This blog includes posts on lead generation, eMarketing, Web Marketing, SEO and other leading edge marketing techniques.
-Alan Blume
All posts with the tag 'eMarketing'
Top 10 Questions To Ask About Insurance eMarketing
Posted on February 11th, 2011 by Alan Blume
Here are some of the top questions you should ask if your insurance agency is thinking about an eMarketing initiative:
- What are the best days of the week to send emails? And why?
- What time of day should we send emails?
- Are the emails optimized across all major clients and browsers?
- How many links should be included per email?
- Have you carefully checked the email content to enusre there are no accidental use of “spam words”?
- Which words have the highest spam reporting rates?
- Have you determined a target click through rate (CTR)?
- How often should you send emails to your prospects? Clients? Does this frequency vary with type of email, newsletter, offer or webinar?
- Is your Call To Action clear and easy to understand?
- Is your email integrated with your Insurance Agency Social Media Marketing initiative?
Understanding the importance and nuance to all of the above questions is crucial to the successful implementation of your opt-in agency eMarketing campaigns. If you’re uncertain about any of the above questions, you can find great content on the internet, or your agency could consult with other agencies or insurance web marketing experts. Above all else, however, make sure your agency carefully adheres to the CAN-SPAM Act. Regulations can be found at business.ftc.gov, or simply search for it in your favorite search engine.
Insurance Agency Web Marketing Plans
Posted on December 9th, 2010 by Alan Blume
As insurance agencies create their marketing plans for the upcoming year, many will focus on insurance agency web marketing as a key marketing driver to generate insurance agency leads. Web marketing is not merely a trend; it is a new way of doing business, and one which agencies cannot ignore. The days of agency growth from a purely referral driven perspective are gone, as more and more communication becomes virtual in nature, as networking moves from handshaking to internet surfing, and younger buyers embrace digital communication over face to face meetings.
Yet what does insurance agency web marketing mean these days? According to Wikipedia, web marketing “refers to the placement of media along many different stages of the customer engagement cycle through search engine marketing (SEM), search engine optimization (SEO), banner ads on specific websites, e-mail marketing, and Web 2.0 strategies.” This serves as a reasonable definition for our discussion, as we answer important questions relating to insurance agency web marketing: Let’s begin by identifying the key components of an insurance agency web marketing plan:
- Agency Blogging
- Insurance Agency Telemarketing
- Insurance Agency Web Seminar Marketing
- Insurance Agency Website Design
- Insurance eMarketing Campaigns
- Insurance Search Engine Marketing (SEM)
- Insurance SEO (Insurance Agency Search Engine Optimization)
- Pay Per Click (Google PPC, LinkedIn PPC, etc.)
- Social Media Marketing (Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, YouTube, StumbleUpon)
Arguably, insurance agency web marketing always begins with a comprehensive insurance website redesign, unless the insurance agency website was recently completed and is up to date. An insurance agency website must be graphically attractive, it should have current and compelling content, a blog (and vlog if possible), and industry news to mention a few important elements. Video is becoming increasingly more important as it provides a medium for the quick conveyance of information in a compelling and personal manner. Website video can also be leveraged on YouTube to further increase insurance agency internet presence. Vlogs, which are video blogs, can be very helpful to a website. Vlogs can be a talking head video, recorded PowerPoint presentation or even voice over photographs. They integrate the contextual power of a blog with the enhanced impact of a video or PowerPoint. For a sample of a vlog, go to: http://www.startupselling.com/video.html
Content is king on the internet, and an insurance agency website should take great care in the creation of their website content. A graphically attractive website, short on content, will result in a sub-optimized insurance search engine marketing result, adversely impacting insurance agency SEO efforts and mitigating website stickiness and efficacy. These days, a key aspect of any insurance agency web marketing plan should include an annual review of website content. Further, the content should be of interest to both prospects and clients alike.
Insurance agency social media marketing incorporates Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, YouTube, and StumbleUpon to mention just a few of the major opportunities, allowing agencies to dramatically expand their marketing reach. Social media marketing offers insurance agencies the ability to expand branding, share content, establish subject matter expertise and participate in discussions. There are many aspects of insurance social media marketing to consider. For example, a simple blog entry can be utilized in many ways to expand reach. A blog can be tweeted, reblogged, ePublished, and incorporated in a newsletter or eMarketing campaign. In this case, one blog is reused five times, though there are methods where one blog can be used ten or more times, dramatically expanding internet reach and enhancing cyber presence and insurance SEO. Why is social media marketing a critical component of an overall insurance agency web marketing plan? Social media marketing creates a cyber foundation for an agency to build upon. Ultimately, social media marketing, if used correctly, can become one of the key drivers for insurance agency leads. For the purposes of this article, we’ll add blogging and ePublishing to the social media marketing category since these are tightly interconnected. Blogs which are repurposed as articles can then be shared on Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter and StumbleUpon, helping insurance agency SEO.
