Lead Closing Strategies Blog

It’s so tempting. You’re sending out an email to get in front of your list of prospects. So why not load it up with all your best offers to give them more chances to get interested and take action?

Turns out that kind of scattershot approach may be what’s suffocating your email response rate.

You Mean More Really Isn’t Better?

The folks at Marketing Experiments recently tested how emails offering one service performed compared to emails pushing multiple choices.

They found the email that offered only one free service worked 464% better than the multi-offer email.

So if you’ve been heaping health, life and financial offers all into one email, it’s worth seeing what would happen if you craft a message that focuses on just one offer.

So what do you do with all those offers you have? Should you say goodbye to your Starbucks cards incentives, free quotes and newsletter invites? Or save them to dole out one email at a time?

Target Your Offer

You’ll get a better response by targeting your offers to the people most likely to receive them warmly. For example, if your offer is to get a free quote on health insurance, your current clients aren’t as likely to bite. In a worst case scenario they could even be insulted, concluding you don’t know them well enough. Nobody likes to be sold on something they’ve already bought.

A better fit would be sending current health clients an offer for life insurance. People respond better to things you haven’t already sold them on!

By keeping your offer simple — and by making it relevant — you’ll uncover an improved response rate to your email campaigns.

It’s so tempting. You’re sending out an email to get in front of your list of prospects. So why not load it up with all your best offers to give them more chances to get interested and take action?

Turns out that kind of scattershot approach may be what’s suffocating your email response rate.

You Mean More Really Isn’t Better?

The folks at Marketing Experiments recently tested how emails offering one service performed compared to emails pushing multiple choices.

They found the email that offered only one free service worked 464% better than the multi-offer email.

So if you’ve been heaping health, life and financial offers all into one email, it’s worth seeing what would happen if you craft a message that focuses on just one offer.

So what do you do with all those offers you have? Should you say goodbye to your Starbucks cards incentives, free quotes and newsletter invites? Or save them to dole out one email at a time?

Target Your Offer

You’ll get a better response by targeting your offers to the people most likely to receive them warmly. For example, if your offer is to get a free quote on health insurance, your current clients aren’t as likely to bite. In a worst case scenario they could even be insulted, concluding you don’t know them well enough. Nobody likes to be sold on something they’ve already bought.

A better fit would be sending current health clients an offer for life insurance. People respond better to things you haven’t already sold them on!

By keeping your offer simple — and by making it relevant — you’ll uncover an improved response rate to your email campaigns.

From their name, you can get a good idea what aged leads are. They’re leads that requested a health insurance quote recently, but a little time has passed and they’re not as fresh. They’re a bit older, so they’re less expensive than a lead that is sent to you in real-time, seconds after the prospect has expressed their interest for a quote.

So why are more agencies ordering aged leads lately? Because they’ve discovered that supplying their rookie agents with aged leads is the most cost effective way to train them. New agents get to cut their teeth on a big batch of leads, and the agency doesn’t have to shell out the big bucks.

Even if you’re not training an agent, you can plow through aged leads on your own without straining your budget. I’ve seen this work really well for agents who plug the leads into their LeadMiner autoresponder.

Here’s how that works:

When the aged leads are delivered, they’re automatically sent a personalized email from you. And if you’ve got quoting set up too, the aged lead even gets an updated health insurance quote in the email. You bring in the aged leads at a low price, and you don’t have to lift a finger to get in front of them. And any time that aged lead checks out their quote online, you get an email alert. Now you know they’re a “fresh” lead again, and can hop on the phone to qualify them or make the sale.

So that’s aged leads in a nutshell. A favorite for training rookies, and an affordable way to supplement your real-time leads. If you’re interested in picking some up for your agency, let us know at 1-877-561-9663 ext. 1.

Scott Sullivan is Vice President of Broker Sales at ProspectZone, where he uses his 4 years of industry experience and impressive knowledge of how insurance agents sell to forge strong relationships with successful agencies and insurance carriers nationwide. His team works with agents across the country and educates them on how to implement technology and lead generation into their daily routines. He welcomes feedback at ssullivan@prospectzone.com

Need some advice on how to close leads? Get your questions answered right here in the ProspectZone newsletter by our own sales expert, Scott Sullivan. Submit your sales questions to experts@prospectzone.com. One question a month will be selected and featured in the newsletter.

It’s no secret you have to be quick with the phone these days to catch an internet lead while their interest is highest… or before they find another agent to talk to.

But even when you are first in the door, there’s no guarantee you’ll be writing an app that day. You get your fair share of tire kickers, no matter how good your lead supply is.

And the biggest mistake agents make is just tossing
that lead in the trash. They think, “Who has time to follow up with every person who’s not an immediate sale?”

Answer: You do.

