Email marketing is both an art and a science. Sure, you can follow a playbook of common strategies and glean a degree of success from it, but without finesse and nuance, your successes will only take you so far. Regardless of the approach, it’s one of the most effective tools you can employ in your arsenal — it will allow you to cover all your bases when it comes to email automation, client surveys, and general triggered email marketing.
The current global business landscape also necessitates the adoption of new practices to gain that competitive edge. In one of our recent blogs, titled “10 Best Triggered Email Campaigns for Insurance Brokers”, we covered off on the roughly $144 billion drop in insurance premiums in 2020. This is an enormous amount, equivalent to the GDP of Ukraine in 2021. Luckily, the bounceback is expected to exceed expectations in property & casualty, and commercial insurance. Growth is projected to surpass the extra $1 trillion mark by 2025. This is the time to catch this wave, and ride it smoothly to shore.
Now that we’ve piqued your curiosity, do we have your attention? Believe me, your foray into the world of email marketing doesn’t have to be complicated — our team at Pathway subscribes to Da Vinci’s notion that simplicity is the ultimate virtue. But first, why are automated email campaigns, the notion of email open rates, and the methods of email surveys worth your time, money, and effort? Globally, 3.8 billion people actively use email, over half of the world’s population, with an expected 4.3 billion users by 2023. It’s the most prevalent form of electronic communication after text messaging. Using it as a marketing tool also delivers the highest ROI of all marketing channels—$42 back for every dollar you spend.
How does this apply to the insurance agency, and your brokerage specifically? Well, if you want to remain competitive in this digital world, and provide a first-class customer experience for your clients, then email marketing is a low lift, high reward investment to make. At Pathway, we help build email systems for brokers and give them the tools to be successful. Naturally, we have lots of experience in helping others hit the ground running.
Before you get started on your insurance email marketing journey, we want to cover off the following:
- Our curated top 5 email marketing insights for insurance companies in 2021
- The 2 major pitfalls you should avoid in for your insurance company email marketing
Pathway’s Top 5 Insurance Email Marketing Insights in 2021
As we dive into the meat of the piece, it’s important to acknowledge that many of these trends have been in the making for years at this point. Even though the Covid-19 pandemic has had a significant financial impact on the insurance industry in the short term, it also has more forcefully accelerated already existing shifts such as a move to digital primacy.
We’ve curated the following points to best represent the salient realities that will play a role in the marketing strategies of insurance companies.
- Going Digital is the Future
Business/customer relationships have changed, there is no doubt about it. This has resulted in less of a focus on traditional face-to-face experiences, with the usage of apps and dynamic websites increasing substantially due to global Covid lockdowns according to the New York Times.
This has a drastic effect on the overall customer experience. If you can’t rely on the traditional means of communication and relationship building in physical proximity to a customer, a new strategy is a must.
So what’s the solution? Well, you need to adapt all your critical documentation to e-delivery formats. This means that if a client needs proof of their policy for liability reasons, they can have it at their fingertips with a simple request. Also, for example, your brokerage should have auto-renewal systems in place to ensure that customers remain up to date on key aspects of their policy and that they are always protected. These automated pre-renewal and renewal letters will be delivered to your clients without any input from your end. They are triggered by policy expiration dates, which are stored in your management system, and automatically sent out to each policyholder individually with a personalized message.
Going digital is an overarching point to many of the following trends, which detail aspects of the ongoing communications revolution.
- Don’t Get Left Behind in the Mobile Race
One of the major technological changes of the past two decades has been the seismic shift towards and the sheer ubiquity of mobile technology. This goes hand in hand with the availability of public wifi, and growing 5G networks, meaning that clients expect 24/7 access to their most important downloadable documents when and where they need them.
Consider that 61% of all emails are opened and read on a mobile device, and this number is only growing. According to Pew Research, 97% of the public in the US alone owns and uses a cellphone. Adoption has increased 85% percent since surveys first started in 2011.
Optimizing for mobile is a non-negotiable if you want your broker agency to succeed. It’s one of the most common means of accessing documentation on the fly. Failing to do so is one of the biggest mistakes you can make in your email marketing campaign. To put this in perspective, roughly 75% of recipients will delete an email without reading it completely if it’s not optimized for mobile.
- Build Trust or Go Bust
Prior to the internet as the main medium for information gathering, insurance brokers were the primary source of knowledge for most policyholders. That relationship engendered deep trust and personal ties that built the reputation of brokerages. In 2021, social media and other forms of digital information have superseded traditional modes of information communication — more often than not consumers now use website aggregators, or mobile apps to buy policies directly without agent participation. The days where agents sold policies directly to customers are fading into memory.
Out of a 1,000 person survey, only 3% rated insurance companies as “most trusted”. A further 10% labeled insurance firms as the least trustworthy — putting them on level with government organizations. The problem? A lack of ease in doing business, poor responsiveness to queries on routine matters such as commencement of service, and a general lack of personalized customer service.
In order to build trust, you’ve got to evolve and utilize the very tools which have upended traditional agent/customer relationships. Taking advantage of omnichannel communications, for example through traditional insurance firm websites, new mobile apps, and aggregators that allow for comparisons across brokerages, is a good way of appealing to the new search behaviors of today’s customers. This allows your business to cast a wide net and get eyes on pixels. Similarly, structuring your marketing efforts in the way that product manufacturers do can be a helpful exercise is following a human-centric design approach — made possible due to their keen understanding of their customers from real-time data collection through IoT devices or mobile apps. By employing data feedback systems such as satisfaction surveys, encouraging greater survey participation, email automation, and using KPIs such as email open rates to fine-tune your marketing strategy, your business can begin to customize the product to the consumer. This will build trust by showing the fact that you are receptive to client needs, and are agile enough to anticipate any new challenges they might face.
