Growing your insurance company means finding qualified leads and nurturing and servicing current ones, but running your agency means wearing a lot of hats, and your time is valuable. Once you’ve run out of friends, family, and acquaintances, where will your new clients come from? And how do you get them without spending all of your time writing emails and social media posts, not to mention cold calling?
It all starts with a plan of what you want to do, how you’ll do it and when you’ll do it. Will you use direct mail? Telemarketing? Social media? Reserve one day a week for cold calling? Decide. Then decide how much. If you know what and how much, you can decide when.
Naturally, you’re asking: How much activity will it take to get x results? But, really, the question is what do you need to do and what do you need to plan for?
Let’s assume that:
From these assumptions “how much” becomes clear:
Don’t get hung up on whether you think direct mail or email (or both) is the best way to advertise, or whether you think the closing ratio is good or bad. That’s not the point. If you know some basic numbers, you can easily figure out how much activity you need to reach your goal.
Every marketing and sales team has a different idea about the best way to sell insurance. You have different goals, talents, resources and abilities. But we can all achieve our goals with the appropriate amount of activity.
Figure out how much.
Use today’s marketing automation software to your benefit. Don’t be intimidated – it’s become increasingly user-friendly and eases the burden of everyday marketing tasks.
Customer Relationship Management (CRM) systems can be used to manage all of your agency’s relationships and interactions, whether they’re existing or potential clients. Companies use a CRM system to help them and their sales team stay connected, streamline processes, and improve profitability.
With a marketing automation platform, you can write email campaigns far in advance and schedule sending them when you want to. For example one of OAA’s rapidly growing agency owners is using a CRM system to contact prospects each month. He has five years of emails set to run to these prospects! If one of the prospects becomes a customer, he kills the email series to them and sends them a five year set of customer nurturing emails. If he loses the customer, he kills the nurture email series and starts the “we want you back” series.
While writing a long series of emails can be tedious, this particular agency owner is growing 25% per year – on autopilot.
This is just one way to market to prospects and customers but it makes the point. You can just as easily have the CRM program send direct mail, or send a contact list to a telemarketer every week for calling. Or, you could have it automatically schedule pre-recorded voice messages. This is a very powerful technique. The CRM could also text your customers. CRM programs can do these tasks automatically. And it’s a great way to market informative, educational and lead generation online content.
Clients who feel you care about them are likely to stay with you longer. You must nurture customer relationships, and that means contacting them outside of renewal time. You want more than their money; you want their loyalty. Think about contacting them once a month using your CRM. After all, you’re busy running an agency and selling insurance.
With your CRM system, you can:
Virtually anything that doesn’t require you to be physically present can be done via your CRM. You’ll also gain customer data regarding needs and interests to sell them other products.
Autopilot your nurturing program. Design a year or more’s worth of contacts at once. Mix it up and use both email and printed material. Leaving a voicemail is powerfully effective, and easy to do. You can also text.
Write the emails and letters. Pre-record the voicemail. Pre-write the texts. And then schedule them to go out at the appropriate time in your CRM. Now, sit back and relax – your customers are hearing from you regularly and your autopilot is doing all the work!
An important tip: Be sure to always give your customers the ability to opt-out of any method of communication; you want to nurture a good relationship, not annoy them.
You’ve sent out prospect and client emails, and the reason you sent them is because you want a response. This is a case of “be careful what you wish for,” because email can become an overwhelming, time-consuming task.
Did you know that the average professional spends 28% of the workday reading and answering email? For the average full-time worker in America, that amounts to a staggering 2.6 hours and 120 messages received per day!
With everything else you need to do, how can you have time for that? As an independent insurance agency owner, time is of the essence. When your inbox is full of correspondence from customers, carriers, partners, and others, time management and streamlined processes are vital in order to make sure your customers get the great service they expect.
Brandon Sherman, the owner of S&H Insurance and an OAA member, shared his method for organizing your Outlook email to save time and energy while ensuring nothing slips through the cracks. Setting up these rules means emails will go to the right person or department for a prompt response.
IMPORTANT: Always test the rule by sending yourself a test message for each word separately.
That's it! You're finished, and your email is now more organized and ready for your inflow of daily emails.
If you’d like more information about cost effective CRM, how to automate voicemail messages, video email, auto texting or other simple, easy to use, cost effective marketing strategies, give us a call at 405-702-0900. OAA is dedicated to the growth of the independent insurance agency and we have many resources available to members.