Geo-Targeted Email Marketing for the Independent Agent

Geo-targeting is new to some of us in the insurance space, and could be a valuable asset to you and your independent insurance agency, as long as you have the right approach. Geo-targeted data allows us to make use of a targeted demographic that wasn’t always traditionally available. But what is geo-targeting exactly?

Geo-targeting is essentially when you collect data about your audience based on their location, and deliver unique content for them that is tailored to their specific location’s interests, needs, or other criteria. Think about it this way–if you were a sporting goods store putting together an email marketing campaign about your upcoming summer sale, wouldn’t it make more sense if only people near the ocean receive advertising material about your beach supplies, surfboards, or other water sporting goods? Or think about this scenario for our industry–what if a new dealership just opened up in a select town or city and you wanted to market your auto insurance to people in that area’s zip code? Well, you can through the data and power that is geo-targeted marketing.

While geo-targeted marketing is made simple on social media (because any time you “pay to play,” the social media network will ask what location you’d like to target), I wanted to talk to you today about something a little more out of the ordinary: geo-targeted email marketing. Now, you may be wondering about how you could possibly narrow down an email marketing campaign to only a certain location, but it’s actually not all too complicated. At our agency, when our marketing team has an objective or a specific subject that they need to get marketed to our audience in a specific location, we have them search our management system for all leads corresponding to a specific zip code. From there we can export that list, and use all of the corresponding emails in an email marketing campaign, just like that, in a simple two-step process.

So what is the power behind geo-targeted email marketing? Well, let me give you an example of how my agency made recent use of this creative strategy. We recently hosted a bike giveaway for our local elementary school based on a raffle, and kids who had read 70 or more hours during the school year were entered into our raffle. Once the winners were selected, we went down to the school and made our donations, and it was a great experience for the school, our agency, and our community as a whole. Now, before the event took place, we needed to get it some visibility so that our students would participate in their reading. One piece of our multi-step strategy in achieving this was to make use of an email marketing send-out, but we wanted to make sure it got in front of the right eyes. To do this, we designed an email template that outlined all of the details of our event, and included some bright visuals (because visual content is king in the world of digital marketing!). After that, we chose to only send this email out to those who live within our town, and in turn they could let their kids know about our contest.

A similar example I could give is that we also have our Flag Day Barbecue and American Flag giveaway coming up soon as well, and we need to get this event visibility as well. With this campaign, we also chose to only target people within our zip code to get the event as much visibility as possible, and then blast out an email that we designed that included all of the event’s information, its landing page on our agency’s website, and all of our social media networks so our customers can stay connected with us and see how the event is going by checking in with us online.

I’d like to talk about one other example where this targeting could come in handy for you and your agency as it has with ours. We have a business partner program called Partners of Paradiso Insurance, where we promote our clients’ businesses to encourage our community to shop small or shop local (because we believe in our town, and it’s also a huge part of our agency’s brand).

Now, let’s take a look at geo-targeted marketing within our email campaigns from a different perspective. There’s another strategy that you can make use of when it comes to these campaigns, and that’s to include a map within the email of the location of an event, social gathering, or even your agency. Emails that include maps with their calls-to-action receive a much higher click-through, because the customer, client, or prospect can see just how close the event or your agency is to them right from the map. Think about it this way, if your agency is holding an event, such as our Flag Day Barbecue, wouldn’t it make sense to have a map that leads to the event, where your customers can just punch in their home address to receive directions and discover the event is close by? This is where it all comes together.

To include a map within your email marketing campaign, first go to Google maps, and then enter your location in the field labeled “choose destination.” After that, you can copy the URL of the map, which will include the address you decided to include, such as an event location or your agency’s physical address, depending on the nature of the email. Then you can use that link to embed into images or text within your email, and your customers and clients can see how close they are with just a click.

By geo-targeting your email marketing campaigns, you can use powerful data to capitalize on targeting specific clients in specific locations. I hope you and your agency make the most of this powerful strategy, and over time develop more creative techniques to optimize it even more. As always independent agents and brokers, happy marketing!