- Personalize Your Product to the Client & Tell Their Story
Consumers want more personalization. When they show up, they want their brokers to anticipate their needs, but without overwhelming them with requests in order to garner the data to do so. As a good rule of thumb — the more you know about customers, the more you can tailor experiences for them.
Seeking proper feedback through email surveys is the first step towards that next level of personalization. As part of your email strategy, include customer surveys as an automatic follow-up to previous communications. For example, if someone files a claim, a triggered email with a survey should go out in response. If you’ve just launched a new product offering, get client insights on what works, and what doesn’t. The goal is to boost survey participation as much as possible.
Word-of-mouth is the best form of free marketing you can get for your business, with 61% of people finding information from “a person like me” to be credible or very credible. So why not enlist the help of clients by asking them to provide you with publicly accessible reviews and testimonials? Turning your clients into storytellers is an elegant way to tell your story through the voice of those who use your product. It builds trust in your brand and gives you another source of feedback to use. This goes hand-in-hand with customer surveys — you can even include both as follow-up requests in your email marketing strategy.
- Let Automation do the Heavy Lifting for You
Good email marketing is hard. But, there is a way to make it easier for you, your employees, and help cut down on time and effort spent— automation.
The benefit of adopting a strategy of triggered emails (automatic messages based on performing a certain action or fulfilling certain criteria) is that clients receive email reminders relevant to them at that moment in time. The advantage is that it establishes a regular cadence of touchpoints with your clients (e.g. by automating billing reminders), saves your business the time spent crafting and sending communications, and anticipates future client needs. It is the definition of a personalized customer experience.
Pathways’ Renewal Bot allows you to do just that. Based on insurance email marketing insights data we’ve gathered from millions of emails sent by our customers, you can expect an almost 50% open rate for your emails. The industry average according to MailChimp is 21.36%. Let that sink in.
Two Insurance Pitfalls to Avoid in 2021
Being aware of key trends in the insurance industry is important, but the team at Pathway went the extra mile in adding a few crucial pitfalls to also avoid in navigating the current challenges in the industry.
- Don’t Forget to be Inclusive
The more inclusive you are, the larger the audience and pool of potential customers you can tap into. The demographic math in countries such as the US, where multicultural consumers account for 40% of the population and are armed with $3.2 trillion in spending power, makes inclusivity a key aspect of any successful insurance company marketing strategy. Thanks to globalization and border fluidity, consumers are no longer homogenous sectors.
To appeal to their audiences and remain relevant, brands today are embracing inclusive advertising. Simply affirming your values as a business can net you positive reviews from a wide range of consumers, 44% of who believe it is important for companies to align with their own set of values as well.
In your email marketing strategy and beyond, you can boost responsiveness by integrating racially diverse and disabled models in your advertising imagery, diversify your own internal team to be more representative of your customers, and even consider gender-neutral terminology. The goal here is to celebrate diversity in an authentic way and make sure consumers see themselves reflected in your outreach. Inclusivity is good for business.
- Comparisons go Beyond the Industry
It used to be that business was a much more level and siloed playing field. Not anymore. Digital and social media adoption across successive generations means that consumers now compare businesses across different sectors and industries. Consider the Apple Genius Bar or Amazon Web Services. Both have set a high bar when it comes to customer service, engagement, security, and responsiveness — to the point where there is an expectation that that quality is the norm, rather than the exception.
New entrants into the insurance and automation fields have also challenged the status quo. Large, incumbent insurers as well as smaller brokerages are having to work harder and smarter to attract and retain customers. According to a 2020 Deloitte study, 62% of insurers believe that offering non-insurance products that add value and are extensions of their core products (including areas such as home security, financial planning, and car maintenance) is the most important factor for consumers when choosing their provider. This suggests that insurers recognize that few customers — whether they be consumers or businesses — currently
find the idea or process of buying insurance an exciting prospect. New entrants to the industry are capitalizing on this by utilizing AI-backed software, and automation to offer a wider variety of services at similar costs that goes beyond the bread and butter services of traditional brokerages.
Though we briefly touched on security, it’s worth delving a little deeper into how it has become such a topic of concern in the insurance industry. Cyber-criminals recognize that insurers possess large amounts of personal information about their customers, which is very attractive to identity thieves and fraudsters. However, the shift towards more security across the industry isn’t happening quick enough. The problem is clearly illustrated in the 2020 KPMG CIO Survey: Cyber security remains the number one skills shortage for insurers (48%). The risk here is the misperception of cyberattacks as Black Swan events — still dangerous, but unlikely to happen even if the consequences are severe. Providing real-time insurance services with a seamless and frictionless customer experience requires the latest infrastructure technology and highly skilled personnel. Cybersecurity must be baked into new software and applications. According to IBM, companies in the U.S. spend almost $4 million dollars on average to respond to data breaches. That’s a lot of money taken away from your bottom line. For this reason alone, adopting the gold-standards used in the tech and financial services industry is a must to succeed. For example, Pathway’s servers are hosted on Amazon Web Services (AWS) because we know that we need the very best to safeguard our clients data. Just because you haven’t been the subject of a phishing attack yet doesn’t mean you’re off the hook in the future.
At Pathway, we pride ourselves on creating intuitive automation solutions for the most progressive insurance agencies and brokerages in the U.S., U.K., and Canada. We hope that the above distillation of the key insights and pitfalls for the insurance industry in 2021 will help give you that extra guidance your business needs to navigate today’s complex business environment. You can learn more about our work here.
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