All posts with the tag 'StartUpSelling.com'

Insurance Agency EMarketing, Web Marketing And The Split Test

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.

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Posted in business, Insurance Agency Leads, Insurance Agency Marketing, Insurance Agency SEO, Insurance Agency Webinars | Leave a Comment »

Patience Is A Virtue – And A Good Rule For Web Seminar Marketing

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?

  1. The web seminars are educational – they do not try to sell their services
  2. The topics are current business topics, related to their vertical industry expertise
  3. 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

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Posted in business, emerging business, Insurance Agency Leads, Insurance Agency Marketing, Insurance Agency Webinars, Virtual Business | Leave a Comment »

Are the days of B2B cold calling/telemarketing over?

My answer to this question is, “it depends on the industry and prospect profile”. Telemarketing (or cold calling) can be very effective when properly approached and applied to a specific niche and B2B target profile. There are many newer methods of marketing  B2B products and services, but  highly targeted, niche cold calling can still prove effective for your B2B business. Ultimately, however, the days of cold calling will come to a close as eMarketing, Social Media Marketing, ePublishing and other web centric methods prove to be more effective and less expensive. But today, cold calling or outsourced B2B telemarketing can still be highly effective for certain niches and prospect profiles.

For example, one of our clients is a truck insurance agency located in the southeastern U.S. This insurance agency focuses on smaller trucking firms with 2 to 50 trucks, though most of their prospects fall within the 2 to 15 truck range.  We currently provide them with an average of 6 appointments per week in only 10 hours of calling per week. We have seen the scenario repeatedly for transportation insurance agencies targeting smaller profile trucking companies, and, we’ve seen it for B2B clients which focus on a vertical niche, everything from sales consulting, to CPA firms, from training companies to cloud computing software solutions.

Though our preferred approach revolves around a fully integrated, comprehensive and web centric approach to marketing, we have found consistently high yield results for these vertically oriented companies, which have seen returns anywhere from 2X to 10X on their telemarketing investment. Cold calling can also be done on a tailored basis by sales people, calling high in their targeted prospect accounts, which combined with a personalized email can yield effective results. We describe the difference between salespeople’s cold calling and telemarketing from a numbers perspective. Our appointment setters are expected to yield about 25 calls per hour, documenting changes in position, direct phone number and of course delivering pitches along the way. This means that in 60 hours of calling per month, the phone is dialed about 1500 times, or 18,000 times per year when fully extrapolated. Sales professionals time is much better spent on other activities, they do not have the time or patience to deliver this volume. Obviously, telemarketing is not just about volume: a well defined and consistently refined script is essential, resulting in an appointment every two hours, which is subsequently very worthwhile to the salesperson, CPA, small business owner or producer (using insurance agency jargon).

Thus, in our opinion, though the days of telemarketing are dwindling for many B2B companies and industries, there are still instances where it is highly cost effective, if done professionally and properly, where high quality B2B telemarketing can yield cost effective results.

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Office Buildings Are Obsolete and Offshore Drilling is the Result

Your Virtual Success - virtual sales, marketing and business - photo from Flickr

Office Buildings Are Obsolete - "GoVirtual, Baby, Go Virtual"

These days, office buildings simply seem like an outdated concept, a horse drawn carriage in the age of the Boeing 787 Dreamliner jet, a stereo turntable in an iPod era. Of course towering skyscrapers and massive office buildings composed of brick and mortar, conference rooms and cubicles made sense at one time, but with the advent of pervasive internet connectivity and virtual meeting tools, these office buildings are rapidly becoming obsolete, resulting in unfortunate collateral damage like massive oil and gas consumption, unnecessary expense and wasted productivity. Office buildings, though seemingly innocuous, are one of the key catalysts causing us to use 350 million gallons of gas per day, and waste millions of hours of valuable time and productivity. Does is make sense for millions of white collar workers to spend an hour commuting into a city, searching for parking, scurrying across crowded streets to then spend 99 percent of their time working from their PC, talking on the phone, and communicating through email and on-line Web meetings?

Reducing the national commute is no longer a want; it is a clearly defined need as is evident by the BP Deepwater Horizon oil well leak in the Gulf of Mexico. Drilling a mile down under the ocean illustrates the extreme lengths we as a society are willing to go to fuel our need for oil and gas. Why do we need so much oil, and why are we importing over 60% of the oil we need? Figures vary, but some, including the NRDC, estimate that passenger cars use up “40 percent of the oil consumed in America”. Many organizations are calling for improved fuel consumption, smaller cars, hybrid vehicles and carpooling. But I look at these suggestions, albeit good ones, as treating the symptoms but not the disease. We could easily cut passenger car fuel consumption in half (or perhaps by as much a 75%), if companies adopted a virtual approach to business, abandoning the tiring and tedious commute and embracing a home office based, internet model.

According to Wikipedia, “Estimates suggest that over 50 million U.S. workers (about 40% of the working population) could work from home at least part of the time yet, in 2008, only 2.5 million employees (not including the self-employed) considered home their primary place of business.” Yes, there are millions of telecommuters and home office based businesses now operating out of their respective homes, but this could and should be increased tenfold.

