Improve your Marketing Swing

Who says you can’t learn great marketing tips from your kids? With spring in the air, our marketing manager, Lisa Merriman, was recently asked to coach her son’s little league baseball team. And therein lies a lesson for all us. Here’s how she tells it:

“It was all too obvious when these very young kids (ages 6-7) came to practice that first day that they had a lot to learn. With much trepidation, I started to teach them some baseball fundamentals. Who would have guessed that those kids would also teach me something about the way you and I do business.

“Their swing was stiff-armed, only swinging half way with no follow-through. They couldn’t connect with the ball, and when they did, it certainly didn’t go ‘out of the park’! With a lot of work, and a little patience, they learned that there are many elements that go into ‘the perfect swing’. You can’t just stand there and move the bat in the general direction of the ball and expect anything meaningful to happen. For one thing, your swing will be far too late to connect most of the time. You’ve got to anticipate the ball’s arrival and place your bat strategically at the sweet spot with a full swinging motion, among a host of other considerations. It takes time, but gradually my kids are acquiring the skill that will help them one day hit a few out of the park.

“And so I thought, using newsletters as a marketing tool is a lot like learning how to swing a bat. If you just send out your newsletters month after month, with no follow-through, swinging with no particular strategy in mind, you’re not going to have an effective ‘marketing swing’. At best you might hit a single now and then, but certainly not the home run you are looking for.” So what’s your newsletter marketing swing like? Are you swinging aimlessly, with no particular strategy in place? If you’re sending out newsletters to existing clients for customer communication and retention purposes, that’s one thing. But if you expect to acquire new business that way, you need a plan. Most successful agents use a plan that involves sending out newsletters with a telephone follow-up. There are two simple steps to this plan:

1. Send your prospect your newsletter on a regular basis (preferably monthly) for several months. This accomplishes several objectives: you familiarize them with your branding, including the name of your firm and its corporate identity; you establish your concern for communicating with clients about topics of interest in insurance and risk management; and you indicate your interest in doing business with them.
   
   
2. Once they’ve become familiar with your branding and your reliability after several months, give them a call. Ask how they’re enjoying the newsletter. Most importantly, ask for an appointment to meet with them to review their insurance program. Or maybe you’ve got something important to show them that will make life easier for them, like on-line service and management tools or an approach to customer service that’s unique to your agency (your “branding”). Or maybe even play it low key on the first call and just ask if the newsletter is getting to the right person. As you build trust, your likelihood improves of getting a chance to quote or even get a broker of record letter.

So don’t just take a few wild swings at new business with your newsletters. Develop a plan and follow through with it.

Email or paper? What’s the best format for your newsletter?

From your point of view the biggest difference between an email newsletter and a paper newsletter is probably the cost. If you don’t count the cost to write or design it, it’s almost free to email a newsletter.

There are several hurdles you face with an email newsletter though:

1. Getting past the gatekeeper, i.e. the spam filter. Even if you have a relationship with the addressee their spam filter may not like certain characteristics of your email. Supposedly ISPs are getting less nitpicky about words like free, no risk, guaranteed and insurance — yes, insurance has been known to be a prime spam filter trigger — as well techniques like all CAPS. Reputation based filtering is becoming more the norm, however, where the most important items for the spam filter to consider are the reputations of the sending ISP and the sender (you). Most agents with opt-in lists don’t have problems with this, but if you need some tips on avoiding the spam filter, read Wendy Roth’s article at iMedia Connection.
   
   
2. The subject line has got to grab ‘em. Short is probably best. Marketing pro Justin Palmer suggests tips like including the recipient’s name, special characters (&#+@, as in “++Identity Theft On The Rise++”), CAPS, and truncation — cut off the end of the phrase, like “Consumer-Driven Health Care is Cutting…” Cutting what? Costs probably. But maybe something else is getting cut. Doctor’s fees? The level of health care? Maybe you should open the email to find out for sure. Restating the headline as a teaser is also effective: “Consumer-Driven Health Care. Who Does It Really Benefit?” But don’t get too gimmicky either. Finally, don’t become predictable; try to keep your approach fresh.
   
   
3. Some people don’t like to read anything online unless it’s absolutely necessary, like email. This may be particularly true of older people.

The simple fact is that with email fighting these hurdles it won’t pull more readers than a paper newsletter. Newsletter for newsletter, more people are going to see your paper newsletter. A good open rate for most emailed newsletters is about 30%. If you mail your newsletter, even if the person you mailed it to doesn’t read it, they’ll still see your branding. Even if they don’t read it, they are just as likely to set it aside for later reading or route it to someone else in the office. The impact per newsletter delivered is much greater with paper than email.

So is paper always best? Not so. If people have actually opted into your email newsletter —from your website, from an email rental list (where your ROI is probably better than if you had mailed out 10,000 paper newsletters) or because they formerly received your paper newsletter and opted for email — email is best. Otherwise, if you want to make an impression, send them a paper newsletter. In fact, it’s a good idea to send your paper newsletter from time to time to your email opt-in list — if you have their postal address. It breaks things up. Maybe they’ve started to take your email newsletter for granted. Or maybe you need to do some more brand-building, particularly with prospects.

We hope this is helpful.