Email marketing is a very powerful tool that opens a direct line of communication with both existing and prospective clients.
According to a 2017 email marketing report conducted by GetResponse and Smart Insights, 53.6% of marketers worldwide report email marketing as effective, ranking it more positively than all other digital marketing channels.
While search engine optimization, direct mailing, social media marketing, and paid digital advertising are valuable techniques for marketing your insurance agency, email marketing takes the lead.
The benefits of email marketing include:
- generating an increase in leads
- improving conversion rates
- identifying better-quality leads
- improvement in sales
- reducing costs for marketing
With all of the benefits that it offers, you want to be sure that you are using your agency’s email campaign to your full advantage.
Send the Right Emails at the Right Times
Be sure that you are keeping your email list engaged by sending them the right emails at the right time.
Welcome Email
Seen as a greeting to someone who has recently joined your subscriber list, a welcome email should be automatically sent out the moment they sign up.
Consumers appreciate and expect a welcome email. With 4x the open rates and 5x the click rates as other promotional emails, welcome emails offer you a chance to introduce your agency and open the door for future engagement.
Tip: Be sure your welcome email answers the question ‘what is in it for them?’ Demonstrate the value that being your subscriber will bring to their life.
Nurture Email
Making up the majority of your campaign activity, nurture emails are your opportunity to prove your agency as a valuable asset to your subscriber list.
- Don’t: Be overly self-promoting.
- Do: Be a source of knowledgeable, helpful resources.
Educate and engage subscribers through storytelling by presenting a problem, outlining a plan to solve it, and detailing what life will look like for the reader when the problem is solved.
You can pepper in promotional emails that provide subscribers with a call to action that your agency provides, but first gain their trust by making the bulk of your emails about them, not you.
Tip: All of the content you provide doesn’t need to be centered on insurance issues. You can also provide content that is helpful to your demographic.
For example, if you specialize in contractor insurance, you can write an email focused on advice that will help contractors face challenges specific to their industry in the coming year.
Re-engagement
There a variety of reasons why subscribers might lose interest in emails over time, including:
- too many emails
- subject lines that are misleading
- difficult to view emails on a mobile device
- repetitive or irrelevant content
- life changes such as change of employment or residence
When your readers lose interest, it’s time to employ a re-engagement campaign to regain their interest and engagement with your agency emails, by sending:
Email 1: Reminder: “It’s been a while….” ” or “Would you still like to hear from us?”
Email 2: Make an offer: Offer a free ebook, guide, or tips to help with pain point/ problem.
Email 3: CTA: Invite them to change email preferences or unsubscribe.
Email 4: Goodbye: Inform them that they will be removed from the list.
Tip: Removing subscribers that aren’t engaging improved key metrics such as deliverability, open rates, and click rates, while also keeping your agency email from being flagged as junk.
Test Subject Lines
With all the time and care you’re putting into your insurance agency’s email campaign, it can be easy to overlook one very important part of email marketing: the subject line.
You take your time figuring out what kind of content will be beneficial to potential leads and existing clients. Then, you carefully curate content that will help educate them, positioning your agency as a trusted resource. Next, you take that content and address it to your entire subscriber list.
Then you slap something into the subject line and hit send.
Without a carefully crafted title in the subject line, it’s possible that all the work you’ve put in will never even be seen.
Keep your subject lines short and simple, but make sure they stand out.
Hubspot offers a lot of advice on how to make sure your email subject lines are on point, including the following:
- Create a sense of urgency, as long as you deliver on that urgency in the body of the email.
- Spark curiosity with subject lines that entice readers to open, but make sure that it aligns with both your brand and the content of your email.
- Make an offer. Everyone likes ‘free stuff’ and are likely to open an email with an offer. Just don’t send them too often or you’ll come off as spammy.
Test your subject lines to see what’s most effective for your audience. Take one email campaign and send it out with two or three different headlines. See which one has better open rates.
Tip: Use different elements in your subject lines sparingly and mix them up in order to keep your emails genuine.
The readers on your subscriber list are there for a reason. They are looking to you as a valuable resource for insurance information and advice.
The key to successful email marketing is to be thoughtful about the content you’re providing, who you are sending it to, and when you are sending it. Do that and when those on your email list are in need of insurance services, your’s is the agency they will look to as a trusted resource.