What’s the key to a good closing ratio? Is it persistence, picking up the lunch tab, knowing when to ask for the order or having a better product, price or personality than the competition?
None of the above. It all boils down to three rules: Three very simple, but profound marketing ideas for insurance agents who take a common sense approach to sales.
- Super-qualify your prospect
- Don’t be a human quote engine
- Know when to walk away.
It’s surprising how many agents allow prospects to treat them like commodity providers, as if they’re selling gravel or potatoes by the pound. If you’re a true professional, act like one. Don’t give out quotes like someone hawking cheese samples at Costco; analyze the situation and offer your services like any other professional would, within a context of understanding your market and based on mutual respect and expectations. It’s a process:
- Start with super-qualified leads. This could mean working a niche market you’re familiar with — and preferably where you’re recognized as an expert, getting referrals from satisfied customers who support you with their testimonials, or having people approach you on the strength of how effectively you’ve demonstrated your professionalism in social media and other venues. A very effective way of developing and nurturing a target market is by sending out an insurance newsletter regularly. Check out which Smarts Publishing newsletter would work best
Focus on Your Insurance Professionalism to Help People Understand the Insurance Aspects of the Pandemic
Showcase your insurance professionalism by helping people understand the numerous insurance-related pandemic developments.
It’s interesting how often insurance is playing a key role in the pandemic. Many of the controversies that involve insurance are not easily understood by most people.
Have you considered this may be an excellent time to show off your insurance professionalism? Insurance-related pandemic developments are putting you front and center. You are not just an insurance sales person. You are a trusted insurance advisor who keeps clients informed.
Above all, since most other insurance professionals are probably doing a poor job of it, you will shine by comparison.
For instance, consider these recent developments in various insurance lines:
Workers Compensation
In Congress and state legislatures, there is legislation to:
- protect businesses from COVID-19 related liability.
- make businesses protect worker betters.
Many states have passed presumption laws. These stipulate that “essential workers” who contract COVID-19 did so as a result of their job.
Liability Insurance
Many businesses have started to require customers and workers to sign Pandemic liability waivers. Are these legal? Will they hold up if challenged in court?
Business Interruption Insurance
- In most cases, property and business income policies do cover businesses that have been shut down because of viruses or pandemics. In fact, in many cases, policies specifically exclude these perils. However, some lawyers are working to get around these exclusions.
- In addition, state legislatures and Congress are working on proposals to write legislation forcing insurance companies to pay business interruption losses.
Employee Benefits
The CARES Act passed by Congress makes it easier for people to borrow from retirement funds during the pandemic without penalties.
Directors & Liability Insurance
There is concern about lawsuits brought against companies for not taking proper precautions to prevent or alert employees and the public of COVID-19 related contamination. In addition, lawyers anticipate there may be suits regarding whether government funds provided for COVID-19 related expenses were properly used.
Travel Insurance
There has been controversy with many Trip Cancellation and Extended Medical claims.
Overall, there may be availability and pricing issues arising out of many of controversies in the not distant future. Are you keeping clients informed?
Showcase Your Professionalism!
Albert Einstein (among others) said, “in the midst of every crisis, lies great opportunity.” In other words, are you helping your clients understand the Insurance aspects of the pandemic?
At Smarts newsletters we follow all these stories in our various edition. We’ll keep your insurance professionalism front and center with your clients and prospects.
17 Ways Insurance Newsletters Can Build Your Business in 2021
INSURANCE NEWSLETTERS — ESPECIALLY PRINT NEWSLETTERS — SHOULD BE IN EVERY AGENT’S MARKETING TOOLKIT.
Insurance newsletters, in my humble opinion, are as critical to a successful insurance agency marketing strategy as EGGS to an OMELET.
Why are newsletters so effective? For one thing, they align with almost every influence trigger identified in Robert Cialdini’s book Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion, Revised Edition
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People are complicated jumbles of emotion and reason with specific needs or “pain points.”You need to satisfy those pain points before they are even READY to do business with you — let alone BUY from you.