Social media marketing along with insurance agency SEO help with organic search engine rankings. Another option is paid engine ranking placement otherwise known as PPC or Pay Per Click advertising. At the top and side of the organic SERP (search engine results page) are paid PPC ads. When an internet user clicks on one of these, your agency is charged a fee. These fees can range from under a dollar to $15 or more depending upon the competitiveness of the search term. For example, let’s say that your PPC keyword phrase is New York Business Insurance, and when someone types in that keyword phrase your PPC ad appears. Depending upon your budget and keyword phrase bid, you might appear on the top, and when someone clicks on the ad, you are charge a PPC fee, let’s say five dollars. The great thing about this is that the volume, efficacy and conversion ratio are really easy to track. The negative is, of course, that you are constantly paying out ad fees. Thus the difference between organic and PPC, and predicated on your insurance agency web marketing plan, you may have budget for only one or the other, or perhaps for both.
Web seminar and eMarketing campaigns represent a compelling outbound approach for insurance agencies. Insurance agency webinars offer the ability for agencies to communicate on a high level with their B2B prospects. eMarketing campaigns that offer educational content are much better received than insurance product offers or pitches. A long term approach to insurance agency web seminar marketing can yield significant dividends, though it is important to note that eMarketing and web seminar programs can often take up to 6 months to establish a following.
Lastly, where and how does telemarketing fit in, after all, it is not technically a web marketing solution. Telemarketing, or in this case perhaps appointment setting is a better description, is an important component of an overall web marketing plan. After all, these web marketing leads need to be followed up upon. If your agency producers are busy with renewals, or if they only have time for warm prospects, the outsourcing an appointment setter can be very helpful to your agency’s overall pipeline building efforts. For example, when doing an eMarketing campaign, all prospects who click through to your website and all registrants should be called directly after the webinar to ensure you optimize your web marketing efforts. If producers don’t have the time to call, the calls should be done with a qualified appointment setter. After all, the primary purpose of any insurance agency web marketing plan is to drive qualified leads into the agency pipeline.
Our Lead Lead Generation Is Morphing From Outbound To Inbound – We Eat Our Own Dog Food?
Posted on November 9th, 2010 by Alan Blume
StartUpSelling, Inc. is having a banner year, something we’re particularly proud of considering the lackluster 2010 economy. One of the most preeminent sources of business in 2010 has been inbound inquiries from our Social Media Marketing, SEO and ePublishing efforts. In 2008 and 2009 for example, over 80% of our business came from eMarketing and Webinars. In 2010, we expect over 40% of our business to come from Social Media Marketing, SEO and ePublishing. This will be roughly equal or even a slightly greater contributor than our eMarketing and Web Seminar Marketing initiatives, which are expected to produce about 40% or our business in 2010. This trend is accelerating, along with our own efforts to create quality content to drive “in profile” prospect traffic to our website. Our Social Media Marketing focuses on our LinkedIn activities and LinkedIn groups, blogging, ePublishing, Facebook, Twitter and assorted and sundry other venues, and of course, search engine optimization (SEO).
These are the same activities we do for our clients. Our activities range from insurance agency web marketing, to law firm SEO, to B2B website design, to high tech eMarketing and web seminar marketing. Thus the old adage, we eat our own dog food. We take our own best practices, including our 75 step checklist for a successful eMarketing and Web Seminar campaign, and apply it to our own initiatives and, simultaneously, on behalf of our client initiatives. Perhaps a better frame of reference might be to call this methodology and resulting paradigm shift a “win-win”. Even though we’re dog lovers, “we eat our own dog food” creates a bad marketing visual!
Insurance Agency Prospect Lists And Insurance Agent Leads – Need A Tune Up?
