Explainer videos are brief, funny videos, usually about 60-90 seconds long, that explain a product or service. They gained popularity in the software industry, but these days they can be seen in many different sectors—including in insurance.
Insurance agents blog for a number of reasons. These include building an expert reputation, connecting with customers, starting conversations, attracting media attention, and improving the website’s visibility in search engines. Blogging can be a very effective tool for SEO, or search engine optimization, and you can get great results without being an expert. Here are a few things to keep in mind.
Building strong relationships with your customers is crucial in the insurance industry. This goes for customers you interact with online as much as it does for those you meet in person. Here are a few ideas for pulling it off gracefully.
The start of a new year is a great time to take stock of what’s working—and what isn’t—in your marketing strategy. It’s just as important to give up on tactics that aren’t getting you anywhere as it is to stick with activities that are achieving great results. Here are a few moves to ditch in the coming year.
Now that 2016 is over, it’s possible to look back at the year in insurance—its positives as well as its negatives. 2016 was a challenging year for many, but there were also some bright spots in the year. Here are a few of the things that had an impact on the insurance industry.
2016 wasn’t an easy year for everyone, but hopefully you saw some successes in the past year. The New Year is a great time to assess how far you’ve come, the achievements and setbacks you experienced, and where you want to go in the next twelve months. Here are a few resolutions for insurance agents in the coming year.
“Spam” is the shorthand term for unsolicited bulk email, sent to thousands or even millions of emails at a time for marketing purposes. Spam filters function to sort these messages out of the recipient’s inbox. If you use email marketing to promote your insurance business, it’s important to understand how these filters work—and how to keep your messages out of them.
Name: Gabriela Patino
Job Title: Admin
Number of years of experience: <1
What do you enjoy most about your job? The people that I work with are AMAZING, and very helpful.
What surprised you the most about it? How many different types of insurance there are.
What’s your ideal Saturday afternoon? Collecting sea shells and sand dollars at the beach.
What’s one thing most people don’t know about you? I’m Bilingual in English and Spanish
According to some estimates, as many as 205 billion emails are sent every day. Click-to-open rates for marketing messages among mobile users in the US hover around 13.7%, according to 2016 estimates; desktop rates are a bit higher, at 18%. That translates into a lot of marketing emails that don’t get opened.
Your email subject line is the biggest predictor of whether or not your message will be read. And what works best might surprise you. Here are a few ways to tweak your email subject lines to get more opens—that you might not have thought of.
Qualifying your prospects allows you to devote the majority of your sales efforts to your best potential clients—the ones who have a demonstrated need for the type of insurance you sell, buying authority and the budget behind it, and who are ready to buy.
Asking the right questions at the beginning of the sales process can help you determine what the prospect’s buying pattern is, their existing concerns about insurance, their satisfaction with their current provider, and whether they’re worth selling to. Here are a few questions that can help you narrow down your field.
There’s a lot of advice out there on what tone insurance professionals should adopt in social media. We’re told to be approachable, accessible, honest, and friendly. In insurance, this can be crucial to giving your company a fun, engaging personality that pulls prospects in and generates interest. But what do those things mean in practice—and how do you pull off an approachable tone? Here are a few tips on what “being approachable” really means.
Even insurance agents and companies have to think about online reviews these days. Consumers talk about and evaluate everything they buy online—and they may be talking about you, too. Whether positive or negative, a single review can have a huge impact in whether or not prospects decide to work with you. And reviews are becoming increasingly more prevalent in search results as well—so your online reviews are often the first thing people see, well before the link to your website, when they search for you.
California has always battled wildfires, and they remain a source of risk for insurance carriers today. Accurate records of acreage, location, structures damaged, and deaths have been kept since 1932. These records now show a pattern of repeated ignition throughout California. Nevertheless, our population growth and new construction are occurring adjacent to brush. Monitoring and assessing brush risk is going to be an evolving concern.
Name: Renee Raney
Job Title: Processing
Number of years of experience: 14 years
What do you enjoy most about your job? Every day is slightly different. I started off as the Receptionist in 2002. We had just started getting super busy because other carriers were not writing and we didn’t have anyone at that time that could just input. This was before Modernink and Ireli :-). I offered my help to Jack in order to free up the underwriters to help with calls.
It’s not always easy for insurance agents to build an audience on Facebook organically. According to a recent Adweek article, only approximately 2.6% of your audience sees what you’re posting at any one time. If you pay for the ads, not only can you guarantee that more people see them—but you can determine who sees them.
Name: Moniqua Mireles
Job title: Accounting
Number of years of experience: Less than one year.
What do you enjoy most about your job? The people I work with are amazing and so welcoming!
Instagram is a social media platform based on visual content, where users can share images and short videos. And it’s huge—almost 400 million people use it. There are more users on Instagram than on Twitter—which means it can be a very valuable marketing tool. Yes, even for insurance.
It’s not uncommon for insurance agents to dismiss Instagram as a useful social media platform for marketing. After all, insurance isn’t a “visual” business—not like cooking, say. You don’t have a beautiful finished product at the end to take pictures of.
Name: Marissa Davidson
Job title: Agency Support
Number of years of experience: Six years
What do you enjoy most about your job? I enjoy all of the interactions with both agents and co-workers.
What surprised you the most about it? How crazy busy our office and my desk can get at times.
There are many reasons a commercial or residential property can become vacant for a significant period of time. When an owner dies, it can take months to get financial affairs in order while a home stands vacant; it can likewise take a long time to find a new tenant on a rental property when the previous one leaves. Investors buying a property for the sole purpose of “flipping” it may take longer than planned to make repairs and sell the house. These are just a few of the most common scenarios.
Most people think earthquake insurance should be an easy sell in California. But a lot of agents and brokers in the state know that this isn’t always the case. It might surprise some people to learn that, even though California has a 99% chance of experiencing a 6.7-magnitude earthquake or larger within the next three decades according to the US Geological Society, only about 12% of homeowners in the state have earthquake insurance.
So why don’t more people buy earthquake insurance? Here are a few reasons—and some strategies to counter these objectives in a sales situation.