Sean D’Souza, author of The Brain Audit: Why Customers Buy (and Why They Don’t)
, says there are seven psychological barriers to remove before someone will buy from you. He compares getting past those psychological barriers to an airline passenger getting his baggage from the carousel. If the passenger cannot get all the bags, he waits.
What baggage is holding back your business? How can you improve your prospect CONVERSION rate and your client RETENTION rate ?
Insurance marketing consultant Michael Jans likes to point out that
5% improvement in RETENTION on a million dollar book of business
= $1,310,849 extra PROFIT!
Here are 17 ways INSURANCE NEWSLETTERS, especially PRINT NEWSLETTERS, can help you remove the psychological and other barriers that are preventing your business from growing faster.
Insurance Newsletters establish AUTHORITY.
“We are trained from birth that obedience to proper AUTHORITY is right,” says Cialdini. People seek AUTHORITY for comfort and often to avoid making decisions themselves about things they don’t feel well informed enough about.If the content of your agency newsletter is professional, informative, well-written and easy to understand, it will project AUTHORITY. People like knowing people they can trust.
PRINT Newsletters create RECIPROCITY.
Even when someone gives you something of value without any obligation to reciprocate, the reality is that you still feel some sense of obligation.The reason PRINT and not email newsletters create RECIPROCITY is because emails have no perceived value per se. People get 100s of emails every day. Whether that email is a newsletter or not makes no difference. People know it costs next to nothing to send email newsletters.With PRINT the recipient knows you paid for printing and postage. While the vast majority of agents would have just sent an email, the PRINT recipient feels you value the relationship enough to provide something more valuable.
Insurance Newsletters show COMMITMENT and CONSISTENCY.
When you send newsletters at regular intervals, you prove CONSISTENCY and COMMITMENT to a schedule. This satisfies a real need people have. COMMITMENT and CONSISTENCY are especially important to insurance buyers because they rely on their agent to protect their family and assets. Two more psychological factors important to persuasion, according to Cialdini’s book.
Insurance newsletters facilitate the Strategy of Preeminence philosophy of serving the best interests of your clients.
Marketing expert Jay Abraham created the concept of Strategy of Preeminence to explain a sales philosophy that focuses on serving the best interests of others, in this case, the interest of clients, above all. “Preeminence extols, advocates, champions the role of … the customer.” “You get preeminence by subordinating your needs and totally focusing on the [needs of the client].”
The Strategy of Preeminence is a powerful yet simple strategy that almost single-handedly can transform your business or career. It makes people enthusiastic to do business with you instead of your competitors. It will give you an uncanny insight into what people want, and why they act and react in various ways. It will turn clients into, literally, friends for life. and it will strengthen your passion and connection to everyone with whom you associate.
— Jay Abraham, Getting Everything You Can Out of All You’ve Got: 21 Ways You Can Out-Think, Out-Perform, and Out-Earn the Competition
The strategy of preeminence makes you the fiduciary of your client. If you really care about your clients, part of your commitment to them is to provide information that helps them live a better life and run a more successful business. Newsletters are the perfect tool for this.
Insurance Newsletters educate insurance buyers.
Unfortunately, we tend to overestimate how well people understand insurance. Too often, they don’t even know what they don’t know.- Only 14% of people understand the four basic health insurance terms: “deductible,” “copay,” “coinsurance” and “maximum out of pocket.”
- 37% of 18- to 29-year olds think car insurance doesn’t pay if the driver causes the loss.
- 44% think a red car costs more to insure than a white car.
Insurance Newsletters reduce agent E&O.
The more clients understand the products they buy and become aware of the products available to them, the less likely they are to file claims against you if a claim isn’t covered or fully paid.
Insurance Newsletters build awareness with people who don’t know you yet, like prospects.
Nothing makes the point better than this famous ad by McGraw-Hill that first ran nearly 60 years ago.Copyright ©The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc. No redistribution or reproduction without the permission of The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc.
