Take a look at your inbox. How many unopened or unread emails do you have? How many times have you opened an email but decided to come back to it later… but didn’t? According to the Harvard Business Review on average, professionals have more than 200 emails in their inbox and receive 120 new ones each day –  but respond to only 25% of them. Sending a single email and counting wholly on that one chance to engage will most likely not drive the growth most Insurance providers are looking for. Successfully engaging new prospects and cross selling to existing customers requires a multi message approach, with personalized and relevant content.

Nurture The Relationship

While a single message has one chance of engaging your audience, multiple messages sent at a cadence along the customer journey can increase both the likeliness of messages being opened and acted upon. Drip campaigns deployed through a marketing automation platform allow you to schedule a series of emails, sharing different content aligned to your strategy. For example, a nurture drip to new prospects enables you to share content about your business, the risks you cover and the value you can provide. Spacing this out over the course of several messages makes it easier for a prospect to consume the content and for you as the Insurance provider to build a relationship.

Make Sure Your Email is Delivered

Just because you hit the send button, doesn’t mean that your email will land in your target customers’ inbox. There are many steps required to make sure your email is delivered, ranging from having the correct email address to adhering to guidelines for content and images (see our blog on this for further details). A bounced email, an opt out or a message caught in a SPAM trap means your one shot of reaching your customer has failed. Without a marketing platform that monitors and reports on deliverability, you wouldn’t know that your single email didn’t land in the intended inbox. Bounced emails can be shared with CSRs to update with correct information and opt outs can be reduced by implementing a preference center to provide options that reduces the chances of the recipient opt-outing out of all communications from you.

Test Different Coverage Benefits

Customers often have different priorities when looking for coverage. But how do you know what will resonate most with your audience? Subject line testing allows you to gauge this. Create two different subject lines, focused on different benefits for a coverage and see which one drives the highest open rate. Best of breed marketing automation platforms will manage the testing, by monitoring the winner and using it in the message to the remainder of your targeted audience.  The alternate subject line can also be used to resend your email to anyone who didn’t open the first one.

Leverage Different Channels

While email is arguably the most popular digital communication channel, social platforms provide another way to attract attention and engage. A recent GlobalWebIndex survey showed that 43% of respondents said they research products online via social and 27% said they discover brands and products using social platforms. Formats including white papers, blogs and increasingly video, enable Insurance providers to detail the benefits of coverages in various ways, appealing to different audience types.

“More thought needs to be put into the overall goal. By building journeys and leveraging clean data sources – you will achieve the desired action. Too often I see insurance providers lack this connection and therefore their programs do not perform well or they simply become a “box that gets ticked off as done”. This results in an inability to connect value and ultimately becomes a missed opportunity to impact the business.
If we expect our email communications to represent with the same superiority as our in-person communications for example, this would help set the tone of why a single reachout isn’t going to be enough to drive an action and successful outcome.”
– Jennifer Pugsley, VP, Customer Success at Goose Digital

Keep Track of Those Not Ready to Buy

Some prospects or customers might just not be ready to buy – now. Ask if they want to be contacted at a later date, closer to a current policy expiry date, the purchase of a new home or an event, through the use of landing pages. Use that data to schedule reminder campaigns, personalized with information that has already been captured.

Don’t Put All Your Eggs in One Basket

A single reach out to a client or prospect, regardless of channel, will limit your chances of successfully engaging with them. Reminder or nurture messaging, set at a strategic cadence, with best practices including personalization and subject line testing will increase those chances. And using a marketing automation platform to manage and measure each one of these steps allows you to maximize the success of your reach without adding significant resources.

We would love to help show you how. Contact us for more information.