Think email is dead? Think again.
A study completed by the Radicati Group in 2017 estimated there were 3.7 billion email accounts in existence worldwide, and we were sending an average of 269 billion emails per day. These trends are on the rise year over year.
If you’re marketing your wholesale insurance business, email is a great way to reach out to the agents and brokers you work with. But some methods work better than others. Here are 6 best practices for effective email marketing in 2018.
1. Personalize your campaigns. With marketing automation and segmentation tools, you have more power to personalize now than ever before. Studies show that personalizing your subject lines makes readers 26% more likely to open your email.
And you can go far beyond personalized subject lines now. For instance, you can send a drip campaign based on the reader’s insurance interests—as determined by the areas of your website they visit.
2. Give something of value. People are far more likely to open your emails if they think there’s something in it for them. Instead of keeping your messages purely promotional, consider how you can offer valuable information about the areas of insurance you and your audience specialize in.
Use your emails to send readers to your blog—where you’ve written detailed articles to illuminate some aspect of the business they need to know about. Develop an informative newsletter discussing developments in the industry. Offer tips and tricks for improving their submissions. You can never “give” too much.
3. Be clear about what you want. Every email should have a clear call to action. Do you want readers to go to your website? Get in touch by phone or email? Be sure to provide clear, specific and short directions in a way that draws the eye.
4. Avoid shady practices. Some of the major “don’ts” of email marketing include:
- Emailing people who haven’t given specific consent for you to do so.
- Forgetting to send a follow-up email after someone has opted in, asking them to opt in again (this prevents people from signing up accidentally).
- Making it less than crystal clear who you are in your emails—or how to contact you.
- Sending barrages of emails multiple times daily.
- Making it difficult to unsubscribe.
5. Automate everything. We’ve written before about marketing automation tools—and this is particularly crucial for email. If you try to manage all your email campaigns by hand, you’ll do nothing else.
At the very least, you can automate your welcome email, which thanks a new subscriber for signing up. If you want to get fancy, you can also automate follow-up emails after key conversations, and multiple-email drip campaigns based on the type of insurance the subscriber has shown an interest in.
6. Create your own email list. It can be very tempting to buy email lists. It takes a long time to build your own list of highly-interested insurance agents. But that list will be far more valuable than a random list of agents and brokers you purchased.
In 2018, email marketing is alive and well—and a very effective tool for wholesale insurance brokers. Follow these best practices, and you should be able to get the most out of each campaign.
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