. These messages will help establish you as a trustworthy business and build a relationship with potential customers. Personalize these lead nurturing emails as much as possible to make the customers feel like more than a number to you.
Drip marketing and segmentation
Drip marketing is a marketing strategy that sends different messages based on a subscriber’s previous actions.
For example, a drip email campaign may start with a welcome email. If the recipient opens the email, they’ll later get another message with the next steps in the purchase process. If the recipient doesn’t open the email, then their next message will be a follow-up asking if they need any help or have questions. If they still don’t respond, the drip campaign ends there.
The great thing about marketing software is that it can completely automate your drip campaign. You only need to write the messages and specify each action-message path. Then, as customers take action down different paths in the campaign, the software will automatically send the coordinating messages.
Example marketing emails and how to use them
It’s always helpful to see some real-world examples to serve as inspiration for your own campaigns. Here are some life insurance email marketing templates you can use to inspire your own messages.
Thank you and welcome emails
Thank you and welcome emails are straightforward messages that help you touch base with new subscribers and lay the groundwork for later communications. Use the customer’s name rather than a generic “hello customer” whenever possible.
Educational content and informative emails
If all of your emails are trying to sell customers on your products, you may overwhelm and annoy them. Instead, consider sending some educational emails with insurance-related information that may be relevant to your subscribers. You can even promote other content you publish, like blogs or ebooks, in these messages.
Product introduction
An introduction email lets customers know about new insurance products you’re selling. You can even tease the launch with some intriguing details in an earlier message.
Getting started with insurance email marketing
Email marketing campaigns connect you with customers, generate leads, and improve customer retention. If you aren’t already using emails to promote your insurance business, now is the time to start.
Focus on building an email subscriber list and sending compelling, well-designed emails at the right times. It’s not as daunting as it sounds. Email marketing software will help you manage your campaigns and all the necessary repetitive tasks.
