Live from NAILBA: digital marketing best practices

It can be tough to keep up with the ever-changing marketing landscape. Insurance professionals are bombarded with various offers and marketing messages daily. The majority of those messages go completely unnoticed.

As marketing technology continues to change, agent behanvior also must evolve.

Related: 3 must-have digital technologies for today’s insurance agents

Approaching this subject at NAILBA 35 in Dallas was Justin Blase (seen here at right), director of digital strategy at Insurance Forums. To kick off his entertaining and informative session, Blase went over a few important demographics relating to today’s life insurance agents and digital data.

Here’s what we know about today’s agents and advisors:

• • The average age of an insurance agent is 57. 
  • One in 4 agents will be gone by 2018.
  • Eight in 10 advisors use social media within their practice. 

Here is some information about digital data today:

• • Digital media is increasing each year; it’s now up to 5.6 hours per day.
  • Mobile now accounts for 51 percent of digital media consumption. 
  • Mobile continues to grow faster than any other category.

“Mobiles are popular for early morning commuting, PCs dominate working hours and tablets are popular at night,” Blase said. “Mobile is taking over but not at the expense of PCs and tablets.”

So how do you reach today’s digitally-focused agent? Blase suggests these five ways:

1. 1. Email marketing
   2. Organic search engine traffic
   3. Paid search advertising
   4. Facebook ads
   5. LinkedIn groups and ads

See also: Insurance consumers: We’ll give up our data for personalized service

Continue reading for a closer look at each of these key insurance agent and advisor marketing tools.

Email marketing “is not the newest and hottest thing at all,” Blase said. “But it’s still the best way to generate positive ROI.” (Photo: iStock) 

Email marketing

Blase said there are a few things to keep in mind when using email marketing.

1. 1. Locate or identify the right email list or segment.
   2. Create an angle that positions your offer attractively to your selected audience.
   3. Craft a subject line that entices opens.
   4. Write email copy that generates curiosity, establishes credibility and entices the click-through.
   5. Technical house is in order to ensure high deliverability.

“In reference to number three, avoid certain types of terms like ‘money’ in your subject line because that’s such a common spam subject line,” said Blase. “Your email could go straight to spam. Craft a good, short subject line without the use of common spam terms.”

Blase also urged those in attendance to use drip or stagger email deployments for optimization.

“If you send 60,000 emails to Gmail addresess at one time, Gmail will put those straight into spam, and then likely watch your email address for future sends,” Blase warned.

He also cautioned agents in regards to asking too much of those receiving your marketing emails.

“Limit calls to action to one or two at most,” he said. “Don’t put so many ‘click here’ or ‘check out our new homepage’ links. Ideally there should be one goal and maybe restate that once or twice.”

See also: 5 rules for killer email campaigns

Organic search engine visitors

The pros of optimizing your business communications for search engines include:

• • Searchers have high intent.
  • Searchers are already a step further down your marketing funnel.
  • ROI can be huge.

The cons to hopping on the Search Engine Optimization (SEO) bandwagon include:

• • Opportunity is capped by agent search volume.
  • Good SEO takes a lot of time and resources.

“With search, your opportunity is limited by the number people searching for that exact phrase,” Blase said.