Posted on November 7th, 2010 by Alan Blume
What’s the difference between an insurance agency list source and an insurance agency lead source? List sources are used as a mechanism to contact prospects, deliver a message, qualify the prospect and move into the agency lead funnel. Lead sources, at least theoretically, take care of the first two criteria, providing the contact and at a minimum, delivering a general message. Insurance agents must in both cases then qualify the prospect and subsequently move the insurance agency lead into the lead funnel. A better prospect list or lead source should ultimately yield a better insurance agent pipeline.
Let’s start with insurance agency web leads. There are many insurance lead companies, aggregators, and portals which sell leads under a vast array of plans. Prices range dramatically, from less than a dollar to more than $50, predicated on the type of lead and the number of agents which receive the lead. For example, a life insurance lead which will be sold to many agents is much less expensive than a health insurance lead which is sold to far fewer agents. In most cases, these insurance agency web leads are sold on a non-exclusive basis, requiring the insurance agents to rapidly deliver their value proposition in an attempt to win over this prospect from a multitude of other agents.
Another form of insurance agent leads comes from those derived on an exclusive basis from internal agency resources or from an outsourced insurance marketing agency relationship. In these cases, dedicated outbound and inbound insurance agent marketing programs drive leads into the pipeline. These programs are typically higher cost, but result in leads that are completely exclusive to the agent and agency, offering an opportunity to deliver the value proposition in a much less competitive venue.
Insurance agency list sources are a completely different animal than insurance agency lead providers. Prospect lists range the gambit from providers who actually source the information to those who merely resell or broker the information. No two lists are alike and some can be truly problematic. If an insurance agent wants emails included with the demographic information, costs can increase dramatically, and procuring quality emails can prove challenging. Even then, if high quality emails are purchased, there is an array of challenges which awaits agent and agency with the CAN-SPAM laws now in place. It’s fine for agents to call on these contacts directly, but be careful using your list for email marketing, even if you have purchased an insurance agency web marketing platform or use an eMarketing engine. Remember, if someone hands you a fistful of wrenches, it doesn’t mean you should open your hood and tune up your car.
There are several important tips for insurance agents considering a list source or procuring web leads.
- Choose your list or lead source wisely. Start with a sample (perhaps even a fee sample) before making large scale purchases.
- Be selective when downloading lists and choose the best contact information fields for your prospecting. Lists often include extraneous fields of little value which create data clutter.
- Create a list of ideal qualities and attributes for your ideal prospect, then target this profile specifically. StartUpSelling refers to this as the Virtual Prospect Scorecard, a sample is located at: http://www.startupselling.com/sales-tools.html
- Differentiate commercial line leads and personal line leads. If emails are involved, make sure your commercial emails are not contaminated with personal emails.
High quality insurance agent pipelines begin with high a quality prospect database. This list needs to be carefully culled to help agents guarantee they are working within a profile that yields the highest possible close ratio. And when it comes to using your list for eMarketing, either get some good advice or read up on current articles on the subject. A sure fire way to get in CAN-SPAM trouble is to buy a list of 10,000 prospects and “blast” out an unsolicited email. Regardless of the quality of your list, poor execution in this area will cause your insurance agency marketing engine to break down. If your agency intends to utilize your prospect list for email marketing, a good suggestion is to have an “eMarketing mechanic” tune up your engine before you start it up, ensuring your marketing vehicle will not break down.
Insurance Agency EMarketing, Web Marketing And The Split Test
Posted on October 31st, 2010 by Alan Blume
Insurance agency eMarketing and web marketing can be greatly enhanced and refined through the use of split test sends. Split tests offer insurance agency eMarketers greater control and flexibility when sending out targeted emails to both prospects and clients.
What is a split test?
Let’s say your insurance agency is offering a seminar on advanced workers’ compensation analysis. Your goal is to maximize attendance and you intend to do this by sending out an email announcement. You’ve considered two subject lines for your email. The first one is: Workers’ Compensation Webinar – Utilization Of Experience Modification Factors and The Impact On Premiums. The second subject line your agency considered is: Web Seminar Tomorrow – Workers’ Compensation and Advanced Calculations of X-Mods. A split test send would allow you to send both of these emails to small respective test groups and measure which email resulted in higher registration.
How does a split test work?
Think of an eMarketing split test in the same way as a wine tasting. A waiter pours a small amount of two wines into two glasses. You taste the first wine, and it tastes pretty good. You then try the second glass and find this wine tastes much better. The waiter then pours you a full glass of the 2nd wine, after you compared and contrasted both wines. A split test works in exactly the same way. Your insurance agency can sends out both versions of the emails to 20% of your target prospects. After the results are posted, your agency marketer measures the number of emails opened, total click through counts and total registration. If version one of your email resulted in greater registration, you can then send that email to the balance of your target prospects, or in this case, the remaining 80%.
