With the amount of time required to build and maintain relationships with warm prospects and clients, it’s no wonder most insurance agents have little time for cold leads.
Fortunately with the simplicity and automation of email marketing, it doesn’t have to be this way anymore. You can now more healthtrax email effectively nurture and close cold prospects without having to sacrifice the valued time needed to run the rest of your insurance practice.
The first step is to determine exactly how your follow-up funnel currently operates. From this diagnosis, you’ll easily see what you can do to improve its efficiency.
How Is Your Follow-up Funnel Operating?
What happens to leads that go cold? Do you drop them into the same pile of your other cold leads, periodically sending them weak, ineffective communications?
Using Email Segmentation to Better Nurture Cold Leads
It’s said that it takes 10 to 12 contacts before someone associates your name with what you provide. Sending mass emails to your entire cold prospect list, however, is likely to cause prospects to start associating your name with spam.
Send enough of these mass emails and you’ll end up with a high percentage of unsubscribes and complaints. On top of that, you’ll likely have very few cold prospects take interest and inquire about your services.
Instead, you’ll generate much better conversions and engagement by segmenting down your list of “cold” prospects and tailoring messages based on the specific services they inquired about.
How to Begin Your Email Segmentation
While I can’t speak much about other types of insurance, let me use a figurative health insurance agent named “Bill” as an example.
Bill offers a variety of health-related services to his clients. Instead of following the typical follow-up funnel most insurance agents use, Bill is smart.
He realizes that most people don’t know him or what he’s about. They’re much more likely to sign with an agent that has some affiliation (relative, acquaintance, etc.) over him.
Instead of fighting this, Bill is going to use email marketing to manually create this “affiliation” with his cold prospects.
Yes, it will take time and a sophisticated email service to set up. Bill, however, understands that the value of his cold prospects is multiplied when he increases his conversion rate, thus raising the amount of “hot” prospects he has to work with.
Additionally, Bill realizes that once his automated email follow-up campaigns are set up, little if any work is needed to maintain this process.
For Bill, an agent working in the health insurance space, his segmentation based on services will include:
- Medicare prospects
- Individual and Family Plan prospects
- Ancillary products
- Short-Term services
From this segmentation, he now plans to build separate email follow-up campaigns for each of these types of cold prospects.
While this does require a bit of upfront setup, such email segmentation will likely:
- Make emails more welcomed, allowing more frequent sends
- Allow prospects to engage more with the content, deepening the agent – prospect relationship
- Reduce unsubscribes and spam complaints
- Raise conversion rates
Follow the 80/20 Rule for Email Engagement
Instead of bombarding prospects with sales message after sales message, he’ll aim to give 80% valuable content and 20% sales emails.
20% Sales Emails:
Sales emails will include incentives and special information about low insurance rates, packages, and other messaging geared at getting a policy signed. These messages will all tie around the services that his cold prospects inquired about.
Subtle sales messages can include:
- The cost of insurance and how having an agent doesn’t cost more
- Licenses and certifications and how you can be trusted
- The cost of not going through an agent and the added hassle
There are a lot of subtle ways to sell your services without directly asking them to take action. Simply by analyzing the sales flow from new prospect to client, you will find numerous sales points and benefits that can be engineered into these 20% sales emails.