Get In, Nurture, And Close

You can build a steady supply of commissions by nurturing your tire kicking leads. And no, it doesn’t take an impossible amount of time. You can start earning profits from cooler leads — and you don’t have to spend any more time on it than you do right now.

Here’s how it works, in three steps.

1. Get your foot in the door.
   Contact your leads as soon as they come in. People are more receptive to you when they’ve got insurance fresh on the brain. Here’s where you identify their “readiness” to buy. When you sniff out a tire kicker, move right on to step number 2.
2. Pitch them a no-risk relationship – not a high pressure sale.
   A person who just wants some ballpark prices
   might be uncomfortable talking to you. Running through the back of their mind is, “Oh no… is this
   guy going to show up at my house and camp out at the kitchen table until I buy a plan? I just want to know how much things cost!”

   Right away you need to establish a friendly, no-risk relationship. You’re here to educate them, show them the plans and prices they wanted, and be ready to answer their questions. Try saying:

   “If you ever have any questions, I’ll be happy to answer them. And if your situation changes and you decide it’s time to get a plan, give me a ring so I can help you out. We can talk about what would be the perfect fit for your needs.”

   And if you’re using a BrokerOffice database with quoting enabled, you can say:
   
   “…I’ll keep your information on file for you, so any
   time you want to find out how much plans cost, just give me a quick call. I’ll be able to punch up new rates and email them over to you, and it only takes a minute.”No threat of a high pressured sale. Just change your pitch to be educational, and show how available you are.

3. Keep in touch – automatically.
   Now you need to set a system in place to follow up with these leads. Even with the friendly relationships you’ve developed, prospects can easily misplace your information, or forget your name.Email autoresponders send out a campaign of personalized emails to all the leads in your database. You can keep offering friendly advice, tips and reminders to them for weeks or months to come.

   The best part is, after that first phone call, all the follow-up work is done for you, automatically. You can sit back and relax, knowing that leads are still getting your message. When they’re ready, they can just shoot you an email, or give you a call.

By handling tire kickers with the same respect and attentiveness you give to the immediate sales, you’ll
lock in their business downstream.

The first goal of any agent’s marketing campaign is to connect with your prospects and make some sales.

The second goal is less obvious, but just as important: you want to be able to learn from the campaign, to find out how to make the next even better.

The best way to start learning from your campaigns is to do split-tests. And the easiest and most affordable campaigns to split-test are email campaigns.

Start Testing… And Watch More Prospects Take Action

Setting up an email split-test is easy. Create two emails. They should have similar messages and make similar offers. But they should also have at least one key difference. Send the first to half of your list, and the second to the other half.

What should you test in your emails?

Subject Line. This is probably the most
commonly-tested part of an email. For example, you could compare the results from:Stay Covered: Here’s Your Health Insurance Quote

ABC Insurance — The Health Quote You Requested

Which one will get more people to open your message? Most marketers try to write subject lines that are snappy and engaging, without sounding too “sales-y.” But lately, some are suggesting that plain, straightforward, and official-sounding subject lines work better.

Who’s right? You have to test it to find out.

Headlines. Test how you lead into your offer. Which is a stronger reason for your audience to take action: the promise of a free quote, or the protection of coverage?Get Your Free Quote From ABC Insurance

Protect Your Family With Coverage From ABC Insurance

When you test headlines, you want to look at who clicked though your message and actually took action on your offer. Surprisingly, many of the same people who suggest using plain and straight-forward subject lines say that headlines should be snappy and engaging.

But again, you should test it for yourself.

Graphics. If you’re sending HTML-based emails, you have the option of including graphics with your messages. Try two different images and see which works better.At ProspectZone we recently sent out a promotional offer with two different graphics — one of a man, the other of a woman. The result? The offer with the man on it got 53% more click-throughs than the other offer.

We had no idea that a picture of a guy in a business suit would do better than an attractive woman in a dress. That’s why you test.

And The Results, Please

To find out your test results, you have to crunch some numbers. You should be able to get these numbers from your email service provider.

First, you’ll want to know how many addresses were on each list. This is the number of messages sent.

Next, subtract the number of undelivered messages. These are addresses that aren’t valid anymore. The number left over are your delivered messages.

Now, for each list, look at how many people opened the message. Divide the number of opened messages by the delivered messages. This is your open rate. If you’re testing your subject line, this will tell you which one performed better.

If you’re testing headlines, graphics, or any other part of the body of the email, you want to look at click-throughs. These are people who acted on your offer. You can find the number of click-throughs by looking at your web server logs to see how many unique visitors landed on your offer page. The number of click-throughs divided by the number of delivered messages is your
click-through rate. The higher the number, the better that message performed.

Different audiences in different markets react differently to sales messages. There’s no “right way” to do marketing that always works for every prospect. You can never be certain what’s going to engage people. But by testing, you can get closer to finding out.