How Insurance Agents Build Customer Relationships Through Email

Email marketing is a great tool to help insurance agents build customer relationships so that when the customer needs something, you are the first person they think of. However, the average person receives so much email marketing that your messages are easily lost in the pile. Worse yet, your potential clients are so sick of being marketed to, they immediately trash your messages without reading them. How can insurance agents build personal relationships through email, instead of blasting information to your contact list? By following a few simple guidelines, you can avoid the spam folder and develop relationships that have potential for generating business in the future.

Human Touch To Build Customer Relationships

The reason most email marketing messages are immediately trashed is that the information isn’t relevant or interesting to the recipient. This is a big reason as to why agents shouldn’t do their own newsletters, too. However, when making a newsletter, images are a great way to pique interest without guessing what is relevant to every individual on your list. Beginning your message with a compelling image, graph or chart, to draw interest and then concisely explaining the meaning of the image is a great way to capture attention and to demonstrate a more personal, creative side of your services. Pictures of family events or community gatherings or images that relate directly to business are all great ways to begin a message. This same approach can be applied to insurance agents who use social media for their business. This strategy is all about building and driving long-term customer value for policyholders.

Frequency

Spamming can be the quickest route to email marketing failure. By using a resource like Google Analytics, you can easily interpret data about traffic to your website to help determine whether your emails are coming too often or not often enough. You can also try monitoring subscribe and unsubscribe trends to refine the frequency with which you message to make sure you are not overwhelming your audience. You should be able to see these metrics in your marketing automation dashboard or reports section.

Business Material

Of course, you also want your audience to know about the latest and greatest insurance products that you can offer them, so you definitely want to include this information, but in a tactful way. By finding creative ways to explain your services, you can do a lot to build personal relationships so that clients will think of you when they are ready to do business. By using personal examples, anecdotal situations or again, images and graphics to illustrate a scenario, you are making the substance personally interesting instead of just presenting the facts.

Usable Information

This perhaps goes without saying but the most valuable way to keep your readers interested in your messages is to send them information that they can actually use. It is your responsibility to stay current on best practices, industry developments, events and policy changes that affect everyone. By emailing this ‘inside’ information to normal people in a way that makes sense to them, you demonstrate your professionalism, engagement in the insurance industry, and commitment to your customers’ needs. A lot of this comes back to understanding how to do content marketing for your business.

There is no silver bullet for email marketing and each situation is unique but, if you follow these guidelines, you can find the formula that’s perfect for you. Instead of just providing information, focus on creating personal relationships that draw people in, demonstrate your expertise and show that you can reliably bring your customers the information they value. And if you need help with this, OutboundEngine specializes in helping insurance agents build strong relationships with their policyholders.