Why use a split test?
Split test eMarketing offers improved performance for the same costs. It also offers greater insight into email marketing composition, subject line creation, open rates and delivery rates. The bottom line, however, is simply that there is no reason that you should not try this methodology for your eMarketing campaigns. For the same amount of money, and a modest amount of work, insurance agencies can quickly and easily improve their web marketing results.
Insurance agency eMarketing is both an art and a science. Every insurance agent and agency should carefully comply with the CAN SPAM Act regulations. The CAN SPAM Act regulations can be found on the FCC website under the Consumer & Governmental Affairs Bureau tab. Agencies should utilize multipart mime email formatting, and ensure their emails are composed to mitigate automatic spam filters from adversely impacting delivery rates. Split test eMarketing can help any insurance agency improve their web marketing with more effective and quantitatively accurate eMarketing.
For more information, read Your Virtual Success (Career Press) or go to: http://www.startupselling.com. StartUpSelling, Inc. provides outsourced marketing, sales and lead generation services focusing in the areas of insurance agency eMarketing, web seminar marketing, insurance agency SEO, social media marketing and insurance agency website development. StartUpSelling, Inc. specializes in innovative entrepreneurial marketing and sales concepts.
Insurance Agency Web Marketing for Lead Generation In A Soft Market
Posted on October 29th, 2010 by Alan Blume
When considering the current economic climate and soft insurance market, every agency and agent wants to generate the optimum number of qualified leads with the lowest possible marketing investment. There is always a tradeoff between insurance agency lead flow today versus long range marketing plans, branding and agency awareness campaigns for the future. These are some of the more important insurance agency web marketing options available. They are in a suggested order for a typical insurance agency web marketing initiative.
- Insurance Agency Website: Every agency must have a professional and up to date site.
- Insurance Agency Search Engine Optimization (SEO): More and more prospects will search Google for information about insurance.
- Blogging: Fast and easy, inexpensive and effective.
- Electronic Publishing: A surprisingly powerful web marketing activity.
- Social Media Marketing (Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, YouTube, Flickr): A must have in today’s online world.
- Insurance Agency eMarketing: More complex than many think, an outsource play for all but the most sophisticated agencies.
- Insurance Agency Web Seminars: Combined with eMarketing, an effective long term solution. And as noted above, an outsource play for all but the most sophisticated agencies.
- Pay Per Click (Google PPC Campaigns): This can be very effective but needs to be closely monitored. A reasonable monthly budget must be allocated in perpetuity.
- Web Lead Bulk Purchases: A quick fix for pipeline activity, but a free for all and often price sensitive type of prospect.
These web centric activities can help drive leads to an agency, even in a challenging soft market as we have today. Your agency should focus on areas in which you have expertise. For example, perhaps one of your agents or support specialists likes to write, you could have them work on blogging and electronic publishing. Or, you may have a principal who would like to create a prominent social networking presence. However, if you lack the internal expertise or bandwidth, you can outsource all or part of these activities to a competent insurance marketing agency.
For more information, read Your Virtual Success (Career Press) or go to: http://www.startupselling.com. StartUpSelling, Inc. provides outsourced marketing, sales and lead generation services focusing in the areas of eMarketing, web seminar marketing, insurance agency SEO, insurance agency social media marketing and website development. StartUpSelling, Inc. specializes in innovative entrepreneurial marketing and sales concepts.
Sales and Marketing Best Practices: Lead Generation Yesterday, Today, and Tomorrow
Posted on October 25th, 2010 by Alan Blume
Lead Generation Article – Mike Lauducci does a quick review on lead gen methods – pros and cons – then and now…
Business is constantly evolving. From new manufacturing methods, to new methods of power generation, to new tools and equipment, things never stay the same for long. The same is true for lead generation and sales and marketing methodologies – techniques that worked 20 years ago may be useless today, and what you’re doing today may not work five years from now. Let’s review some tools from years past, take a look at what’s working today, and get a glimpse into where sales and marketing is headed into the future. Follow this Ezine link to read more: http://ezinearticles.com/?Sales-and-Marketing-Best-Practices:-Lead-Generation-Yesterday,-Today,-and-Tomorrow&id=5251128
Top 5 List – For Insurance Agency Leads
Posted on October 23rd, 2010 by Alan Blume
Insurance agency leads are often preeminent in the minds of agency management and agency producers alike. Compelling insurance agency pipeline activity along with a well crafted and easily understandable insurance agency value proposition is often a great recipe for growth, even in the midst of a soft insurance market. Insurance agency producers are often torn between several important areas of responsibility including client retention, referral development and insurance agency lead development, the latter appropriately framed at the end of this list. Producers often lack the time, marketing tools and expertise which would allow them to consistently drive leads into their pipeline.
