How Insurance Agents Can Create Effective Email Marketing Campaigns

Email marketing can be one of the most effective ways for insurance agents to grow their businesses. Yet being effective requires more than just building up an email list and sending out messages. Instead, you need to strategically create email marketing campaigns. Email marketing campaigns for insurance agents may require a bit of trial and error, but over time you can find ways to get more opens, more click-throughs, and ultimately stronger leads and customer relationships.

If you’re new to this type of marketing, you should first read our guide on email marketing for insurance agents. Once you have a grasp on issues like gaining subscribers and complying with regulations like CAN-SPAM (and others that may apply depending on your location and that of your customers), insurance agents can start to develop email marketing campaigns. 

What do email marketing campaigns for insurance agents entail?

“An email campaign is a sequence of marketing efforts that contacts multiple recipients at once,” explains SendPulse, a marketing platform. “Email campaigns are designed to reach out to subscribers at the best time and provide valuable content and relevant offers. Using email campaigns allows you to build deep and trusting relationships with your customers.”

In other words, email marketing campaigns for insurance agents involve distinct sets of messages that generally guide recipients toward an action. For example, an email marketing campaign for insurance agents might involve sending out an initial message to prospects about setting up an introductory meeting. Then, the campaign might include a follow-up message to recipients who have not yet responded asking if they would like to meet or receive more information over email first. At the end of the campaign, you can then get a sense of how many recipients completed the action you intended, and you can also measure which messages were the most effective.

In this guide, we’ll dive into more detail on how to create the best email marketing campaigns for insurance agents, including how to create email marketing templates and how to create great email marketing content.

\After you create email marketing campaigns, you often want readers to complete a purchase. Using a platform like Wheelhouse, powered by Talage, allows you to create a custom landing page that you can direct email recipients to. From there, they can easily get instant, bindable quotes, helping you turn prospects into customers. Book a demo today to see how Wheelhouse can help you get more out of your email marketing campaigns.

Know Your Audience for Email Marketing Campaigns

Before you start creating email marketing campaigns, you need to first understand your audience. Knowing who will be receiving your messages affects what you create. For example, if you’re primarily marketing to small business owners, you might want your campaigns geared more toward addressing the personal connection that owners have to their businesses. In contrast, email marketing campaigns to CFOs might be focused more on cost savings. 

Segment Lists

Since you probably have more than one type of audience, it helps to create segmented lists. That way, you can create an overall email template for a campaign and then tinker with the template for each segment. Some of the ways you can segment lists include separating contacts based on:

• Industry
• Occupation
• Company size
• Region
• Whether they are existing customers vs. prospects

Set Goals 

As you think about your audience, insurance agents should set goals for email marketing campaigns. Each campaign can have its own goal, such as:

• Getting prospects to book a meeting
• Getting existing clients to renew policies
• Informing customers of new policy offerings

While email marketing campaigns for insurance agents generally have the end target of increasing sales, not every series has to be a direct promotion. For example, you might establish a welcome campaign that gets sent out each time someone signs up for your email list. 

“By sending a welcome email, you increase the credibility of your brand. Many customers don’t trust newly discovered brands,” says Omnisend, a marketing platform. “A welcome email can help warm up new members faster and push them further through the sales funnel.”

Establishing Email Templates for Insurance Agents

Once you have a good idea of who you’re sending your email marketing campaigns to and your goals, you can start to build email templates.

As payments company Square explains, “an email template is a preformatted email that allows you to quickly create email campaigns.” 

By having a template ready to go, insurance agents can save time creating email marketing campaigns. Plus, you can establish brand consistency that helps you deliver a strong customer experience.

To create email templates for insurance agents, consider the following: 

Leverage Platforms 

Many companies like Square offer pre-built email templates within their platforms that let you “add content blocks, put in a header with your logo or company name, pick a theme, and set your style,” as Square says. 

You can also find email templates within email marketing platforms like Mailchimp and Constant Contact. Insurance agents can find free templates too by searching online or creating your own, but using software can help those who may not be naturals at design. Plus, using email marketing templates from software platforms can help in areas such as automatically formatting your emails to look good on both mobile and desktop.

Test Your Templates 

Another perk of using software platforms to create email marketing templates is that you can often easily test them out. For example, you could send out some A/B tests, where half your email list randomly receives an email that uses one template, while the other half receives a message from another template.

Based on the results such as click-through rates, you can get a sense of whether one template or another works better. Small changes like adjusting image placement or the design of a call-to-action (CTA) button can affect your success.

Creating Email Marketing Content for Insurance Agents

Knowing your audience and building email templates are key to trying to create the best email marketing campaigns for insurance agents. But you still need to create strong content. The text and multimedia that you include in your email marketing campaigns need to connect with your audience and motivate them to take your desired action. 

To get there, focus on how you can:

Write Great Subject Lines

A great email subject line can be the difference between a prospect opening your email or immediately deleting it. So you need to create a subject line that captures their attention.

“Treat them as the most important element of your email campaign – which they are,” advises GetResponse, a marketing platform. “Don’t leave it as an afterthought. Set aside time to A/B test your subject lines. And use data, not your gut feeling.”

Repurpose Your Content 

While you may need to get creative with subject lines, you don’t have to be overly original with the body content of your email marketing campaigns. Insurance agents can repurpose existing content into their messages. Making small edits to content you’ve already created, especially if you’re sending it to a new audience, can be highly effective.

“Before you start creating content from scratch, think about what you already have that your customers might find interesting, like a popular Instagram and Facebook post or an article written about your company,” advises Mailchimp.

Add Value

When repurposing your content, or in some cases coming up with original material, make sure you’re adding value to your readers, rather than making it all about you. Although you may be trying to sell an insurance policy, the best email marketing campaigns for insurance agents still connect with readers. So think about what’s important to your audience as you think about what to write. 

“While the ultimate goal of email marketing is to grow your business, you need to realize that promotions are not the core of email marketing. The heart of your email marketing must be to establish and nurture healthy relationships with your customers,” says Campaign Monitor, an email marketing platform.

Include CTA

Email marketing campaigns for insurance agents should essentially always have CTAs. For example, you may want to include a CTA at the end of your emails about booking an introductory meeting. Even if you’re not trying to close a deal within an email, you can still include a CTA that increases engagement, such as directing recipients to read more about a topic on your blog. 

Building Momentum From Email Marketing Campaigns

Because email marketing campaigns are distinct sequences of messages, they can be measured relatively easily. Especially if you use email marketing software, you can often automatically track data such as opens, click-throughs and unsubscribes. By closely analyzing this data, you can get a strong sense of what works well and what doesn’t. From there, insurance agents can continually improve email marketing campaigns.

To also build momentum, you can use a platform like Wheelhouse, powered by Talage. Wheelhouse enables you to easily create custom landing pages that you can use in your CTA, and you can send readers there to obtain instant, bindable quotes. If you can turn these prospects into customers, insurance agents may have an easier time going forward building email marketing campaigns that engage these new clients, rather than continually trying to convert leads the old fashioned way.