Email marketing is an important part of a digital marketing strategy, but email marketing for insurance agents is a huge opportunity to upsell the customers in your database. You can use email marketing to advertise new products or provide thought leadership information, such as original articles on insurance topics that will position you as an industry expert and someone your clients can trust. But the thing about email marketing is that it only works if your messages are engaging, so how do you make sure your efforts aren’t wasted?
In this article, we’ll tell you how you can integrate CRM with email marketing to create one seamless workflow to reach your customers with engaging information.
What is CRM?
CRM, or customer relationship management, is a technology tool you’re likely using to manage all your agency’s relationships and interactions with current and potential customers. CRM tools benefit your business by keeping you connected with customers and streamlining processes. When you have a great CRM tool in place, you can improve your agency’s productivity by up to 34% and increase revenue by 41% per salesperson.
CRM With Email Marketing
The advantages of using a CRM doesn’t stop at keeping sales and contact records. You can use the tool to execute your email marketing strategy. In fact, using a CRM is one of the most efficient ways to execute email marketing for insurance agents. When you integrate a CRM with email marketing, your agency will be much more successful at reaching your customers and getting their attention.
What is CRM Email Marketing?
CRM email marketing is a form of email marketing that leverages the information and capabilities of a CRM tool to create more appealing and effective email messages to current and potential customers. This approach works better than traditional email marketing because you can tailor the messages for specific audiences to help boost your sales.
Here are a few services you could improve by using a CRM with email marketing:
Welcome Message for New Customers
The first few interactions with new customers are extremely important because they set the tone and expectations for the kind of customer service your agency provides. When you are onboarding a new customer, you can send useful information in a welcome email. You can start by thanking the customer for their business, then share information about how they can access their accounts online or follow your agency on social media.
Up-Selling and Cross-Selling
80% of your future profits will come from just 20% of your existing customers. Most of your agency’s profitability lies with repeat customers who hold multiple policies. You can get tons of new revenue for your business by up-selling and cross-selling to customers who currently hold one policy only. If you integrate CRM with email marketing, your tool can generate an email list of customers who may benefit from additional policies or products.
Thought Leadership Content
You can win the trust of potential customers and improve relationships with current customers by sharing information that positions you as the local expert on insurance topics and products. If you create thought leadership content such as blogs and white papers, you can use your CRM to send emails to your database directing them to the content.
Customer Feedback
A major part of improving customer services involves gathering feedback from your customers about their experience. You can use CRM email marketing to send messages to customers after they make a new purchase or have a customer service interaction with your staff. The information you gather from these feedback emails can help you identify potential service issues with your agency and create a plan to resolve them. You may also receive testimonials that can be used on your website.
The Advantages of CRM With Email Marketing
There are numerous advantages to CRM email marketing for insurance agents. Here are some of the most notable:
Segmented Distribution Lists
One of the most valuable benefits of integrating your CRM with email marketing is the ability to create segmented distribution lists so your messages are reaching the right audience. For instance, if you’re trying to up-sell home and auto insurance bundles, you would not want to send an email to your customers who already hold both policies.
Your CRM tool will analyze the policyholder data and generate a distribution list that excludes your customers who already have both home and auto bundles with you. This keeps your customers from being overloaded with irrelevant emails, so they will be more likely to open and read messages that contain information that pertains to them.
Maintaining One System
If you use email marketing outside of your CRM tool, you will have to use a third-party email marketing tool or manually execute your email marketing strategy through Gmail, Outlook, or any other email communications tool you use in your agency. This can be extremely time consuming and inefficient.
In order to get your distribution list, you’d have to export from your CRM and either upload to a third-party tool or manually enter the list in your agency email each and every time you want to send out a marketing email. That just doesn’t make much sense. When you integrate email marketing into your CRM, you’re getting everything you need in one system, saving you time and potentially the expense of another tool.
Real-Time Reports and Analytics
Using your CRM for email marketing gives you access to reports and analytics that you can use to adjust your strategy and content for future emails. You will be able to run reports to see the number of emails you’re sending and to which customer segment, how many emails bounce back, and how many customers are opening your emails. If you know that emails on certain topics are not getting as many opens as others, you can adapt your strategy and messages to be more effective and generate more engagement.
Easy-to-Use Templates
Email marketing can be ineffective if the messages are not eye-catching or engaging. If you aren’t great with design, this can be a challenge. However, CRM tools often provide easy-to-use templates to make designing your emails quick and simple. You just select a template you like and plug in your text. You can either add custom images or choose from stock photography contained within the template library. You don’t need any design or coding experience, and your customers will get a great looking email that captures their attention.
The Best CRM for Email Marketing
So, what is the best CRM for email marketing? You have many options to choose from when it comes time to select a CRM tool, and they have different pricing, features, and advantages.
Here are a few:
Hubspot
Hubspot is a popular tool used by organizations in a variety of industries. There are several analytics features in Hubspot that will help guide your digital marketing strategy, including click-through tracking and call-to-action reporting. Hubspot has the capability to integrate into CRM tools and can incorporate some social media options.
However, Hubspot has many limitations for the free or low-cost plans. It doesn’t offer as many metrics or analytics, and there are limits on the number of contacts you can have in your database. The paid plans offer higher limits, but they can be extremely expensive, and you’ll also be paying separately for your agency CRM tool.
ActiveCampaign
ActiveCampaign can be used as a CRM and email marketing tool. The cloud-based platform works well with most devices and browsers and even offers a Chrome extension for easy access. Many users like ActiveCampaign for its easy-to-use format and excellent customer service.
The platform isn’t without its drawbacks, though. Some users report system struggles when using ActiveCampaign on a laptop, and it can be very difficult to integrate the system with other tools like SMS texting. The platform can also be on the pricey side for plans that offer the most options.
In regards to Insurance Agencies – both these systems do not integrate with any Agency Management System which makes data flow a real challenge and forces agencies to do a lot of manual push and pull of data between systems thus making it very inefficient
InsuredMine – CRM for Insurance Agencies
You can use a general CRM tool, but your agency will see the most benefit from a CRM designed specifically for insurance agencies. For insurance agencies, the best CRM for email marketing is InsuredMine. InsuredMine is an all-in-one CRM tool that allows you to grow your sales, engage your customers, and analyze data and reports.
The platform’s Account360/Contact360 feature lets you see every detail of a customer’s account from the dashboard. You’ll have instant access to policy overviews, documents, contact details, customer interactions, and email analytics. You can also track your sales pipeline and deal progress for all your agents.
When it comes to email marketing, InsuredMine has numerous features to streamline your efforts. The template library has dozens of options to make designing your emails and text messages easier than ever. You can use automation features to schedule email distribution and drip campaigns, which are a series of emails that are sent to a customer over a certain period of time.
Because InsuredMine is a full-service CRM program, you don’t have to worry about paying for or maintaining multiple platforms. The program is also cloud-based, so you and your agents can access the platform and work from anywhere. There is even a mobile app so you can access information on the go. InsuredMine has customizable pricing plans to fit the budget of agencies of any size.
Try InsuredMine for Free Today
Now that you know all about insurance CRM and email marketing, it’s time to give InsuredMine a try. Streamline your email marketing strategy and execution with the #1 insurance CRM on the market. Try InsuredMine for free today.