A lot of previous articles we’ve discussed looked at things like Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter, Social media, blogging, affiliate marketing and lead generation …
However, one of the things to really focus on is email marketing which has been around as long as the internet has – if not longer.
But we still see clients that are really missing an opportunity to engage with customers and to help them upsell, cross sell, to help them with their insurance renewals and so on.
One of the things that we like to talk to new clients about especially is looking at ways of building their e-mail databases, and how that’s managed so that you’re able to have monthly touch points with customers that you normally probably wouldn’t speak to once you’ve got them as a customer.
You may talk to them during the odd MTA or maybe just before renewal time. What we like to suggest to brokers is that they really want to be talking to customers at least monthly by some kind of newsletter which we can help put that together.
It also gives you the opportunity to offer other products and services that maybe your customer base might not know you offer. We had that in our own business where we sometimes spoke to clients and they didn’t realise we did other stuff.
We still come across these situations so one of the activities that we’ve been doing for probably the last 18 months more consistently than before is sending out monthly newsletters both through our partner networks and also through our own email database.
And that’s starting to see some results – we’re getting some quite good engagement and more people connecting with us.
So it’s working for us, and we want to see that translate into working for our clients too. So if e-mail marketing and newsletters are something that you’re thinking about (or you’ve not thought about) why not drop us a line so we can help.
We are also putting together a whole range of different blueprints, ideas and workshops about how you can use email and put some of your marketing on auto pilot – the latter is great for those members of staff you have that maybe don’t like selling or don’t like talking to customers.
For example, one of the things that can be done is to actually nurture customers through an email process which does most of the selling or at least preselling for you. That way you’re getting customers ringing you as opposed to you having to outbound, so emails are great for that kind of activity.
It also allows you to connect with other means of advertising online. For example, you can upload your customer email database into Google and then use that to deliver adverts to customers at renewal time. You can do the same thing with Facebook.
The other thing that you can do with Facebook via email that we’re just starting to test now is through Facebook lead ads – you can have a lead form that gets prepopulated by Facebook.
The user just sees your ad on their mobile or on their desktop device, he/she clicks to send their information off and then that can be prepopulated into your database system. You can actually use things like Facebook to build your email marketing lists.
One of the other things that we are starting to work quite well again with Facebook is actually sending out some offers within Facebook itself.
I don’t know if you’ve seen these, but you have these “get offer” buttons with some of these ads that you click on, you have to provide information, and then you get access to some kind of offer.
Now whether that could be some kind of discount for renewal or whether that’s some kind of introductory saving or discount code it is something worth bearing in mind.
So if you have a database that you haven’t touched for a long time it could be you send out an e-mail to in order to drive people into Facebook where they probably feel a bit more comfortable.
It’s another way of cleaning your databases as people move on and change their email address. This activity could be a very useful exercise.
Hopefully that’s given you some food for thought. If you want to get in touch with us then we’d love to help.