There are three major factors which need to be addressed to foster a dramatic increase the numbers of home based workers.

1. A new management style will need to be embraced by companies; management needs to be focus on results and not on the close daily supervision and behaviors of individual employees.

2. Workers need to learn how to work from home and get comfortable with the home based office concept.

3. A shift in tools toward cloud computing and away from traditional enterprise applications may be required.

Of these three factors, the first two represent a change management paradigm shift which as we all know can be very challenging and time consuming. The latter is a technology shift, more readily and rapidly addressable, almost everything this writer does is now cloud computing based. My days are now comprised of a handful of Skype calls, several web meetings, eMarketing, SEO (search engine optimization), website makeovers, blogging and Social Media Marketing and Networking, all done in the internet cloud.

Are office buildings and all they represent the underlying cause for the BP Deepwater Horizon oil well leak in the Gulf of Mexico? Can we rapidly curb our appetite for oil by adopting a virtual approach to business and commuting? Will the echoes of the Michael Steele and Sarah Palin slogan “Drill, Baby, Drill” someday change to “Go Virtual, Baby, Go Virtual”? I think virtual business and management will be an evolution rather than a revolution, behavioral change lags technological change. This change, however, is happening and it is a change for the better, a more eco-friendly and lifestyle friendly model, and certainly a change for increased productivity and decreased fuel consumption. As this evolution unfolds, what will happen to all those office buildings? I believe they will simply be repurposed, whether they morph to condos, research facilities and light industrial (yes there will still be jobs which require onsite venues), warehouse space, and community, athletic or recreational facilities. Or perhaps they will slowly evolve to some purpose beyond our current scope of understanding or speculation. Regardless of what shall happen to these office building obelisks, encompassing both impressive and generic icons of an anachronistic business model, I think many would agree that it seems like an inherently bad idea to continue to foster a commuter centric model which requires millions of white collar workers to burn oil, time and money in this virtual age.

OK, I’ll say it, “Go Virtual, Baby, Go Virtual”.

For more information, read Your Virtual Success (Career Press), available at Amazon, Borders, Barnes & Noble or Indie bookstores (or online). Or go to one of my websites: http://www.yourvirtualsuccess.net, http://www.startupselling.com. Has your company, agency, or professional services firm started the transition to a more efficient and productive virtual sales, virtual marketing or virtual business model?

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Insurance Agency Marketing & Lead Generation – Google Pages or Yellow Pages

Where do your fingers do the walking these days? It was a catchy slogan back in the day, and when it comes to major purchases, people still let their fingers do the walking, they just happen to be walking on a keyboard as opposed to a phone book. Google’s $500 a share stock price seems to offer compelling proof of this, as Google and the other major search engines have become the Yellow Pages of today, with significant advantages to both the consumer and advertiser.

Consumers are rapidly embracing the internet to find products and services they need. Thinking about insurance for your business? Looking for property and casualty insurance? How about healthcare insurance? These days, it seems slow and tedious to pull out the Yellow Pages, search through the book until you arrive at the letter “I” and then scan down the page to an insurance agency lead generation advertisement. Granted, on rare occasion, I do use the Yellow Pages to find someone locally, perhaps to clean the gutters on my house or to deliver a truckload of mulch, but that only happens when on rare occasion, and usually for an inexpensive product or service. If an insurance agency wants their message to reach me, my family or my colleagues, it will likely be displayed over the Internet.

There are two ways to display your Insurance Agency name in front of prospects on a Google Search Results Page. One is for free, and one comes with a fee. The latter is called a Pay Per Click ad (PPC) whereby you use Google AdWords to display a small add at the top or to the side of the organic Google search results. Each time your ad is displayed, you pay a small fee, when someone clicks on the ad to see your web site or landing page. The theory is that if someone clicks your ad, they are interested in your product or service, and you only pay when they click. In reality, they may be an unqualified buyer, or even your competitor – if they click – you still pay. The rates are relatively modest, for example, it might only cost a dollar or two (or a few) per click. But over a month, at two dollars a click and 10 clicks a day, you have spent $600, which adds up to $7,000 per year. Of course you can limit your budget and determine exactly how much you want to pay, but a better way, is to show up in the organic Google search results for free. The organic results, meaning the ten results that are not advertisements, but are Google’s best estimate of the content the user is searching for, are better for several reasons:

1. Users consider them to be truly relevant since Google “found” them based on content criteria.

2. There are no fees associated with the appearance of your web site, thus if displayed a thousand times (in a thousand searches), your costs are still zero.

3. If competitors or unqualified buyers are clicking on the organic search result (your web site link), it doesn’t matter, since there are no costs associated with organic clicks.

