Executive Summary (TL;DR)
- The Reality: Carriers and MGAs need to communicate with their broker partners regularly. Product updates, appetite changes, underwriting bulletins, events, education and marketing communications are simply part of doing business.
- The Opportunity: If you are already sending a significant volume of email, make those communications count. Better data, segmentation, personalization and automation can help ensure brokers receive information that is actually relevant to them.
- The Evolution: Platforms such as Mailchimp and Constant Contact can be excellent tools, particularly for straightforward email programs. But as broker distribution becomes more sophisticated, especially when using free or starter versions, organizations may begin to need deeper automation, CRM integration, subscription management and personalization.
- The Result: A more connected broker communication strategy that supports Business Development Managers, improves readership and engagement, and gives marketing and distribution teams better visibility into what brokers actually care about.
Most Canadian MGAs and carriers send a lot of email. And they have to. Broker bulletins, appetite updates, product announcements, underwriting changes, educational content, events, newsletters and business development communications are all part of maintaining an active broker distribution network. The question isn’t whether you should be emailing brokers.
The better question is:
If you are going to send the email anyway, how do you make it more useful to the broker receiving it? For many organizations, platforms such as Mailchimp or Constant Contact are a perfectly reasonable place to start. They are familiar, accessible and can handle many standard email marketing requirements very well. The challenge comes as an MGA or carrier grows. More products. More provinces. More BDM territories. More broker relationships. More data sources. More appetite changes. More communications. At that point, particularly when organizations are working within entry-level or starter functionality, limitations around segmentation, personalization, automation and data integration can become more noticeable.
That is often when the conversation shifts from simply sending email to building a more sophisticated broker engagement strategy.
Insurance SME Take:
Carriers and MGAs are always going to have something they need to communicate to brokers. The opportunity is to stop treating every broker like the same broker. Better data and automation can help marketing teams make communications more relevant while giving BDMs another way to stay connected to the brokers they are responsible for.
Here are five areas growing MGAs and carriers should consider as they evolve their broker communication strategy.
1. Stop Batch-and-Blasting Every Broker
One of the biggest opportunities in broker marketing is simply becoming more relevant.
Consider the amount of information the average broker receives from carriers, MGAs, associations, wholesalers, technology providers and other industry partners every week. Now imagine if you’re a commercial producer focused on new business in mid-market, but you are constantly getting email for personal lines or mandatory bulletins. The emails themselves may be perfectly good, but oftentimes they’re limited to information that is not exactly valuable to the receiver.
Over time, irrelevant communication trains brokers to stop paying attention and worse yet, emails will auto-move to spam.
Instead of asking:
“How many brokers can we send this to?”
A better question is:
“Which brokers actually need to receive this?”
A more mature communication strategy might segment broker audiences using information such as:
- Title and Role
- Province or territory(s)
- Line of Business focus
- Product or industry specialization
- Brokerage affiliation
- Historical submissions
- Current book of business
- BDM territory
- Previous content engagement
- Event participation
- Expressed product interests
The goal isn’t necessarily to send fewer emails.
It is to send better emails to the right brokers at the right times.
2. Understand the Full Breadth of Your Broker Data
Personalization is only as good as the data behind it, but in insurance, understanding your broker data is rarely as simple as identifying one system of record.
Carriers and MGAs often have broker information spread across CRM platforms, broker management or policy administration systems, SharePoint, spreadsheets, event databases, marketing platforms and individual BDM contact lists.
The challenge is that these systems were often built for very different purposes.
A transactional system may tell you who keyed in a piece of business, but that person may not be the producer, decision-maker or broker you should be communicating with about a new product or appetite.
A CRM may contain relationship information, while your marketing platform may hold engagement history and communication preferences. Event data may reveal another group of active contacts that may or may not appear in your policy system at all.
That is why carriers and MGAs need to think beyond simply identifying a single “source of truth.”
Instead, ask:
- What is our total addressable broker marketing database?
- Which contacts are active producers versus administrative or transactional users?
- Who influences placement decisions within each brokerage?
- Does our system tell us who is new to a brokerage?
- Which system should be authoritative for contact information, relationships, transactions and marketing preferences?
- How do we reconcile duplicate or conflicting records across systems?
- What additional data would help us understand a broker’s interests, role vs title, geography, book of business or potential opportunity?
This may involve consolidating duplicate records, mapping broker and brokerage relationships, identifying assigned BDMs, connecting transactional activity where appropriate, capturing line-of-business interests and continuously enriching contact information.
The goal is not simply to create a cleaner database.
It is to build a more complete understanding of who your broker audience is, how they interact with your organization and what information is most relevant to them.
That foundation gives marketing teams stronger segmentation and gives Business Development teams visibility into what your brokers are engaging with digitally, when it comes to your products, services and tools.
3. Treat Email as a Business Development Tool
Broker marketing should not operate separately from business development.
The best marketing automation strategies can help BDMs stay visible and relevant.
