A Quick Email Marketing Guide for Insurance Agents

/ by

The insurance industry is notorious for its competitive nature and cut-throat environment. To survive in insurance, agents must go above and beyond to win clients and keep them happy. The reality of being an insurance agent is far from glamorous. Behind the success of every insurance agent is a lot of hard work and persistence. Insurance agents have to be proactive in finding clients. In this industry, nothing comes easy.

email marketing guide for insurance agents

According to PWC, CEOs in the insurance industry are highly concerned about their growth prospects because of over-regulation, customer behavior changes, technological advancements, and steep competition in insurance.

Shortcuts:

What Insurance Agents Struggle With

Every industry has its own set of challenges. However, the insurance industry comes with challenges of a different caliber. In addition to the massive competition, there are other hurdles insurance agents must face as they brave the landscape to survive in the insurance industry.

  • Generating Leads: Frequently, prospects can be hard to convince. Although insurance is vital, many prospects don’t feel that they need to have insurance in case they run into trouble. It’s also uncomfortable to plan for inevitable events such as death.
  • A Misunderstood Product: Insurance is often portrayed as an investment when it should actually be seen as an expense. There are a lot of agents out there that promote insurance as an investment to convince prospects that the payoff can be worth it in the end. This is misconstrued and can cause misunderstandings in the long run.
  • Keeping Up With The Regulations: It’s not uncommon for healthcare to change its regulations. Due to the many changes, insurance agents have to keep up with the constant changes in the regulations to sell their products with authenticity and maintain the trust of their prospective and existing clients
  • Trusting the Industry: Consumers are apprehensive about buying insurance because insurance agents can appear untrustworthy. According to a survey by TrustPilot, 31% of respondents found the finance industry to be generally untrustworthy or not trustworthy at all.

What’s Email Marketing?

Email marketing is defined as the use of email by a business to establish a connection with people who want to know more about them and could turn into potential customers. Email marketing can be used in various ways but the most popular ways businesses use it are for direct selling and as a medium to keep in touch with their subscribers.

A few examples of email marketing you might be familiar with are newsletters, post-purchase emails, and reminders. Unless you’ve been living under a rock, you have probably gotten these types of emails in your inbox.

The Benefits of Email Marketing

Email marketing has various benefits. To name a few, email marketing can help with lead generation, create personalized content for customers, and can even improve sales in some cases. Overall, email marketing can help businesses increase their leads and sales when executed properly.

Email marketing is also something that can be automated, which makes email marketing campaigns less time-consuming and nerve-wracking. With the right research, email lists can be effective and businesses will be able to reach their target audience with ease. Email marketing is also an excellent way to keep in touch with your subscribers and share valuable content with them.

How Email Marketing Can Help Insurance Agents

You might be wondering how insurance agents can utilize email marketing to help them navigate the competitive industry. Insurance agents can use email marketing as a means to develop a connection and deeper relationships with their existing and potential clients and prospects.

Although many businesses often use email marketing to sell their products or services, in the insurance industry, the key to a successful email marketing campaign is to build trust and credibility. So, instead of aiming to sell their products, insurance agents need to focus on connecting with their audience long before pitching their products.

The Different Types of Emails Insurance Agents Can Send Out

There are a variety of emails insurance agents can send out to their prospects and existing clients. We list some of the most popular email types below:

Welcome Emails

When you have a new subscriber, a welcome email is a perfect way to greet them. This first email is the first touchpoint and should be filled with details about what type of emails they will expect from you in the future, instructions on how to keep in touch with you, invite them to your social media platforms, and lastly, don’t forget to thank them.

Content Emails

When a subscriber joins your list, they expect to see more emails. Whether it’s a monthly piece of content or updates from your brand, remember to send out content regularly. Before jumping to a sales email, consider sending some quality content to your fellow subscribers. The content you send out can vary from tips, stories, or just some updates from your company.

Newsletters

Newsletters are an excellent way to share quality content with your subscribers. They can be sent out every day, every week, or every month. Newsletters are also helpful for keeping your subscribers updated and notified. When you send out newsletters on a regular basis, your subscribers will remember you won’t have to worry about losing touch with them.

Post-purchase Emails

Once someone has purchased insurance from you, a post-purchase email is a nice way to welcome them. You might think that once they purchase insurance from you, your job is done. Your work is just beginning because they still need to renew their insurance the year after. So, keep in touch with them even after a purchase. These types of emails can express gratitude, and include instructions on what’s next, and whom they can reach out to if they have any problems.

Feedback Emails

Feedback emails can be sent out at certain points in a customer’s journey. Usually, businesses send them out after a purchase or after interaction with a customer. Feedback emails help you get to know your customers, collect testimonials, and figure out what makes your customers tick.

Updates or Reminders

You can utilize email to send out reminders or updates if there are any. This keeps your customers in the loop and lets them know of any important updates that you may have gotten wind of. The last thing you want is to leave out important information from your subscribers.

11 Email Marketing Tips Insurance Agents Need to Know

Now that you have a rough idea of how email marketing can benefit insurance agents, we’re going to list ten tips every insurance agent need to know about to further improve their sales and connections with their clients and prospects.

1. Set Your Goals and Objectives.

Before anything else, make sure that you have identified your goals and objectives. Without any goals, you won’t have a guide to follow and your email marketing campaign will end up being all over the place— which isn’t good.

