In recent years, many insurance agents and brokers have decided to change from print delivery of their client newsletters to email. When you stop and think about it, that decision is astonishingly self-defeating.
A good open rate for email is 25% to 30%. Anything better is extraordinary and usually only temporary, as the majority of your recent email opt-ins eventually stop noticing your emails.
Who’s got time for all that email anyway?
Funny how people still seem to have the time for regular mail, though. For one thing, there’s just less of it these days — since everyone is using email.
So why do so many agents opt to reduce their visibility by as much as two-thirds or three-quarters by switching from print to email delivery?
Obviously, as a newsletter publisher I’ve grappled with this. We publish both print and email newsletters because we recognize agents want both. But we also know that print pulls better. I think what makes email marketing so appealing to people is how it ties in to the technological revolution that agents are still trying to come to grips with. Everyone believes in automation. Everything should done by computers and of course be paperless. Well, it follows that newsletters, too, should be paperless. Right? That’s why email is better. It’s paperless.
And there are some advantages to email: identifying who opens your newsletters, recording which articles they read and, since they’re digital, faster and more efficient delivery. But these advantages hardly compare to the benefits of having your message seen by three or four times more people.
Technology gets to be like the carpenter whose only tool is a hammer and everything starts looking like a nail.
Marshall McLuhan said the medium is the message. But he was wrong. The message is the message. If you really want to get your message across, you need to use the best medium for delivering the message.
And here’s a bonus advantage to consider. While most of your competitors are getting sucked in by the paperless myth, your paper newsletters make you stand out from the crowd even more.
Is there still a role for email newsletters though? Very much so. Read my next post.