After sending your newsletter to a prospect for several months, call them. Ask them how they like the newsletter. Refer to a specific article about something you think would be important to them. Then ask if you can quote their business.
Insurance Newsletters — especially PRINT newsletters — keep you top of mind.
They’re sticky! When someone gets a print newsletter in the mail, they see your branding, if nothing else. But because it has physical dimensions (unlike email), the PRINT newsletter reader is more likely to skim or read through all of it, finding the articles that interest them. PRINT newsletters also get passed around, sometimes four or five times. It also helps that 5X more people see a PRINT newsletter than an email newsletter. A good open rate for email is 20%; almost everybody who gets a PRINT newsletter at least sees it. PRINT cuts through the digital clutter like a hot knife through butter.“In this day and age of technology and everything being digital, it is much more personal and authentic to have a great looking and informative customized newsletter like the one Smarts Publishing creates for us, to share with our customers by mail.”
— Cindy Koebele, President, TitleSmart, Minneapolis, Minn.
“It’s the little things that make a big difference.”
Newsletters are part of an all-encompassing communications strategy.
It takes multiple touches to stay top of mind throughout the year. Your communications strategy should also include birthday cards, special announcements, calendars, webinars, community events and phone calls before renewal time. Even though newsletters are often the most important part of that strategy.“One of the most popular things our customers like about us is the print newsletters. They like our print newsletters most of all — more than the birthday cards we send everyone and even more than the people who handle their accounts.”— Larry France, President, France & Associates, Worthington, OH
Use Newsletters to showcase clients.
Feature clients and their businesses in your newsletter. Write an article about them. Then give them extra copies to send to their contact list. You both get publicity. You validate your client. You get in front of your client’s clients, who probably don’t know you yet and who may decide to contact you because they trust your client.
Use Newsletters as standalone publications.
Hand them out at seminars. Put them in proposals. Put them in your waiting room. Give them to people you meet. Take them to networking meetings, especially if a current topic is relevant.
Send Newsletters to clients of other professionals..
Swap lists with accountants and other professionals in your networking and BNA groups. Ask these colleagues to write a short note introducing you and recommending your services to their client list and send them your newsletter. Do the same for them and their newsletter.
Use Newsletters to celebrate your staff..
Feature them in your newsletter. Write about their hobbies, their professional accomplishments, their jobs and service to clients and community. As Scott Addis built his Philadelphia insurance agency from scratch to $40 million a year over the twenty-year period before it was sold to BB&T, he featured employees, new and old, in every edition of The Addis Company’s Managing Risk newsletter, published by Smarts. In #4 above, I mentioned Jay Abraham’s Strategy of Preeminence in connection with clients, but Preeminence applies to your relationship with your staff as well.
Use newsletters to showcase your commitment to the community service.
Feature a story about how people in your firm have volunteered or collected donations for a community cause. Practice social responsibility. This is very important to consumers these days. People want to know you’re doing things to support the community and that you’re giving back.“A key component to the success of The Addis Group has been the firm’s Stakeholder Intimacy and Relationship Management System, which consists of “intimate touches” throughout the year in the form of PRINT NEWSLETTERS, e-newsletters, educational workshops, service plans, stewardship reviews, golf outings, and timely gifts”— Scott Addis, author, Summit: Reach Your Peak and Elevate Your Customers’ Experience
Repurpose Newsletter Content.
Post the articles to your social media sites. Get as much visibility as you can. Smarts gives newsletter clients free access to articles in all back issues. Choose from hundreds of articles to post on Facebook and other social sites. Add a personal comment as an introduction and copy and paste the article.
Use PRINT Newsletter distribution with other communications.
Take advantage of your monthly distribution opportunity. Include a “free standing insert” with information about special products, seminar announcements or anything else. You should also include a reply card, as a reminder to readers that you want them to contact you. A reply card is published with each newsletter. It has check boxes next to the title of each article that appeared in the newsletter, which readers can check off and request more information about.
