Insurance Agency Drip Marketing to Gain a Competitive Advantage
Are you staying in front of your prospects and groups? In any industry, it’s important to gain a competitive advantage, including yours. Health insurance agency drip marketing is a scalable way to communicate to your different audiences. Without sacrificing success, it will help you cut down the hours you spend talking to prospective groups, increasing benefits awareness, and closing deals.
Insurance Agency Drip Marketing
Drip marketing is the communication of information to nurtured leads or prospects through a steady stream of marketing messages sent over a predetermined time period. They help tailor messages to specific audiences who have shown through some behavior or characteristic that they’re interested in a particular topic.
Drip emails, the most popular form of drip marketing, is a series of content tied together by one theme, but are spaced out with the intention of not bombarding your audience with too much information. An example in insurance agency drip marketing would be if a new employer visited your website and responded to your call to action, you could send 3 emails over 3 weeks informing them about how you’re the answer to their benefits needs. At the end, you’ll have strategically told them all of the information they need to decide whether they want you as their broker.
And while it may be easier to send one email to all of your contacts with all of the information they need to know, it’s not ideal for you or your groups. In fact, 73% of consumers prefer to learn about a product through a series of different content pieces1. Even better for you, insurance agency drip marketing cuts the time it takes to close a deal by 23%, leaving you with more time to focus on that next prospect2.
Many different messaging tools can be used for drip marketing, including landing pages, newsletters, printed publications, and email. Some of the best insurance agency drip marketing campaigns we’ve seen are primarily email, and can be modeled for your groups.
Let’s talk through how to get started:
Find an Insurance Agency Drip Marketing Tool That Works For You
If your campaign includes a large list of people and you’re writing HTML emails, email marketing software like MailChimp is a great free or low-cost solution. Want to have a prospect or client feel like you’re personally reaching out to them? Plain text mail merge with Yesware gives the illusion of a personal email using merge tags (like the custom docs feature in Ease) but allows you to simultaneously contact up to 200 people. Both of these tools also provide data so you can measure the effectiveness of your campaign when it’s time.
Identify Your Audience
Drip campaigns are about segmenting your audience into specific groups. Determine who you want to talk to, whether it’s new groups, longtime groups, or prospects. Is the answer to any of these questions “yes”?
- Do you want to nurture leads and provide a solution to their problem?
- Do you want to welcome all of your groups that joined in the last three months and take them through everything you can offer them?
Answering questions like these will help you determine what parameters a customer has to meet to enter your insurance agency drip marketing campaign and what type of content you need to create.
This email from handy is a great example for communicating with prospects who may have visited their website. The calls to action are obvious, and they’re telling us what they can do for us.
Plan Your Insurance Agency Drip Marketing Campaign
Decide what the campaign workflow will look like, and what you’ll do with the results once you get them. For email campaigns, think about the following:
How many emails should I send and when? In the case of onboarding a new customer, you could think about how soon after they sign a contract would you want them to enter the campaign. Then, if you decide on five emails, decide on a schedule. We recommend one email per week.
What’s the call to action? We’ve talked about how important calls to action are in marketing. We suggest deciding on one call to action per drip campaign. It could be asking them to call you for more information or joining a webinar where you talk about the benefits you offer your groups.
Determine the sequence. When planning your insurance agency drip marketing campaign, the sequence the emails are sent is important, the content should flow from one email to the next. The content should also be logical. If you use an online system, don’t assume new groups know how to log in. Maybe you explain how to set up their online account in email one, and then the features they can use once they are logged in in email two.
Craft Your Message
Generate messaging that addresses what you want the reader to do or learn. It should relevant and useful, and entice the reader enough to open the next email. If you are talking to a group that’s onboarding, tell them about how they can get the best out of working with you. It could be utilizing your online enrollment services, or voluntary coverage. When building your insurance agency drip marketing, tease them about other benefits of working with you so they’re eager to open the next email from you.
This email from box covers one benefit of working with them–sharing content. The email isn’t too long, and the calls to action are clear.
Start Your Campaign
Your messaging is crafted, so all you have to do is send. If you’re just targeting a few groups, you can do it manually. If you’re talking to 100 groups about what to expect during open enrollment you will want to use your email marketing software, and its automation feature if it has one. With automation, you can identify the audience, decide what messages they get in what order, and when, weeks in advance. Just activate the campaign and you’re all set. Most marketing software like Hubspot or Mailchimp have tutorials on setting up campaigns like this.
Measure Your Campaign
Take a look at the open rates of each email, the number of clicked calls to action, and if any specific email did better or worse than the others. These statistics will help improve your insurance agency drip marketing strategy.
If you’re an Ease customer you can access pre-built drip email campaigns for free. Contact [email protected] to learn more.
1https://unbounce.com/content-marketing/content-marketing-stats/
2http://www.marketing-schools.org/types-of-marketing/drip-marketing.html
