Email Marketing: The Agency Newsletter and Beyond
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Email marketing is one of the best ways to market your insurance agency. But there's more to it than a monthly newsletter.
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Email Marketing: The Agency Newsletter and Beyond
- 1. Email Marketing The Agency Newsletter and Beyond Becky Schroeder | @beckylschroeder Vice President of Marketing
- 2. Who is Doing Email Marketing?
- 3. Who is Doing Email Marketing? Everyone
- 4. Who is Doing Email Marketing?
- 5. 77% of consumers prefer email for marketing communications. ~ ExactTarget
- 7. Email Marketing Can • Build credibility • Strengthen your relationships • Increase website traffic • Promote your agency • Generate leads
- 9. The #1 mistake you can make in marketing is to assume people are rational. ~ Seth Godin
- 11. Building Your Email List • DON’T use a purchased list
- 12. Building Your Email List • DO build your own list • Customers • Quote forms • Lead magnets • Events
- 13. Email has an ability many channels don’t: creating valuable, personal touches – at scale. ~ David Newman
- 14. Email Opportunities • Two main audiences • Customers • Prospects
- 15. Email Opportunities: Customers • Welcome email • Renewal reminders • Cross selling • Lost clients
- 16. Email Opportunities: Prospects • Prospecting • Follow up drips • Lost prospects
- 17. Segmented email campaigns have been shown to get 14% more opens and 100% more clicks than non-segmented campaigns. ~ MailChimp, 2017
- 18. Segmentation
- 19. Segmentation • Demographics • Geography • Lines of business • Referral source • Email engagement
- 20. “If you think good design is expensive, you should look at the cost of bad design.” ~ Ralf Speth
- 21. Design Tips • Text-to-image ratio 80% text 20% image
- 22. Design Tips • Don’t capture important text in an image
- 23. Design Tips • Strong calls to action (CTAs) • Be specific • Only one per email • Use color • Use a button • 150x150 pixels
- 24. Design Tips • What amount of email is opened on a mobile device? a) 25% b) 35% c) 45% d) 55%
- 25. Design Tips • Mobile friendly • Single-column template • 600 pixels wide or less • Headline font: 30 px • Body font: 16 px • Small image files
- 26. Design Tips • Dedicated landing page for EACH email
- 27. How to write a good email: 1) Write your email. 2) Delete most of it. 3) Send. ~ Dan Munz
- 28. Content Tips • Single topic • Simple • Short • Scannable • Relevant • WIIFM • Value
- 29. Content Tips • Subject lines • Simple • Short • No ALL CAPS • Tell them what’s inside • Start with action verb • Ask a question • Have fun • DON’T use noreply@myagency.com
- 30. Don’t Guess. Test. • What color should your CTA button be? • What’s the best subject line for your email? • What CTA gets more clicks? • Which design gets more engagement? • Split test it!
- 31. That which is measured improves. ~ Karl Pearson
- 32. How Did Your Email Do? • Open rate: # opens / (# sent - # bounced) • Click-through rate (CTR): # clicks/(# sent - # bounced) • Click-through-to-open rate (CTOR): # unique clicks / # unique opens • Unsubscribe rate: # unsubscribes/(# sent - # bounced) • Bounce rate: # bounced/# sent • Conversion rate: # leads/# unique clicks on CTA
- 33. Email Marketing Resources • Blog • Resources.GetITC.com/Marketing • Videos • Resources.GetITC.com/Operation-Agency-Success • Whitepapers • Resources.GetITC.com/Whitepapers • Webinar • Resources.GetITC.com/Masters-of-Marketing
- 34. Questions? Want the slides? They’re available at Slideshare.net/InsTechCorp. Becky Schroeder | @beckylschroeder Vice President of Marketing
Editor's Notes
- Every industry is using email marketing. Food and beverage. Travel and hospitality. Technology. Retail. Nonprofits. Healthcare. Entertainment. Even insurance.
- Agents like you are using email marketing. They’re using it to communicate with clients via newsletters and renewal reminders. They using it to prospect and cross sell and ask for referrals. Why are they using email marketing?
- Numerous studies have shown around 90% of all U.S. consumers use email every day. It’s easy to measure so you can tell what is working and what could be improved. Email marketing is 3x better at generating leads than social media. Why? Because a well-timed email to the right person is far more effective than a post on social media that may or may not be seen depending on Facebook’s algorithm. Don’t get me wrong. Social media has its place in the marketing mix. But when it comes to generating leads, email is bar far superior.
- Don’t make your emails about you. Think about your audience. Who you’re trying to reach. Who are they? What are their problems? How can you help them? With every email you create, try to answer this question from your audience’s perspective: What’s in it for me? Why should your audience care about your email?