Make Newsletters part of your branding.
Include your corporate logo in the header of course. But use your corporate colors, too, for the pages of your PRINT newsletters. Give the newsletter a unique name. You might even want to incorporate the name of your agency in the newsletter title: “Your Benefits Updates from ABC Insurance,” for example. You can also personalize your PRINT newsletters with client names and addresses using variable printing.
If an agency NEWSLETTER can help you improve CONVERSION and RETENTION by just a tiny fraction, wouldn’t it be worth a small investment of $1 per client per month or less?
Request a FREE SAMPLE and order form now.How to Find Insurance Target Markets
I think it’s a given by now that target marketing is smart marketing. If you’re not yet a believer in target insurance marketing, skip past the eight ways listed here about how to develop a target market and read the wrap-up section. But I’m assuming you are already enlightened and just want to jump in and get started.
So how do you find target markets? Here are 8 potential opportunities :
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- Look at businesses or clients you are already serving. Take a close look at your book of business. Do you write a lot of printers, restaurants or artisan contractors? Have you had a lot of success providing life insurance for young families? Is long-term disability a market you know well? Maybe you have only one or two clients of a certain type of business, but others in your firm also a write a few of these clients. Leverage your firm’s reputation as a specialist in this target market.
- Consider emerging industries or businesses, especially in your area. Cybersecurity has been a growing concern for the past couple of decades and it just keeps getting more important. The benefit of developing deep expertise in one area is that you can use it to leverage the rest of the account. Write all the ancillary insurance as well. With cybersecurity, banks are an obvious example. But say you provide cybersecurity insurance for a manufacturer, you could also provide all the other property and casualty needs, including workers comp and employee benefits.
The easiest, most consistent way to stay front and center in the minds of your target markets is by sending out a monthly newsletter. Smarts partners with agents all over the nation who appreciate the advantage newsletters give them with their target markets. Request some free samples and see why.- Did you work in a different industry before you started working as an insurance producer? Do you have contacts you made while working in the restaurant business, construction or pharmaceutical sales that could be leveraged into insurance sales? Your knowledge of another industry could be your golden ticket.
- Are you interested in a particular insurance product? I got my start as a broker working as the protege of a producer who was known as Mr. Business Interruption. He knew everything there was to know about B.I. He taught it, lectured about it and was known for his depth of knowledge all over the West Coast. Obviously, he didn’t just write the B.I. He also wrote the rest of the account: property, liability and workers comp.
- Or maybe you have a personal story that makes you passionate about selling a certain kind of policy. One producer tells the story of how his mother would not have lost her business if she had purchased disability insurance to give her the extra income she needed while she couldn’t work for several months. If this was your story, you might become a kind of evangelist for making sure this doesn’t happen to other small business owners.
- Observe the demographics in your area. Life insurance opportunities exist with new families. What about long-term care for aging boomers? One producer looks for seniors who own CDs. He shows them the probate advantages of purchasing a life insurance policy for their beneficiaries, if they have any; or, if they don’t, the advantages of an annuity.
- What do demographic or political trends tell you? The ACA has been a challenge that’s redirected the focus of a lot of agents. Right now the economy looks poised to add new jobs in manufacturing. Is this an opportunity? The demographic shift of baby boomers moving into retirement the past few years has opened a lot of opportunity for agents who want to focus on senior benefits: medicare, long-term care, critical illness, annuities, etc.
- You don’t have to restrict yourself to one target market, of course. You might end up having specializations in several. You might want to work in several related target markets, which is typically the approach that many personal lines agencies take, providing a range of products to families and individuals throughout the life cycle. An agent could start by providing a young man with auto insurance, then go on to provide homeowners, life insurance, long-term disability, long-term care and annuities throughout that individual’s lifetime.
Still debating whether target marketing makes sense for insurance producers? Here’s my take on why this is the best approach to take unless you already have a developed book of businss.
