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February 05, 2016 at 12:43 PM
Email continues to play an important role for delivering messages directly to your target audience.
Email may not be as savvy as social or digital, but email works: Companies using email to nurture leads generate 50 percent more sales-ready leads and at 33 percent lower cost. And nurtured leads, on average, produce a 20 percent increase in sales opportunities compared to non-nurtured leads, according to HubSpot.
In addition to lead nurturing and customer acquisition, email marketing is also a great vehicle for insurance marketers to industry to retain customers and boost loyalty.
If you are not using email marketing, it’s time to step up and add this strategy to your marketing toolkit. Especially considering that for every $1 spent on email marketing, the average return on investment is $44.25, according to ExactTarget.
Here are five tips to help you get started:
1. Understand your target audience
As in all industries, insurance marketers today are bombarded with data and are collecting as much data as they possibly can. But more often than not, marketers forget to ask, “Am I collecting the right data?”
If it doesn’t provide any insights into who your target audience is, data is, well just data. It clogs up your marketing systems, causes more havoc, more time, and more resources.
Your acquisition dollars should be focused on understanding your audience through a combination of your internal customer and prospect data, as well as third-party demographic data:
Internal data: This data includes anything sitting in a data warehouse, customer relationship management system or other sources that have not been integrated into your marketing database. Examples of internal data include customer service records, transactional data, credit card purchases, or email.
Consumer demographics: Data providers aggregate and source these data sets to compile additional consumer insights such as age, gender, and income. Data may be aggregated from sources including public records, phone directories, U.S. Census data, consumer surveys and other proprietary sources.
Example of the types of consumer data selects that can be appended to your database include date of birth, home ownership, occupation, gender, estimated income, age, telephone number, credit card, hobbies, language spoken, purchase behavior, lifestyle interests, presence of children, and investments.
2. Be sure your email list is up to date
An average of 30 percent of subscribers change email addresses each year.
Emails go bad, and customers move and change their email. Or as is often the case, you may have a huge list of prospects and customers — you know their name, where they live, but have no email address on file.
By using an email append service, you can add these missing email addresses to your customer file. Your customer records, which most likely already consist of names and postal addresses, are matched against a third-party database to produce a corresponding email address.
One of the most often overlooked components of email marketing is email validation and verification. When sourcing new email addresses, a good email append provider will run these addresses through a validation and hygiene process to ensure your newly acquired emails are clean and deliverable.
The validation process identifies addresses known to be associated with spam traps, invalid emails and domains, role accounts, complainers, and known hard-bounces. This process also removes duplicate emails and corrects formatting errors.
3. Segment your email list
List segmentation is all about creating personalized emails. The segments can be as large or as small as you want, but the more targeted the segment, the more it will resonate with your customers.
