With the amount of time it takes to build and maintain relationships with warm prospects and customers, it’s no wonder most insurance agents have little time for cold prospects.
Fortunately, with the simplicity and automation of email marketing, it doesn’t have to be that way anymore. Now you can more effectively nurture and close cold leads without sacrificing valuable time needed to run the rest of your insurance practice.
The first step is to determine exactly how your follow-up funnel is currently performing. From this diagnosis, you will easily see what you can do to improve your efficiency.
How is your follow-up funnel performing?
What happens to leads that go cold? Do you drop them in the same pile as your other cold prospects, periodically sending them weak and ineffective communications?
Using email segmentation to better nurture cold leads
It is said that it takes 10 to 12 contacts before someone associates your name with what you provide. However, sending mass emails to your entire cold list of prospects is likely to cause prospects to start associating your name with spam.
Send enough of these email blasts and you’ll end up with a high rate of unsubscribes and complaints. On top of that, you probably have very few cold prospects who take an interest and ask about your services.
Instead, you’ll drive much better conversions and engagement by segmenting your list of “cold” prospects and personalizing messages based on the specific services they inquired about.
How to start segmenting your email
While I can’t talk much about other types of insurance, let me use a figurative health insurance agent named “Bill” as an example.
Bill offers a variety of health related services to his clients. Instead of going through the typical follow-up funnel that most insurance agents use, Bill is smart.
He realizes that most people don’t know him or what he does. They are much more likely to sign with an agent who has some affiliation (relative, acquaintance, etc.) to him.
Instead of fighting this, Bill is going to use email marketing to manually create this “affiliation” with his cold prospects.
Yes, it will take time and a sophisticated email service to set it up. Bill, however, understands that the value of his cold leads multiplies when he increases his conversion rate, thereby increasing the number of “hot” leads he has to work with.
Additionally, Bill finds that once his automated email follow-up campaigns are set up, little to no work is needed to maintain this process.
For Bill, an agent working in the health insurance space, his service-based segmentation will include:
-
Potential Medicare Clients
-
Individual and Family Plan Brochures
-
Auxiliary products
-
short term services
From this segmentation, you now plan to create separate email follow-up campaigns for each of these types of cold prospects.
While this requires some initial setup, such email segmentation will likely:
-
Make emails more welcome by allowing more frequent sends
-
Allow prospects to engage more with content, deepening the agent-prospect relationship
-
Reduce unsubscribes and spam complaints
-
Increase conversion rates
Follow the 80/20 rule for email interaction
Instead of bombarding prospects with sales message after sales message, your goal will be to deliver 80% valuable content and 20% sales emails.
20% Sales Emails:
Sales emails will include incentives and special information about low insurance rates, packages and other messages aimed at signing a policy. All of these messages will relate to the services your cold prospects inquired about.
Subtle sales messages can include:
-
The cost of insurance and how to have an agent does not cost more
-
Licenses and certifications and how you can be trusted
-
The cost of not going through an agent and the added hassle
There are many subtle ways to sell your services without directly asking them to take action. By simply analyzing the flow of sales from new prospect to customer, you will find numerous selling points and benefits that can be designed into these 20% sales emails.
80% of engagement-oriented emails
This is where Bill can design a powerful follow-up campaign that provides value and establishes his agency as credible.
The content of the commitment may include:
-
Education on specific insurance policies the prospect has inquired about
-
Insurance Claim Horror Stories and How You Handled Them Easily
-
General hints and tips
Each of these vignettes above would cater to each segment that Bill communicates with. For the last bullet point, for example, Medicare insurance prospects would receive advice on aging and Individual and Family Plan insurance prospects would receive advice on family and children’s health.
While engagement-oriented emails aren’t common practice among insurance professionals, Bill realizes that sending only sales-oriented emails will alienate his already cold list.
Engaging content and tips are a helpful and essential way to warm up your list from cold to hot.
A cold health insurance prospect who isn’t interested in information about the latest health plans available can get involved through an article on how to get the most out of your health insurance plan. Because the potential customer has consumed an item from the agent, a behavioral seed is planted, making them much more likely to repeat the action.
Planting seeds of familiarity
Sending targeted and personalized content via email is just the beginning. However, good content alone won’t increase sales on its own.
Bill, of course, realizes this and knows that he is not only competing for the interest of the prospects, but also for their trust.
Most people, as mentioned above, will choose an insurance agent they know over a stranger. To create an effective email nurturing campaign that competes with an in-person network, careful planning is needed.
For starters, Bill strives to brand his emails with a unique design and color scheme that prospects can’t forget.
Plus, you make sure to always include your contact details in each and every email communication with a quick two-sentence ad text that reminds potential customers of the services you offer.
This text ad is not the typical call to action that most insurance agents use in their signature. Instead, it adheres to two proven direct response principles:
1. It is directed
While an all-encompassing tagline ensures that prospects know you offer a variety of services, it drastically weakens your message.
Lines like, “Bill Insurance Agency can quote your business, auto, home, life, and health insurance today” do little for prospects who are only interested in one service.
Based on the segment Bill is emailing, he adjusts his ad text to highlight the specific key benefits most likely to drive action. From the example above, that means Bill would have four separate email templates with four separate ad text calls-to-action.
2. You have a unique selling proposition
Bill realizes that insurance agents are very expensive. To compete effectively, you make sure that each and every email has your unique selling proposition embedded. Your USP is not only conveyed in your sign and signature, but also throughout the message.
Each email follow-up, in essence, becomes a brand vehicle for your USP.
This ensures that anyone who reads your email will easily set you apart from the rest, not only by what you say, but also by the value your emails provide.