Email Marketing For the Independent Insurance Agent

Email is a great marketing tool that’s been used for years now. But email marketing has an inherent problem: when you see an email hit your inbox from a big name corporation, do you open it? If the latest deals came up from Target, or if Progressive was emailing you to tell you that you could be saving a bundle, would you actually open that email or would you send it to the trash?

Getting your email opened is just the first step of the process. Let’s talk about how your email marketing campaigns can stand out from the competition.

Increasing Your Open Rate

Your emails are nothing if they go straight to the trash. There are only a few factors you can control to make sure your emails are getting opened. First, focus on when you send out your email marketing campaigns. Consider which day of the week and what time of day are best.

Generally speaking, Monday is a dead day for email marketing. Because people are usually running around or preoccupied, weekend emails have pretty low open rates as well. Tuesdays and Thursdays seem to be the best days to send out “call to action” emails. Historically speaking, Tuesday is the best. Wednesdays aren’t quite as successful as Tuesdays or Thursdays, but if you have an informative but lower priority email you need to send out, consider Wednesday as an option.

The other factor is the time of day. The below graph, provided by Mailchimp, represents average email open rates based on time of day.

A third factor you can control is your subject line. Your subject should be personable and welcoming. You don’t want it to sound like a robot sent the email out or like you simply don’t care. Avoid salesy words, such as “new offer” or “save big,” and never, EVER use the word “free.”

Other than that, be sure to keep your subject lines short and simple. Make sure they never repeat themselves. And remember to not over-complicate things.

Building a Positive Customer Experience

Once you’ve figured out how to get your emails opened more frequently, consider what’s inside. Your email should be welcoming and informative. Most importantly, it should somehow help your customer or prospect. This way they don’t regret opening it.

Your greeting should be personalized and should include the recipient’s first name. You can do this with almost any email marketing tool (our agency uses Zywave). If you have trouble finding out how to do this, just contact your email marketing system’s support team to help you out.

Next, make sure your email follows your company’s branding guidelines. If you don’t have any in place, consult a professional graphic designer or branding professional to help you get started.

The visual appeal of your emails make a world of difference, so include your branded logos, colors, and some corresponding visuals to give your message a nice look.

Be sure your insurance agency’s phone number is clearly listed at the very top of your emails and all of your contact information is at the bottom, so there’s no confusion about how to get in touch with you.

Other than that, make your message personable. I can’t stress enough how much your customers will appreciate a personalized message that makes them feel like they are working with you on a one-on-one basis.

Onboarding Process

Whenever you write a new policy for one of your customers, launch a series of automated messages that start hitting their inbox shortly after the sale. That way, they won’t feel like you’ve abandoned them and were just after their money.

Our agency’s onboarding email roadmap may give you ideas to help build your own successful email plan going forward.

• Day 1: Your first email should thank your customers for their business. Consider providing them a survey, just like we have, to see how their experience went.

• Day 2: We send out a “meet the team” email as part of our onboarding process, to remind customers that we are real people, real agents, and we’re here to help them.

• Day 3: We ask for reviews online and provide the links to get there. Word-of-mouth is still the number one form of generating business, so get your customers to talk!

• Day 7: A week into the program, we send out some information on our referral program and reward customers who give us referrals.

• Day 14: Two weeks in, we send the customer an email about our mobile app. The email highlights all the great things our app can do for them and contains download instructions as well, to help them get started.

• Day 21: In the third week, we send customers links to our social media profiles. We encourage them to connect with us online and give them some information about our updates to help attract their attention and generate response.

• Day 28: The fourth week is when we send our customers information about our service offerings. There is serious power in marketing to existing clients. There is always the possibility that a customer has more to insure, so we highlight everything we can cover in this email.

• Day 35: In the fifth week, we send out information about insurance discounts⎼but we don’t mention that in the subject line, because it is salesy! We want to make sure our customers know that we are working for them, to help enhance their insurance and financial experience. This email does just that.

• Day 42: In the sixth week, we take time to support our business partners. As we have promised these partners, we are here to help promote and support their businesses. Cross-marketing local businesses has helped us extend our reach, so we crafted this email to get the word out.

• Day 49: The seventh week is the last in our onboarding process. With this email, we send customers an account review and let them know that we are here to help, especially if their rates ever increase.

Onboarding isn’t the only time that we send out automated email from our agency. We also have notices going out for account renewals on an automatic basis, 120 days prior to the renewal date. It’s important that this email gets sent out before the renewal hits, so people have plenty of time to prepare and think about it in advance.

Special Occasion Email Campaigns

Some of your email campaigns will have to be sent manually, because they’re special occasions, not regular occurrences. We have campaigns for birthdays, holidays, company events and other special occasions. These can be crafted on an individual basis, and again, sent out manually.

Get creative in your approach but avoid sending too many emails. You don’t want to bombard your customers with so many emails that they start marking them as spam. When it’s appropriate, remind your customers that you’re there to serve them and that you care.

If you have any further questions about your email marketing, please feel free to reach out to me.