- Target marketing allows you to use your time efficiently and provides a much better return on investment. Have you ever tried to sell a product to a customer when you had no prior knowledge or experience with the industry or the product? The opportunity presented itself and you took advantage of being in the right place at the right time. Or so you thought. Then a competitor who specializes in the industry or the product suddenly turned up. The competitor offered a better product and made a better presentation and you were left feeling maybe a little embarrassed. But the worst part of all was you had probably invested a lot of time and energy getting up to speed, learning all about the new industry or product so you could make the sale. With target marketing, producers — and their staffs — use their time and resources much more productively because they know their market.
- By focusing your efforts on the markets that you have studied and deal with on a regular basis, you build your reputation and credibility more easily. When you use sales tools such as newsletters, brochures, and Internet marketing, you are aiming at a very defined, comparatively small market. When you do this consistently, making a series of impressions that underscore your expertise and interest in doing business, you’re building your brand. Then when the opportunity arises, your prospect will recognize you and they will be much more likely to want to do business with you.
- By targeting certain groups, whether demographic or trade groups, you develop premium volume in particular lines with similar risk characteristics. This can make negotiating with underwriters easier and more efficient. In some instances, understanding your market well and building a sizeable volume in it may even allow you to leverage your book of business into a special program that you could wholesale to other agents.
- Producers who specialize by trade group often comment on how much satisfaction they feel serving a particular industry. Many come to feel as if they are part of the target industry itself, belonging to its associations, serving on committees with industry members and generally developing a strong bond with the group. This can offer great personal and professional satisfaction.
Even if you’re a seasoned producer with a well-developed book of business, think about targeting your future efforts if you have never done so before. You’ll work smarter not harder.
17 Insurance Newsletter Uses That Might Surprise You
Have you ever read one of those articles about all the different ways you can use toothpaste or coffee filters or coat hangers for things you never thought of? I mean besides the obvious use for which they were intended? Like using coffee filters to polish your shoes? Or roasting marshmallows with coat hangers? Things you might not have thought of?
Well, I’ve got 17 newsletter uses you might not have thought of. These insurance newsletter uses might surprise you and will definitely help you get more value from your investment:
- Put newsletters in your waiting room.
- Include newsletters in presentations.
- Always have a newsletter in your pocket ready to give to a new acquaintance.
- Be sure every employee gets a copy, so they’re not caught off guard if a client calls about something they read — and just as important, to educate staff.
- Swap lists with accountants and other professionals; send your newsletters to their lists and vice verse.
- Showcase a valued client with a custom article and give the client extra copies to distribute to their lists.
- Repurpose articles from your newsletter by posting them on Facebook and other social media (Smarts provides you with the text of the articles in each issue of your newsletter for this purpose).
- Include a sign-up form on your website, but don’t call it a newsletter sign-up. Tell people you’ll provide “valuable updates” on critical insurance issues that affect their business, like healthcare legislation updates and advice about how to save on car and home insurance.
- Write articles for your newsletter about your staff. This will boost their egos, reward their work ethic and reinforce their support of the newsletter.
- Use your newsletter to support community causes. This can widen your circulation, get you quoted in local newspapers and earn accolades from community leaders and businesses.
- Make your newsletter distinctive by not only having your own header, but printing the newsletter with your own corporate colors and design elements.
- Make you E&O carrier aware of how you try to educate and keep your clients informed with your newsletters.
- Post your newsletters to your website. The problem with most insurance agency websites is they lack dynamic content. Posting your newsletter to your site means content is updated monthly.
- Keep back issues of your newsletters on your website. This can be a handy reference tool for clients and agents. (Smarts streaming website service includes 12 back issues.)
- Repurpose newsletter content by providing articles on relevant topics to trade association publications and journals in industries you target.
- Promote key products with articles or ads in your newsletter.
- Let readers know that you reward people who make referrals with a Starbucks gift certificate or something similar. Direct them to the page on your website where they can make the referral.
That’s enough for now. I’ve got to go brush my headlight covers with toothpaste so they sparkle.
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