- We are not rational. We choose products and services based on emotion. Everything. From the cars we buy, the clothes we wear to the soda we get from the machine, the impulse gum purchase in a gas station. We make a choice by how we feel, by what we want other people to think about us. We make these decisions on our emotions. Sure we tell ourselves it’s the logical choice. But the logic is only the justification for what is an emotional decision.
- In his 2009 TED talk and in his book “Start with Why”, Simon Sinek said “People don’t buy what you do; they buy why you do it.” If you communicate your why in your email marketing, your messages will resonate with your audience. You’ll start to see results and momentum that will build.
- Using a purchased list in email marketing is never a good idea. They’ve never heard from you before so they’re more like to ignore you email or worse, mark you as spam, which hurts your delivery. There are also spamtraps, which are created to see if you are marketing to people who opted in to your email campaigns. It’s difficult to sell to people who have never heard of you or shown recent interest in insurance. Why spend your budget and effort on a list that has no interest in hearing from you? Plus, many email systems won’t let you import a purchase list into their system. So how do you build a list?
- Start asking every customer you talk to for their email address. Use the email field to look up customers in your agency management system so that you start to get an email address for every customer and you make sure it’s up to date. If you don’t have quote forms on your website, add them. And make sure they ask for an email address. This is far more important than a phone number as many consumers are going to prefer communicating with you over email rather than the phone. Especially those that are researching insurance online. Use lead magnets on your website. Also sometimes called a content upgrade. This is content you offer consumers for free in exchange for their email address. This could be a checklist, free report, ebook, etc. You can create this content yourself. Or, see what your vendors or partners might have that you can use. There are also writing services that can be less than you might think if you want to outsource it. When you’re attending an event and you have a table or a booth, ask people you talk to to join your email list to get more information. Or, have a giveaway item that people can enter to win.
- Welcome emails have some of the best engagement. A welcome email to new customers thanking them for their business sets the right tone and starts your email relationship with them off right. They’ll be more likely to open future emails from you. How do you currently handle renewals? Raise of hands if you call customers about their upcoming renewal? Anyone send a letter or renewal card? Who crosses their fingers that everyone renews? Email can make this easier. And even better, you can automate it with the right system. For example, users of our system AgencyBuzz have improved their retention by as much as 7% through email marketing. If you sell more than one line of business, use email to help round out accounts and cross sell your other lines. If your email system integrates with your management system, this can be easy. You can set filters or pull a list of, let’s say, auto insurance customers who don’t have home insurance with you and send them targeted emails. Losing a client doesn’t have to be forever. Use email marketing to send occasional, targeted messages to try and win back your lost clients.
- Remember those lead magnets and live events you used to build your email list? This is where you get your prospecting list. Pick one (ONE) line of business for your prospecting email. More than one will cause confusion and lead to fewer conversions. To really generate leads with email marketing, do one product at a time. When you get a lead – whether from a website quote form, call in, or from your prospecting emails – you can set up drip emails to follow up and nurture your new prospect automatically. Let’s use auto insurance for an example. You provide a quote to a prospect over the phone. He decides not to buy right then. “I need to talk to my wife.” A nurture email campaign can follow up with him over the next three or four days for you. These nurture emails can be customized according to the line of business. For example, the number of emails needed and the timing of each for an auto insurance prospect is completely different than a commercial or life insurance prospect. And just like with lost clients, you don’t have to stop marketing to prospects that didn’t buy. With our auto insurance example, you can have an email as part of that campaign set up to go out five months later because you know his policy is going to be up for renewal at that time.
- Why do segmented campaigns perform better?
- Because a small list that wants exactly what you’re offering is better than a bigger list that isn’t committed. This is also why purchased lists don’t do as well.
- For example, by age. Considering most people 18-30ish aren’t buying homes right now, it wouldn’t do you much good to send anyone in that age range an email about home insurance. You’d be better off doing one on renter’s. If you were participating in an event near one location, you wouldn’t want to email your whole database but segment based on their zip code so that only those who live near the event would get the email. We have clients who have special newsletters for certain lines of business. Segmenting by line of business is also great for cross selling. If you’re trying to sell home insurance to your auto insurance customers, you don’t want current home insurance customers to get it. You could send a special thank you to prospects from certain referral sources like a partner referral or live event. You can segment based on whether a certain email was opened (or not) or whether a certain link was clicked (or not). Agency appreciation
- Why you want to maintain a proper text-to-image ratio: Image heavy emails without much text raise a red flag for spam filters. Your recipients may have images turned off. Images may take a long time to load, causing your recipients to move on. Notice the few images in this email.
