And why most insurance marketers are underutilizing it.
Marketers know the biggest challenge today is standing out from all the noise the consumers are bombarded with. Consumers are blasted with advertisements on TV, in person, on the web and definitely in their inbox.
Smart insurance marketers know one way to disrupt the noise is to tap into a thought already in the consumer’s mind.
That’s where Triggered marketing comes in.
Examples of Triggered Marketing
Triggered emails (and other medias) are exactly what they sound like – emails that are automatically triggered based on specific events in the customer’s life or relationship with the insurance agency or brokerage.
Examples:
- Got a new client? Trigger a Welcome sequence of emails.
- Lost a client? Win them back!
- Customer had a claim? Maintain contact to ensure satisfaction
- Website service request? Follow-up in a meaningful way.
- Huge customer rate increase? Proactively engage the customer.
Problems with Broadcast Marketing
Broadcasts are the tried and true way for an email marketer to deliver a quick boost in sales. But there are a number of challenges associates with broadcasting clients.
- Are a short-term strategy requiring effort each time
- Are responsible for most spam complaints
- Generate a large percentage of unsubscribes
- Messages are usually company focused in timing and content, resulting in more complaints and a lower response
- Require a significant amount of marketing resource to create
Where Triggered Marketing Comes In
Triggered emails, by comparison, avoid most of these issues.
- Can be setup once and run continuously, consistently producing results
- Generate far fewer complaints
- And fewer opt-outs
- Messages are timely, customer focused and generate value
- And because the marketing runs automatically in the background the marketing team can focus on other efforts when the system is setup
Why Triggered Marketing is Underutilized in the Insurance Industry
Given all the benefits of Triggered Marketing, why is it underutilized in the insurance industry? The biggest challenge is unlocking the power of data. Agency Management Systems aren’t designed to be marketing focused platforms. So many agents rely on exporting data to generic systems like Constant Contact or Hubspot, but by the time the data reaches these systems there’s almost no intelligence left.
In order for Triggered Marketing to run effectively, your data must be streamed to your marketing system. Then your marketing system can respond to your pre-programmed Triggers and effectively communicate to your customers and prospects at the right time.
Agency Revolution Fuse™ has 14 Triggers built into the system, plus the ability to respond to any data your AMS stream to Connect. We’ve engineered the most advance software in the industry to stream data from six different management systems to Connect so insurance agents and brokers can get started quickly.
A Final Word on Broadcast Messages
You may be asking – are blast messages completely bad? And the answer is clearly no. In a future blog I’ll discuss the best times to do blast messaging and how to avoid mistakes that can harm your reputation.
Lucas Jans is the Vice President of Product at Agency Revolution. Lucas leads development of Agency Revolution’s marketing automation software, Connect.
One More Thing! What do you think? How will you and your peers use this to grow your agency or brokerage? Share your thoughts in the comment section below, subscribe to get updates delivered to you and *please share this if you found it informative.