Daily sales & marketing tips for insurance professionals

Following my post a few weeks ago on social networking for business, I’ve seen more and more information regarding the use of social media as a marketing tool for insurance agents.

Today, I ran across this post from a new agent blog reader. Tyler makes some great points about the advantages of using social media like Facebook or Twitter to reach your target market and improve your business, namely:

• It gives your customers a chance to get to know you and your business
• It provides a venue for interacting with clients quickly and easily
• It offers metrics that help you gauge how you’re doing by the number of followers you gain
• It can help you gain credibility with clients and establish expertise in your field

But who is your target market? If it includes men, the wealthy and young adults, a new survey from Mintel Comperemedia suggests social media sites provide a marketplace for connecting with these types of clients—who are most likely already using them for insurance research and communication anyway.

According to Mintel, the results of its study showed that ”10 percent of individuals making between 75k and 100k a year, 9 percent of 25- to 34-year-olds, and 6 percent of men researched insurance policies on a social networking site.”

30 to 35 percent of people in these groups also said they prefer the Internet to an agent, says a recent press release by the company in Business Wire.

Those numbers are quite impressive! Wouldn’t you like a slice of that pie?

Though many large insurance companies are now linking up with customers on social networking sites, many smaller agencies are still hesitant to do so. But if you’re a small independent or captive agency, why not give it a shot? 

If you can find these types of customers searching online, you may be able to provide the services they need, snag a few sales, and help form long-lasting relationships that can pay off for years to come.

As Tyler notes, you have nothing to lose but a little of your time—and best of all, it’s FREE!

Have you ever noticed that everyone in the insurance industry blames the holidays for slow sales?  When I started as an agent, I was told that starting in November things were going to slow down and not to expect much to happen.  Sure enough, I noticed that business did slow down.  Things started to pick up again at the end of January, but that was a long two and a half months of slow business, and I wondered why this was so. 

 I believe expecting slow business during the holidays is a self fulfilling prophecy.  I found I was taking it easy during the last three months of the year.  I did not push myself very hard to do better because I was assuming I was not going to sell much because it was the holiday season. 

 The next year, I decided I was going to ramp up my marketing efforts during the holiday season, something most of my fellow agents did not do.  That year I had a record November, a good December, and a record January.  Business was still pretty slow during the week of Christmas, but the rest of the time I did well.  I know that we are dealing with tougher times this year because of the current state of the economy, but people still need insurance.  I challenge you to do what some other agents are not willing to do at this time of the year.  Do not sit on the sidelines and watch other agents get the business.  Ramp up your marketing and you will see results.

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.

Most agents have no qualms about asking a client for a referral, but what about asking for a friendly Yelp? Depending on where you do business, the latter might be more lucrative.

Yelp.com is web site where people can post and read reviews of local businesses, from unruly dive bars to starched CPAs. Since starting in San Francisco and few years ago, the site has grown exponentially, gathering adherents in every major city in the country, and even one across the pond.

For whatever reason, Yelp emerged from the thicket of local-review web sites as the clear winner, and every day people invest millions of hours writing helpful, funny and cool reviews. Businesses, in turn, spend an increasing amount of time monitoring what people are saying, for both PR purposes and market research.

Because of the site’s popularity and the strong influence of social proof, a positive review from a credible Yelper can generate a tsunami of new business, and while the majority of reviews are of food and retail establishments, more and more people are writing about their experiences in the insurance and financial services realm.

So I recommend registering your agency with Yelp and encouraging your favorite clients to write a review.

Think about the possibility of being able to say this to a prospect: “I pride myself on my dedication to my clients; check out what people have said about my customer service on Yelp.”

That would be persuasive!

Writing for the New Yorker, economist James Surowiecki notes that the FIRE economy–which stands for finance, insurance, and real estate–shrank for the first time in 16 years. “Since 1980, this sector’s share of the economy has grown by almost half. Now, apparently, the worm has turned,” says Surowiecki.