- If you put the most important information in an image, and your recipients have images turned off, there’s a good chance they’ll miss it. You can use alt tags that will show text when images are turned off, but that’s not a guarantee. Keep the important information in the body of the email. Notice in this email their most important information is in the body.
- The most successful call-to-action in the world is the letter X. It’s the one most people click on. Yours needs to be better. Get a Quote or Request a Policy Review are better than Submit. Don’t confuse your recipients with multiple calls to action. One per email. Use color to make your call to action stand out in your email. There’s not one color that is universally better. Try different colors and see what performs better for you. Don’t just link text. The other way to get your call to action to stand out is to use a button. Campaign Monitor found a button instead of a text link can improve conversion by 28%. We’re trained to look for the button to click. One other thing about calls to action. The font should be at least 16 point. And the size of the button should be 150x150 pixels. This makes it easy to click with a finger when viewed on mobile. Which brings me to my next slide.
- Answer: It’s 55%. Making your email mobile friendly is important. Some email service providers have the ability to make mobile friendly emails. Here are some tips on how to make an email mobile friendly if your email platform doesn’t have mobile friendly emails.
- Multiple columns is confusing and hard to navigate on a phone. With your width at 600 pixels or less, it won’t matter, if someone is looking at it on a computer or phone. Make your headline font 30 pixels and body font at 16 pixels. Small image files take less time to load. Test, test, test.
- A dedicated landing page for your marketing email makes it really easy to track exactly how many leads your email generates. This is what we do with our marketing emails. Each prospecting email has its own landing page. And those landing pages are not accessible from our main website. This way, we know exactly how many leads each email generated. The landing pages don’t have to be anything special. But if you can make them mirror your email design, do so. Readers will know they’re exactly where they should be after they click. Repeat some of the same points from the email on the landing page. Then tell them what you’re offering (like a free quote or policy review) if they complete the form.
- Regardless of the type of email, there are some tips to writing good email content that apply to most, if not all, of your email marketing. Focus on a single topic. Newsletters it’s okay to have more than one topic in the email. But for your prospecting emails, cross selling, policy renewals, etc, focus on one topic, one call to action per email. Keep the email simple and short. I don’t have a recommendation for a word limit for emails. But like Dan Munz say, delete most of what you want and boil it down to the most important points. Use simple words. Avoid insurance jargon and long words. Oscar Wilde said, “Don’t use big words. They mean so little.” You want your message to be as clear as possible. Because if people have to guess at what you’re saying and what you want them to do, they won’t do it. Format your emails so they’re easy to scan. We like to think people are going to read what we write word for word, but the truth is, the majority of us scan most things. Use short sentences and paragraphs. Use bullets and subheads. Write content that is relevant and valuable to your audience. Remember, it’s not about you. It’s all about your audience. Write your content so it answers the audience’s question, “What’s in it for me?” This may take some practice. But think about it this way, it’s never going to work if you don’t try. So start, practice and you’ll get better.
- Not sure whether to make your call to action button blue or red? Came up with two subject lines or calls to action and can’t decide between them? Got two email designs and not sure which would perform better? Don’t guess. Test. I can’t tell you the best color or subject line or call to action to use. My audience is different than yours. Your audience is different from another agency. What works for one agency might not work for you. But the beauty of email marketing is you CAN find out what works for you. This is where split testing also known as A/B testing comes in. You create two versions of your email where one (ONE) element is different. Your email sends one email to half your list and the other email to the other half. Then you can see which one performed better. For example, if you’re testing two subject lines, you’ll want to see which one had more opens. If you’re testing something to do with your call to action, you’re looking at clicks. The key is to look for significant difference. If you’re open rate for one email is 10% and the other email is 11%, that’s not a significant difference to tell you which subject line was better. You could use either or change one to a new subject line and continue testing.
- The success of your email marketing depends on monitoring how your emails perform and adjusting accordingly. These are the main email marketing metrics. Open rate, click-through rate and unsubscribe don’t tell you much about your email’s engagement. But they are still good to measure and watch because you can’t get conversions without opens and clicks. But there are two to really watch and judge how successful your emails are. Click-through-to-open rate tells you how engaging your email is. If my open rate is 20-25%, I like for my CTOR to be about 10-15%. If it’s less than that, I’m revising my content to see if I can improve it. The most important metric? Conversion rate. How is your email doing at actually generating leads? This is when it’s really helpful to have a dedicated landing page for your emails. This year, our average conversion rate is more than 10%, which is higher than the last two years. If my conversion rate is lower on certain email, I’m looking at the CTA in the email as well as the landing page and try different changes to see if I can improve it.