Daily sales & marketing tips for insurance professionals

I just love email as a communication tool! (I could write a few pages on the pros and cons of it, but I won’t subject you to that!)

There are tons of great information on the Web that provide tips on professional etiquette and email. Since email is a vital tool with Internet leads—and one form of communication with InsureMe—I think it’s appropriate to touch on a few reminders about email and your InsureMe account:

1. Please remember, you can email us with any questions/comments at leads@insureme.com. However, if you have an urgent matter, calling us is the best option.
2. If you receive a denied credit request and have a question or concern about it, just click on the reply option (which will be directed to leads@insureme.com), and we will review the lead again.
3. If you need to create more than one email for lead delivery, please call the InsureMe agent service department, and we can set that up for you (1-800-467-8736, option ‘2’).
4. If you cannot initially reach a lead via phone, send them an email—even if it’s a quick message to let them know you will be contacting them.

Now for ‘netiquette.’” I cannot stress how important tone, grammar, spelling and font are when sending a professional email to consumers, because a poorly constructed email can affect whether or not a consumer wants to do business with you. (As we all know, spell check does not distinguish the context of many words.) It helps to re-read an email or have someone else conduct a quick check before clicking ’send.’

Our own Jeb Foster provided excellent tips for professional email etiquette in the InsureMe agent resource center. It’s titled, Tips for Email Mastery. Check it out!

Everyone purchases insurance to safeguard themselves against the great Unknown, against what might happen to them one day.  But there is one thing that I can guarantee is likely to happen to each and every individual reading this, and you likely don‘t have a safeguard in place against it.  No matter how safe you think you are, no matter what protection you think you have to keep this from happening, one day – one day­ - your email will fail you.  I’ve seen it happen dozens, nay, hundreds of times.  It doesn’t matter what kind of email you have, public or private; at one time or another they all will stop delivering your valuable emails to you.  Just this last Tuesday, 9/1/09, Google’s Gmail suffered an almost 2 hour system-wide outage due to simple system upgrades.

This is why it is so vital for business users to adopt backup practices for their email accounts.  A missed email from a friend is an inconvenience, but if you currently purchase leads from a company like InsureMe, that’s a missed business transaction, and plain old money down the drain.

Fortunately, all is not lost.  Though we can’t prevent these outages from occurring, we can take out our own personal insurance against them.  One way to protect yourself is to always have a secondary email address on file with anyone you do business with (banks, credit cards, etc.)  Companies like InsureMe will happily forward your leads to multiple email addresses at no additional cost.  Yes, you might end up just deleting the duplicate lead unless there is an issue, but wouldn’t you rather pay for the lead once and have the assurance that you’re always receiving it than end up paying for a lead you didn’t receive because your email is unreliable?  Remember that if you decide to create a backup email that it should exist on a different server.  For example, I have one Hotmail and one Gmail email account.  If you haven’t had a chance to get around to that backup email yet and your email does crash, don’t worry!  InsureMe has created some extra protection for you: you can also access all of your leads real-time (i.e. hot off the press) by using Agent Connection, located in your InsureMe account, which will deliver your leads to your desktop similar to email.  To access Agent Connection, you simply need to log into your InsureMe account, no installing, no extra sign ups required.  So while we keep our fingers crossed that it isn’t our email that stops working next time, do yourself a favor and give yourself a little extra insurance.

ComScore released its annual report on online insurance shopping last month. The company presented its findings at the Auto Insurance Report 2009, sponsored by Risk Information, Inc.

A whopping 32 million consumers used the Internet to submit a quote request for auto insurance last year, which was about the same number as the previous year. In the years before, comScore reported the growth rate of quote requests increasing about 15 percent annually.

Last year, of course, was a different kind of year. But even in this economic retraction era, seven percent more people purchased auto insurance online than the previous year.

And there are millions using the Internet to start researching insurance before they request a quote. According to Google, in April the keyword ‘auto insurance’ was used as a search word 30 million times. ‘Auto insurance quote’ and ‘auto insurance quotes’ were shown to comprise another 6 million or so searches.

These statistics fluctuate and aren’t 100 percent accurate; but suffice it to say, there are a huge number of potentially interested consumers checking out insurance through the search engines.

Of course, with the growing number of consumers online, there is a growing (exploding) number of insurance marketers online. If a consumer enters the search term ‘auto insurance’ in Google, there are over 90 million matches (links to Web pages).

So in essence, there are 90 million sources of information for people researching insurance offerings (98 million for ‘car insurance’). The search engines list those 90 million links in a particular order, based on a number of (secret) criteria; but you can imagine it takes a lot of marketing savvy to rank in the first couple of page results. Most consumers don’t venture much past the first few listings.

The Internet has become congested with information—so much so that it is very difficult for consumers to find what they are looking for. But it is even worse for small businesses—and insurance agents—to try and be noticed when there are so many distractions.

But watch out for someone who promises guaranteed results: no one can guarantee anything with search engines, and there are plenty of shysters taking people for a ride when it comes to Internet marketing services.

Internet insurance shopping: friend or foe? The verdict is still out.

Another Friday afternoon– to be used to improve your effectiveness next week and going forward.

I just finished listening to the Insurance Communication Marketing podcast on “The New Rules of Marketing”. It was very basic information about different methods to get your name out on the internet. After getting past the personal challenge of getting the voice recording timed with the slide presentation, I found the podcast to be a great reminder of some things we should be thinking about. If you want to check it out, click here.

Friday afternoons seem like a good time to learn something new. And, one of the wonderful aspects of the internet is that it evolves so quickly, we all need to continually seek out new sources for updating our personal knowledge. No sitting back and resting on your laurels (however you rest on laurels).

Bankrate.com, which is InsureMe’s parent company, held its partner conference this week. Bankrate.com is based in Palm Beach, Florida, so the conference was held at the historic Breakers Resort. Turquoise ocean, pounding surf, flower blossoms in abundance, and blue skies.

The keynote speaker was Lee Rainie, Director of the Pew Internet and American Life Project. Since 1999, this organization has examined how people’s internet use affects their families, communities, health care education, work place and political life.

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