There are roughly about 4.3 billion email users worldwide accounting for 149,153 emails being sent out every minute. Considering that an average email user receives about 88 emails per day, chances are, the marketing emails that you send out are most likely unread or go straight to trash. Like it or not, that’s the reality. But don’t give up on your email marketing strategy yet. Email drip campaigns are a promising new way for agencies to tackle this issue. In case you are not familiar with email drip campaigns, here’s a brief introduction. Email drip campaigns are a series of emails that are sent or ‘dripped’ to a subscriber at a predetermined point in time called a ‘trigger event’. Email drip campaigns can keep clients and prospects engaged, and maintain open lines of communication even when agents are not directly interacting with them.
Why Email Drip Campaigns for Insurance Agents?
Besides selling policies, an independent insurance agent has multiple other responsibilities. Of these duties, the most important is to keep clients engaged and to interact with them periodically. Another equally important task is to generate prospects so as to sell more products that match clients’ needs. Creating a drip email campaign for each of these tasks takes a considerable amount of time and effort. In this blog, we will show how independent agents can easily create and automate communication with professional email drip campaigns created by InsuredMine.
Identify your goal
It sounds very simple. But knowing what you want to accomplish with your campaign is the first task. Insurance agents tend to wear multiple caps at any given time. For instance, as an independent agent:
- Do you want to introduce a new product or service to your Clients?
- Do you want to show them how to use your product or service?
- Do you want to troubleshoot an issue with your app or website?
There are multiple goals for sending out your email drip campaigns and it is important that you know what you are set out to do. It is also important to know that these goals evolve over time, and agents should adapt and make room for these changes with their drip campaigns as needed. Also, knowing your end goal will help you measure metrics of your email drip campaigns and make sure you accomplish your goals. Assign a numeric value or an end date to your goal. This will provide guidance for executing your end goal with your desired outcomes.
Set a reasonable frequency
Once you set your goal, make sure you select a time and frequency at which your email drip campaign should reach your client or prospect. There is no one-size-fits-all approach to setting up a frequency. Setting up a frequency that makes the most sense is a tough call to make initially. But as you learn more about your clients, you will be able to easily read their pulse and tailor your future email drip campaigns accordingly. Do not overwhelm your client or prospects with your email drip campaigns. Generally speaking, limiting your drip campaigns to send out one email a day as is not seen as intrusive or intruding to the clients. For instance, sending an email a day to a client that only communicates over the phone and has never had a digital footprint on your website or app does not serve any purpose. As an independent agent, more efficient use of your time in this instance is to focus your efforts towards convincing the client to subscribe to one of your email campaigns instead. Once a frequency is decided, the drip campaign feature of InsuredMine can be customized and altered over time as needed.
Craft your message carefully
Pay a lot of attention to crafting your email drip campaign message. Most importantly, do not make your message too lengthy. Readers these days have a very short attention span. If it’s taking more than a few seconds of their time, they skip reading. Grab your reader’s attention with a clear subject line for your campaign. Create a message that is clear, helpful, attractive and actionable to the reader. As an independent agent, your message should convey the essence of your agency and should highlight your value to the reader. Briefly highlight the benefits of your product or service and let the reader visualize what they may be missing out by ignoring your message. InsuredMine has multiple simple drip campaign templates to choose from so agents can send out professional yet personalized messages. You can simply select from a host of messages and tweak them a little to customize them to your target group.
Identify your target audience (Segmentation)
Once you pick your goal, set your frequency and create your message, it’s time to identify your target audience. For example, sending a lengthy welcome email to your long term clients already using your product or services does not make much sense. Segment your audience based on various parameters such as:
- Welcoming
- New Leads
- Lost business
- Newsletters
- Surveys
- Renewals
- Confirmations
- Engagements
- Unsubscribes
You can create as many categories as you see fit depending upon the criteria your clients meet. With InsuredMine’s logic-driven schedules, all these tasks can be automated as needed.
Start your campaign
Once you decide on your campaign strategy and chose a template, it’s now time to send out your email campaign. Again, with multiple email drip campaigns and templates to choose from, InsuredMine offers some of the best email drip campaign templates focused primarily on insurance clients that any independent agent can easily customize to better engage clients. The content of your email should match the stage at which the prospect is on the sales funnel. Using infographics to educate about your product or service work well in the initial stages. Response to the email or lack thereof should trigger another round of emails. You should maintain this ongoing communication until you get clear insights on how your email drip campaigns are performing.
Mastering the Metrics of Your Campaigns
Sending out your email drip campaign is only half the work done. Just because your campaign is automated doesn’t mean you can run it infinitely. You will need some supervision to make sure it is running as intended and adjust your segmentation as needed based on your metrics and analytics. If you are not getting your intended results, try rewriting your call to action.
Tracking your goals
Keep track of your goals and use metrics to measure the success of your set goals. Track client behavior with your metrics and build a profile on each user so you can better serve their needs. Did they sign up for a newsletter or download a user guide? Consider all circumstances and customize your email drip campaigns to keep users actively engaged. Depending upon your campaign’s analytical capabilities, you can track and measure click-through rate, conversions rate, or time spent on your website by visitors, and so on.
Be patient. Monitor, Manage and Repeat
Even though email drip campaigns can take away some of the heavy liftings, they need to be periodically evaluated, adjusted, repeated. More and more people prefer email over a direct phone or in-person contact. Keep in mind that email drip campaigns are a must have in your marketing arsenal. But overdoing it or underdoing it will take away the perks of all your hard work that you put into creating them. Your email marketing drip campaign analytics will continue to provide much-needed insights throughout the cycle of the campaign and following up on the leads will augment the effectiveness of your drip campaigns. Finding the right balance for relevance, frequency and content will go a long way in creating successful email marketing drip campaigns for insurance agents.
Summary
Smart communication is not just about creating a focused marketing email drip campaign with multiple components, but also about automating it with smart logic to convert those one-time campaigns to drip campaigns with multiple scheduled follow-ups or logic driven follow-ups to get the most out of the drip campaign.
Overall essence of smart communication
We hope this blog gives insurance agents a deeper understanding of how to create, launch and manage email marketing drip campaigns to maximize your current book of business and nurture leads to client conversions. Feel free to reach out if you have any question on how InsuredMine can help you start out or enhance your current email marketing drip campaigns.
