Email is one of the most effective health insurance marketing strategies. It’s consistently rated as one of the best marketing methods that delivers the highest return on investment (ROI). One study found that the average ROI of marketing emails is $36, making it highly profitable for insurance agencies to invest in.
Reaching this ROI requires the correct marketing campaign, and the right email marketing strategy can help maximize your efforts. If you’re sending emails to each of your clients on an individual basis, you’re doing it wrong. It’s likely your client's inbox is flooded daily with other email campaigns, as the global amount of emails sent each day is 4.37 billion. That’s why you need to make sure that every email you send stands out amongst the competition.
With that in mind, let’s take a look at 12 ways you can beef up your health insurance email marketing efforts and close more deals.
12 Tips To Boost Your Health Insurance Email Marketing Efforts
1. Use Email Marketing Tools
Getting the best results from your health insurance email marketing efforts starts with having a customer relationship management (CRM) solution. A top CRM platform can automatically organize information for your clients and prospects, as well as help you personalize your messaging to improve the customer experience based on their past engagement with your emails. A CRM solution designed for insurance can also drive more revenue by maximizing your email marketing ROI.
When you have a CRM platform with email automation built into it, you can connect with your clients and prospects easily; a CRM solution can automatically send messages to individuals on their birthdays, remind them that the open enrollment period is approaching, or let them know they’re aging into Medicare soon and it’s time to start preparing.
2. Consider Your Branding
Emails are an opportunity to market your business and reinforce your brand in your audience’s minds.
That being the case, it’s worth spending some time and resources coming up with an email marketing template that highlights your company’s personality, branding, and color scheme while also being pleasing to the eye.
This “extra” step can help set your business apart from your competitors who still send emails full of text and nothing else.
3. Personalize Each Message
In the age of mobile devices, social networks, and Amazon, it comes as no surprise that today’s consumers increasingly expect personalized experiences from the companies they do business with.
As such, it is critical for you to personalize your email outreach to each client and prospect. A CRM solution alleviates the burden of needing to manually personalize every message and can automatically personalize each message for you, saving you significant time.
4. Segment Your Customers
Keep in mind that personalization doesn’t mean sending a unique email to every single one of your clients and prospects.
What you can do, though, is segment your clients and prospects into similar “buckets.” Here are some examples:
- Prospects looking for dental insurance
- Clients aging into Medicare eligibility
- Prospects interested in family and individual health insurance plans
- Clients whose current coverage is expiring
With email segmentation, it’s possible to personalize each email to your audience based on the personas you’ve developed and build stronger relationships with each client and prospect.
5. Write Great Subject Lines
Great email marketing campaigns are built on a foundation of great subject lines. In fact, according to HubSpot, 65% of marketers claim subject lines affect email open rates more than any other aspect of an email. After all, it's your very first impression of the email.
So what does a good subject line look like, anyway? Generally speaking, it’s personalized, short, and to the point, and it creates a sense of urgency.
6. A/B Test Your Emails
A/B testing, in the context of email marketing, is the process of sending two different variations of a message to determine which one performs better. This process starts with a subset of your contacts, and then uses technology to ensure that the bulk of your readers receive the “better version.”
Leading health insurance email marketing solutions enable you to easily conduct A/B testing, which makes it that much more likely that your audience will engage with your emails since they’ve been specifically optimized for them.
7. Optimize Your Messages
Today’s prospect does not have the time to dedicate to reading emails full of text. Not doing so will lead to many prospects opening and closing your emails once they see a block of text.
To optimize your messaging, it’s important to deliver relevancy and the next steps your prospects need to take. In other words, keep your emails short and sweet. Write short sentences, engage your readers, and make sure that the action you want them to take is abundantly clear.
8. Include a Call to Action
You can make clear what you want your audience to do by including a call to action (CTA) in each email you send.
For example, if you’re targeting prospects, your CTA might be a button that says something such as, Get a Quote, and links directly to your website’s quoting engine. If the goal of your outreach is to let certain prospects know that they are about to age into Medicare, your CTA might include a link leading to an e-book or guide about the ins and outs of Medicare.
9. Send Emails From a Human Account
Ensure that the emails you send out come from a person. In most cases, it should be you.
Don’t send emails from an account like noreply@company.com or marketing@company.com. The experience is more personal when it comes from a legitimate human being, as it allows your business to create an actual bond between your sales associates and your clients or prospects.
10. Optimize for Mobile Devices
If you want great results from your health insurance email marketing efforts, you need to optimize your emails for mobile.
Doing so will meet customers’ expectations, especially younger generations who prefer a mobile approach to shopping for insurance, while differentiating your company from your competitors who are slower to adapt to the modern world.
11. Don’t Overwhelm Your Audience
While you should reach out to your audience often, there’s a fine line between being helpful and being overwhelming. In fact, if you send your audience emails too many times, you may experience some audience members unsubscribing from your emails, and you may even be marked as spam.
Be precise with your outreach, send emails at comfortable intervals, and ensure that your emails are timely. To help with this, a health insurance email marketing platform can help you determine the best time of the week to send emails to each of your recipients based on how they engage with their inboxes.
12. Remember the Preheader
You know how there’s some text displayed after the subject line in your inbox? That’s called a preheader, which is a valuable piece of email real estate you can’t afford to take for granted.
Be sure to include personalized and helpful information in the preheader to increase the chances that your audience engages with each message.
Take Your Insurance Email Marketing To New Heights
All of the tips mentioned above are great starting points to begin seeing both quick and long-term wins for your business. However, they are just the tip of the iceberg for turning your insurance email marketing into your most valuable process for creating conversions.
Discover more ways to optimize your email marketing with our free guide for insurance agents.