Looking at credit default swaps and mortgage-backed securities, it’s easy to understand how and why the finance and real estate markets are shrinking. And the insurance industry, of course, is so interconnected with those two that it was only a matter of time before it started to feel the pain as well, even if it wasn’t as reckless as its siblings in the banking and property sectors.

Surowiecki looks back at the last 10-20 year period as the “financialization” of our domestic economy, when Wall Street became an economic driver in its own right, as opposed to a follower. And that’s where things went wrong.

“Wall Street needs to recognize that its proper role is, as it has been in the past, to follow the real economy, rather than trying to drive it,” says Surowiecki. ” During the housing bubble, the financial sector essentially tried to create reality. Now’s the time for it to respond to reality instead.”

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.

The Consumerist reports that one unlucky person received 16 State Farm mailers in one month.

The recipient of the unwanted advances, a guy named Terry, contacted an agent listed in one of the letters in an attempt to stop the deluge. The agent replied that the mailers came from corporate and there was nothing he could do to stop the onslaught.

So Terry sent a pleading email to corporate. He received this response, which is both helpful and sort of depressing at the same time:

Dear Terry,
Thank you for contacting State Farm regarding our Privacy Policy. No, but there are ways you can reduce the number of solicitations you receive from companies with whom you do not have a customer relationship if they are members of the Direct Marketing Association. You can write to the following addresses: • For marketing solicitations received by mail, write to: Mail Preference Service, c/o Direct Marketing Association, PO Box 9008, Farmingdale, NY 11735-9008. • For marketing solicitations received by telephone, write to: Telephone Preference Service, c/o Direct Marketing Association, PO Box 9014, Farmingdale, NY 11735-9014. You may also contact specific companies and ask that they do not contact you either through direct mail or telephone solicitations. This will not stop calls relating to your existing relationship with the company. Certain states may have state-run programs whereby individuals can be placed on a “do-not-call” list to avoid marketing calls from businesses with whom they do not have an existing relationship. Your state will provide details on how to be placed on such a list. The Privacy Policy can be viewed online at If you have further questions regarding the State Farm Privacy Policy or would like to indicate your do not share preference, please call the State Farm Privacy Information Line at 800-865-6035.

State Farm Insurance®
Internet Support Representative

On one hand, State Farm producers ought to be happy that corporate is spending big bucks in an attempt to generate new business. On the other, these producers ought to demand that those big bucks be spent in a better way. [On, say, internet leads from InsureMe—where consumers are already looking for insurance.]

Despite a mixed track record at best, direct mail continues to litter mailboxes and annoy recipients. Scanning the comments to the Consumerist article, I learned that some people are so irritated by junk mail that they use return envelopes to send candy wrappers back to the soliciting company. Another commenter says he turns junk mail into ‘fireplace logs.’

That’s where your advertising dollars are going, State Farm. Right into Blueskylaw’s fireplace.

Twitter is a web application that let’s people share tiny snippets of information about themselves with friends and family. (Some call it microblogging.)

Twitter’s search engine is particularly fascinating because it lets you take the collective pulse of thousands of people—in real time. So if you ever want to get into the head of the average consumer, just do a Twitter search on “insurance.” You’ll get a ton of results—and they’re fascinating. People have passionate feelings when it comes to insurance. As you might guess, a lot of them are negative. But it’s equally clear that people understand the importance of having adequate coverage.

Anyway, do a search for yourself and see what people talk about when they talk about insurance. (I don’t recommend starting an account unless you’ve got above-average time-management skills. Twitter is famous for its addictive quality.)

We just added a new article to the resource center that may interest you: Tips for Email Mastery.

Email is fast becoming (or already is) the dominant medium for communication. Call it impersonal, call it lazy, email is not going anywhere, so working to improve your writing skills is an endeavor that will bring significant rewards.

So check out these Tips for Email Mastery. And learn how to:

• Write better subject lines
• Set the right tone
• Get a response

While it’s not essential that you wax poetic in your every electronic correspondence, it is essential that you communicate clearly and persuasively. As legendary copywriter Donna Baier Stein said, “Response is the end goal of everything you write.”