Optimizing your web site to appear on the first page of Google’s search results (or Yahoo, Bing, etc.) is called SEO, Search Engine Optimization. There are two major components to this, on page optimization and off page optimization. On page optimization revolves around the placement of keywords in your content and the underlying HTML coding (Header tags, Alt Tags, Keyword Description, Page Titles, Site Maps, etc.). An insurance agency marketing keyword campaign might include the following keywords: Truck Insurance, Fleet Insurance and Freight Insurance. These keywords can also be geographically expressed for local or regional insurance agencies. For example, Truck Insurance Massachusetts or Truck Insurance MA could also be used. Off page optimization includes things like external links, blogs, ePublishing, Social Media and other exogenous factors that “point” to your website. SEO is both an art and a science, it’s something an insurance agency can do internally if there resources available, or that can be outsourced inexpensively. Regardless, prime page one Google SEO search results seem like they are worth the investment, as it is an insurance agency marketing gift that keeps on giving.

For more information, read Your Virtual Success (Career Press) http://www.YourVirtualSuccess.net or go to my website: http://www.startupselling.com. I’d love to hear about your insurance agency marketing and SEO efforts.

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Freezing rain, snow and wind in Boston – Brutal Morning Commute for the Non-Virtual

The weather outside is frightful – but my virtual morning commute was delightful. The temperature was in the low 30′s this morning providing the backdrop for a combination of snow and freezing rain. Unfortunately the storm hit during the morning commute making a typically bad commute, simply terrible. Of course, in my virtual office I was comfortable and ready to go at around 7:45am, with my Starbuck’s Pike’s Place coffee, and a good internet connection. My car was snow free, still parked in my garage as I glanced occasionally out the window and remembered what it used to be like to sit in bumper to bumper traffic on Route 128.
On mornings like this, I especially appreciate my virtual business model and virtual lifestyle. It was a tremendously productive day for us at www.StartUpSelling.com. We ran a successful web seminar for one of our clients with 175 registrants and 118 attendees; we posted a web site update for another client, downloaded lists, distributed web seminar reports, sent out multiple email campaigns and called many targeted prospective clients on behalf of our B2B clientele. In other words, it was business as usual.
More info at: www.startupselling.com www.alanblume.com

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My 2 Cents about $20 A Gallon

Have you read $20 Per Gallon: How the Inevitable Rise in the Price of Gasoline Will Change Our Lives for the Better by Christopher Steiner? It’s a very interesting read as he predicts what the future will look like with rapidly rising oil prices. Like most predictive works, there are some things which seem plausible, and others that do not. His basic premise, the inevitable depletion of oil reserves and incremental rise in gas prices seems very likely. However, there are two key factors that are not truly addressed. First, the author presupposes that there will be no cost effective replacement for oil before gas hits $20 a Gallon, if ever. He argues that oil is so cheap, there is no alternative that could provide a cost effective replacement. I’m not ready to buy into that argument; I believe that a combination of greed and technology (is that contemporary capitalism?) can still provide a viable solution. Secondly, and more applicable to the theme of my blog and upcoming book (Your Virtual Success: Finding Profitability in an Online World) is the extremely positive impact of virtual business on energy consumption. Imagine the reduction in consumption if half of the current workforce worked from home instead of commuting to an office. The reduction in energy consumption would be staggering. Combined with solar, wind, hydro and emerging green technologies, and we could see a dramatic change in consumption. Will this happen overnight? No, but it certainly could happen before we see gas hit $20 a gallon.

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Going Postal

It seems pretty strange that the U.S. government still delivers mail six days a week. After all, the postal service has been running at a deficit for years, in some cases, multibillion dollar deficits. At the moment, it does seem reasonable to have mail delivery services a few days a week. After all, we still get some bills and checks in the mail, though the trend is clearly moving to on-line banking and direct deposit. You may receive the occasional important letter or notification, and a favorite catalog from time to time. To accomplish this, according the United States Postal Service Web site (www.usps.com), these items are delivered by, “685,000 career employees and 101,000 non-career staff, making it the second-largest employer in the United States (behind Wal-Mart). The Postal Service employs more workers on U.S. soil than General Motors, Ford and Chrysler combined.” The site goes on further to say, “The USPS operates the largest fleet of commercial vehicles in the country—some 212,000 vans and trucks.” That’s a lot of vehicles, a lot of gas and a huge expense! Imagine the energy savings if we stopped sending junk mail, encouraged opt in email, cut down on the USPS delivery days, and encouraged electronic signatures for legal documents. Imagine the post office needing 100,000 or even 150,000 fewer vehicles! But even this logic is faulty. It won’t be long before most traditional catalogs are replaced by cheaper, faster, better on-line versions. It won’t be long before people stop writing hand written letters and notes. When was the last time your twelve year old wrote a letter and mailed it to a friend? The last time my 20-year-old daughter wrote a letter was six years ago when she was in summer camp and didn’t have access to a computer. My 33 year old nephew receives all his bills on-line, and is still using the same book of traditional bank checks received in his first order. It won’t be long before traditional mail is almost completely supplanted by email, eBilling, Instant Messaging and digital documents. And all of these events will move us into a progressively more pervasive on-line existence and a more environmentally friendly communication and distribution system. Don’t go postal, go virtual.

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