For example, instead of sending one corporate email announcing a new commercial property appetite to every broker, marketing could identify brokers who:
- Operate within the applicable regions
- Regularly write commercial business
- Have previously submitted similar risks
- Have shown interest in related content
- Are assigned to a particular regional BDM
The communication can then come from the assigned BDM, use personalized / dynamic content and provide a natural opportunity for the broker to respond directly. That is very different from pretending an automated email isn’t automated. The goal is to use marketing technology to support genuine BDM relationships, not replace them.
Marketing can create relevance, timing and infrastructure.
BDMs can continue doing what they do best: building relationships, discussing risks and helping brokers place business.
4. Build a Smarter Approach to Broker Bulletins, CASL and Subscription Management
CASL can be particularly nuanced for carriers and MGAs.
Some communications may be operational or necessary to an existing business relationship. Others are clearly promotional or marketing-oriented.
And simply needing to communicate with a broker does not automatically mean every email should be treated the same way.
Instead of allowing compliance concerns to result in one giant catch-all email database, carriers and MGAs should build a thoughtful communication framework with their legal and compliance teams.
That may include:
- Separating essential operational “transactional” communications from marketing communications where appropriate
- Evaluating transactional sending methods for required broker bulletins
- Creating clear subscription categories helps prevent brokers from mass-opting out of all communications
- Allowing brokers to choose the types of marketing content they want to receive
- Maintaining accurate consent and preference records, regardless of existing contracts
- Synchronizing unsubscribe and subscription preferences across systems
- Segmenting communications based on broker role, geography and product relevance, brand, etc.
The bigger opportunity, however, goes beyond compliance.
Readership matters.
You can successfully deliver an email to 10,000 brokers and still fail to communicate effectively.
Carriers and MGAs should be asking:
- Are brokers actually reading what we send?
- Are we sending them information they can use?
- Can they quickly understand our appetite?
- Can they easily find what they need when they are working on an account?
- What are 3 areas of data enrichment that would make this email campaign more relevant?
Compliance is essential, but relevance is what earns attention.
5. Move Beyond One-Off Emails Into Connected Broker Journeys
A broker may not have a submission today. That doesn’t mean they won’t have one three weeks from now. This is where marketing automation can become particularly valuable.
Instead of relying exclusively on one-time emails, organizations can create simple broker journeys around stage, products, education and appetite.
Simple example :
- A broker downloads a Commercial Cyber Guide
- The system records this action
- Several days later, they receive a useful follow-up related to that appetite from their BDM
- Their assigned BDM can be notified of the engagement
- If the broker submits a risk or speaks with the BDM, the automated sequence can stop
- Future communications can reflect what the organization now knows about that broker, coupled with their digital journey. (content consumption, website / portal visits, business written, etc.)
The objective isn’t to automate every broker interaction. It is to use automation where it makes sense so marketing and business development teams can focus their attention where human involvement adds the most value.
From Email Marketing to Broker Engagement: The biggest shift for growing carriers and MGAs isn’t necessarily moving from one email platform to another. It is moving from an email distribution mindset to a broker engagement mindset. Mailchimp, Constant Contact and other entry-level platforms can absolutely have a place within an insurance marketing technology stack, we work within them daily. But as your distribution strategy becomes more sophisticated, you may need capabilities that go further:
- Deeper CRM and policy-system integrations
- Advanced broker segmentation
- Dynamic lists, to support dynamic content
- Automated broker journeys, think New Broker Welcome streams!
- BDM-driven communications
- Centralized subscription management
- Better data enrichment
- Engagement and profile scoring
- Pipeline and submission attribution
Platforms such as HubSpot, Salesforce and Act-On can provide more sophisticated capabilities when those requirements emerge. The technology, however, is only one part of the equation. The real advantage comes from combining better broker data, thoughtful segmentation, insurance knowledge, marketing strategy and strong business development alignment. Because if your MGA or carrier is already sending hundreds or thousands of broker emails every month, the goal shouldn’t simply be to get them out the door.
Make them count.
Make them relevant.
Make them useful.
And make it easier for brokers to understand where you can help them place and retain business.
Ready to Take a Closer Look at Your Broker Communications?
If your organization is beginning to outgrow its current email setup, that doesn’t automatically mean you need to replace your platform.
Start by looking at the bigger picture: your broker data, segmentation, subscription strategy, CRM and policy-system integrations, BDM workflows, automation opportunities and reporting.
Sometimes the answer is better use of the technology you already have. Sometimes it is integrating additional tools. And sometimes it is time to move to a more sophisticated marketing automation platform.
Goose Digital works with carriers, MGAs and brokerages to help assess and modernize these environments, with a particular focus on connecting marketing technology to the way insurance distribution actually works.
Explore Goose Digital’s Insurance Marketing Solutions or Marketing Automation & CRM Services to learn more.
Sources
Sources are not provided for this content, as it is based on widely accepted information.
Content Integrity
This article was generated with the assistance of AI and edited by a human team member.