This is where the agency itself can step up their efforts with a coordinate approach to supplement the individual insurance agency producer’s lead development initiatives. Today, insurance agency leads should embrace a web marketing oriented approach. After all, web oriented activities ten to build a foundation for future insurance agency lead generation, and are often reusable. What are the top 5 insurance agency marketing initiatives for effective lead generation? That list has changed significantly over the last five years, but for a 2011 insurance agency marketing plan, I would recommend:
- Email Marketing
Insurance Agency Leads - Insurance Agency Web Marketing
- Insurance Agency Webinars (B2B Web Seminar Marketing)
- Social Media Marketing (LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, etc.)
- Electronic Publishing (online magazines or prominent article directories)
- Insurance Agency Website Redesign & SEO (Search Engine Optimization)
Which insurance agency marketing activities didn’t make the top 5 list? Telesales can still yield compelling results and we see many agencies still benefiting from appointment setting campaigns. It’s a quick fix to bolster producer activity with insurance agency leads, but lacks the long term, web centric foundation building activities on the list above. Canvassing (dropping off materials door to door), direct mail, fax marketing, magazine ads, traditional “Yellow Page Ads” and other print oriented ads and campaigns are also off the list. These are becoming dated; they are not reusable (like an email list or opt in newsletter), are often difficult to measure and should be considered after the top 5 list is addressed.
StartUpSelling Insurance Agency Web Marketing Featured in Rough Notes Article
Posted on October 12th, 2010 by Alan Blume
In the October issue of Rough Notes, reporter Mike Moody offers a comprehensive view of the insurance agency web seminar marketing strategy which has been implemented by StartUpSelling, Inc. for many insurance agency clients. In this case, the article features a prominent trucking insurance agency. This strategy roughly translates into a new formula for agency producers, in that they “never have to make cold calls again”. Let’s review this seemingly bold claim for a moment. When an insurance agency, or for that matter any B2B business, successfully rolls out an executive web seminar series, eMarketing program and social media marketing strategy, the results can change the sales landscape in such a way that all future calls, essentially become “warm calls”. With registration of 50 – 300+ executives at monthly webinars, it doesn’t take long to establish an ongoing web marketing dialogue with a comprehensive prospect pipeline. These prospects already “know” the sponsoring agency through their webinar program, thus morphing producer colds calls into warm web seminar follow-up calls. It’s a great article and appears on Pages 12 and 14 of the current Rough Notes October Issue: http://roughnotes.com/RN2010/include/10_2010/page/page012.html
Patience Is A Virtue – And A Good Rule For Web Seminar Marketing
Posted on September 29th, 2010 by Alan Blume
One of my clients has a web seminar scheduled for October 6th. An emailing was sent to their prospect list yesterday, and as of this morning 80 people have registered for their webinar. Based on prior monthly webinars, I’d estimate that they will have in excess of 150 executive level registrants by their web seminar date next week. Why is this small business client successful with their webinar marketing program when others may fail?
- The web seminars are educational – they do not try to sell their services
- The topics are current business topics, related to their vertical industry expertise
- The guest speakers are subject matter experts, expounding on a variety of challenging issues germane to the target prospect executives
Of course their first few web seminars didn’t attract nearly as many registrants. Over time, however, they have established a strong following. Today, when they reach out to their prospective clients, their name is known, they are respected as a thought leader in their industry and they are able to readily book web meetings and on-site appointments with these prospective clients.
Beyond the messaging, selecting great topics, finding knowledgeable speakers, and respecting email best practices, this small business has exercised patience, taking a long term approach to winning over their prospects. For products, services or solutions that result in revenues of $10,000, $50,000 or $100,000 or more, this is a great approach. Patience is a virtue and seemingly an important aspect of web seminar marketing too.
For more information on web marketing topics, read Your Virtual Success: http://www.amazon.com/Your-Virtual-Success-Finding-Profitability/dp/1601631014