So, list a few goals you would like to achieve with this email marketing campaign. For example, would you like to improve brand awareness, educate your subscribers, or increase sales? These three things can alter your email marketing strategies significantly.

2. Get To Know Your Audience

Once you have set your goals, it’s time to find out who your target audience is. You can do this by performing research on the target market you are aiming to reach and by creating personas. The more detailed your personas are, the better your reach will be.

Since your emails will be catered according to your audience, it’s important to make sure that you have enough information on your target audience before crafting your content and figuring out which strategies work best for them.

3. Embed personalized videos in emails

Using embedded personalized sales videos in emails has several advantages over just simple text. For one, our brains are hardwired to better retain information from animated visuals than from text.

With the amount of text we are bombarded with each day, our reading patterns have changed from in-depth to skimming. People are more likely to open emails with the word video in the subject line and emails with video generally receive 64% higher click-through rates.

Use screen recording software that enables you to record your webcam and embed a preview snippet in your emails. Direct links to Youtube videos are treated as attachments by many email clients and you can’t track and segment views with most tools.

4. Build Your Email List

The next tip you need to keep in mind is that you need to build a solid email list. This is vital since the emails in this list will be a group of people who will be getting your emails on regular basis.

If you have a website, you can set up a form visitors can fill in if they would like to join your mailing list. If you have social media channels, you can also collect emails here. Remember to make sure that people signing up for your email list do it voluntarily. There’s nothing worse than receiving spam emails from something you never signed up for.

5. Choose the Right Email Software

The good news is that you don’t need to send out those emails one by one. Email marketing can be made simple with automation. There are a lot of free tools out there you can use to do the job of sending emails with just a few clicks. You can even schedule them so you don’t need to wait for the perfect time to do so.

Since there are a lot of options to choose from, you need to spend time researching which email platform or software is ideal for you. This can vary depending on the size of your email list, the goals and objectives of your email marketing campaign, and the user interface. So, take your time and choose wisely.

6. Consistently Send Out Emails, but Don’t Overdo It

Your subscribers did sign up for your emails but that doesn’t mean that they signed up for hundreds of emails every day. Depending on how much content you can create and how many updates or reminders you need to send out, you might need to adjust your email schedule to fit your audience.

It’s important to be consistent and stick to a certain frequency when sending emails. It’s just as important to not go overboard and annoy your readers. When starting, stick to publishing a monthly newsletter in between welcome emails and updates. Once you have a feel of how things are, you can increase the frequency of emails.

7. Listen to Your Subscribers

Your subscribers are your lifeline. So, you must listen to them. Be sure to check your email insights and replies from your subscribers. Looking at your open rate, bounce rate, and unsubscribe rate can show you a lot of information about how your email marketing campaigns are performing.

By looking at your insights, you can figure out what to do next and adjust your emails accordingly. For example, you might need to change the tone of your email or adjust the frequency of emails being sent out. You might also need to improve your content or subject lines if responses aren’t like how you imagined them to be.

8. Use a Variety of Emails

With email marketing, you don’t need to stick to just newsletters. You can opt for welcome emails, short updates, or reminders. The options are limitless. Just keep in mind that your audience is the most important factor.

To keep them interested, mix your emails so they’re not receiving the same thing every time. This will require experimenting with different emails to figure out which ones work the best for your audience.

9. Add Visual Elements to Your Email

Have you ever received a text-heavy email? It can be boring and hard to read. You can reduce blocks of text and make emails readable by adding visual elements. Doing so will make your emails look better and your readers won’t have to struggle with getting through your emails.

Visual elements help reduce bounce rates and can increase engagement. So, don’t be shy and start adding some visual elements to keep your emails interesting. If you want to emphasize statistics or important information, a good way to do so is by the use of infographics. These graphics help deliver complex information in a digestible manner.

10. Make It Personalized

Adding a touch of personalization can help a lot with your email marketing campaign. For example, you could start by greeting your subscribers with their first names. This will make the email seem more personal and make your subscribers feel special. If you want to go the extra mile, you can even include their name in their subject line. Doing so will certainly catch their eye.

11. Remember to Follow Up

Lastly, if you send out emails that don’t get any responses such as sales emails or promotions, don’t give up just yet. You should follow up with an email to ask what your readers think. Sometimes your recipients might’ve forgotten to reply or in some cases, your emails could’ve ended up in the spam folder. Following up will help you get a response and improve your response rate.

4 Signs of a Successful Email Marketing Campaign

Not all email marketing campaigns are created equal. You can’t compare one email marketing campaign to another, because a lot of factors are involved. However, there are a few signs you can look out for to know if an email marketing campaign is doing well or not.

Signs to look out for if your email marketing campaign did well:

  • Referrals from existing customers
  • More leads and signups from prospects
  • The ability to maintain current subscribers
  • The increased value of purchases and sales in general

Final Words

Insurance agents have it tough but generating leads doesn’t need to be impossible. With these tips, we hope you’ll be able to tap into your target audience with ease, gain prospects and new clients, and retain customers without any trouble. In a competitive industry such as insurance, it can be hard to gain and maintain clients. With the help of email marketing, generating leads, maintaining customer relationships, and increasing sales can be made possible.

About the author

Ebnu Sudarso is the Co-founder of Milkwhale, an internationally acknowledged infographic design agency. Graphic design and writing have always been a passion. Over the years at Milkwhale, the company has created and published numerous infographics and great visuals.