What is a drip campaign?
A drip campaign is a type of email marketing campaign that nurtures your prospects with automated emails that appeal to a specific call to action, the action you are asking them to take on your website e.g, “Buy Now”, “Schedule a Call”. Nurturing prospects through email marketing, known as a nurture campaign is essential to any insurance marketing strategy. Nurturing a relationship with a prospective customer helps establish trust, and authority, and delivers value during their buying journey.
What are the benefits of a drip campaign?
A drip marketing campaign works to turn your browsers into buyers. Not everyone who visits your website is your ideal customer. A drip campaign starts with one key objective: capture the email of the person visiting so you can qualify them as high-intent buyers. By launching a drip email campaign and emailing them regularly, you are qualifying those leads to be right-fit, high-intent customers by continuing to offer your services and staying top of mind. Part of a nurture campaign is also helping customers decide if doing business with you is the right fit for them. It’s common for ill-fit customers to unsubscribe at a certain point in the email sequence. Unsubscribes can feel like rejection but it’s all part of the qualifying-your-leads process, conversely, if you are seeing record-low unsubscribe rates, you’re likely not sending enough emails. It’s important to monitor your email metrics with a CRM like Hubspot or Mailchimp to gain insight into the behavior of your recipients.
Drip campaigns are highly targeted at a specific segment of your target market or on a specific action your target took on your website.
For an insurance agent, targeting prospects with upcoming expiring homeowner policies is one of many effective drip campaign strategies.
Cole Information delivers powerful lead lists that allow insurance agents to curate your prospective customers based on dozens of search criteria; like upcoming X-dates.
If you want to get a list of leads with upcoming insurance X-dates in a targeted geographic area, you can get started today.
We compiled our top tips to help agents get started with a strong drip email campaign.
Our top tips for an effective drip campaign before a homeowner policy renewal.
Start by segmenting your insurance customers.
Your segments should be as specific as possible. A few of the more common customer segmentation strategies include: segmenting your clients by product, timeframe (how long before the policy expires), first-time renewals, and age, just to name a few. Each will require a different personalized messaging approach. Customers can also be segmented further based on the insurance packages they’ve selected. Understanding the individual needs of your customer segments will direct the best way to message them ahead of their upcoming renewal: A homeowner is approaching the one-year anniversary of buying their first home, this is a common time to shop for new insurance products as most homeowners change insurance after the first year, by anticipating what may already be on their mind, you can target first year homeowners several months ahead of renewal time and make an offer.
Decide on the nurture email cadence that works for each segment.
Depending on the segment, the cadence could look entirely different. You can’t take a one-size-fits-all approach. In order to effectively message your customer, you must first understand the needs of your individual customer and their behavior; their preferred method of communication, and track their engagement with your communication efforts.
- Identify key dates or events in the lifecycle of the policy and plan communication around these times.
- Target communication around premium payments ahead of the next renewal. This is an effective way to get their attention as their mind will already be on their insurance policy.
- Time your emails for times of the day your customer is more likely to engage with communication.
- Studies show that the best time to send email marketing is mid-week, early morning, lunchtime and early evening.
- Measure your results. You won’t know if you’re reaching your customers if you don’t measure the results of your communication efforts. Keep reading for our tips on how to analyze your data.
- Determine how many emails you want to send. Typically, for a sales email sequence, you want to send 2-5 emails, depending on the product, if there is a lead generator you’re giving away, or if there is an established relationship already. Time your emails for mid-week, when people are likely to hit the Wednesday hump at work and turn to think about their own home to-do list before the weekend. Once your prospect reaches the end of the email sequence, and if they haven’t unsubscribed, they will become part of another email nurture campaign until they take action by making a purchase or unsubscribing.
Determine the goal of each email.
Nurture email marketing can feel repetitive to you but statistically, your target customer only opens 1 out of 5 of your emails. Your customers are more likely to open an email (this is measured by “open rate”) and click on a link (“click-through rate”) if the email offers useful and relevant information and feels personal.
The goal of each email should be to lead your customer to respond to your call to action and renew their homeowner’s policy with you. It’s likely that as they are reaching renewal time, they could be shopping for better rates. The purpose of your drip campaign is to stay top of mind, deliver value, open a conversation about the best rates you can offer, and lead them to renew. So, how do you make each email sound different but have a consistent call to action? Here are some ideas on how to tackle your email sequence and make it sound personal and original.
- Make it personal- address them directly in the subject line and preview text.
- Solve a problem they’re experiencing.
- Give away knowledge for free in the form of a quarterly newsletter.
- Offer testimonials or a case study.
- Give a quote comparing your offer to competitors.
- Be consistent in your tone, message, and call to action.
How to write an eye-catching subject line.
The subject line of your email can make or break your open rate. What’s in your subject line can also trigger spam filters and go straight to junk mail, really damaging your open rate. Here are our tips on how to write an effective subject line.
- Avoid buzzwords that could trigger spam filters like; “free”, “money” or using all caps in your subject line.
- Don’t be clever, be clear. No one wants to feel like they’re decoding a secret message.
- We said don’t be clever but we didn’t say don’t be catchy. You can capture your audience’s attention by piquing their curiosity with a subject line that jumps out of their inbox. As long as it’s relevant to your product, test it out and see how it performs.
- Keep it short.
- Make it personal by sending from an actual person, not from a “no-reply” account.
- Imply a sense of urgency. Maybe it’s in the form of an expiring offer or exclusive discount.
Analyze your data
Use a CRM to analyze how your emails are performing within each segmented group. Key metrics to watch for:
- Open rate between 17-28%- this tells you how many people open your email.
- Click-through rate between 3-5%- CTR measures how many recipients who received your email clicked on a link. This metric takes into account any bounced emails.
- Bounce rate around 2%. Bounced emails are emails that are undeliverable because the email address is invalid, no longer active or incorrect in some way. If you’re noticing a high bounce rate, it may be good practice to clean up your email lists, or check for errors. Emails will also bounce if your email is detected by spam filters. You can avoid this by steering clear of language in your subject line that commonly alerts spam filters like:
- The mention of money or numbers in the subject line “only $99.99” or “100%”
- A dollar sign or percent sign in the subject line
- Language that implies urgency, like “now” or “limited time.”
- Unsubscribe rate between 2-5%. As the name implies, this metric measures how many recipients unsubscribe from your email marketing.
- If you have a lead magnet like a special bonus offer, or deal, track conversion
You may discover that you need to go back to your segmented groups and further refine but that’s what makes data analysis a powerful tool in your email marketing! You have a sneak peak into user behavior that you can adjust to better reach your audience.
How do you find the right customers at the right time? With a customizable lead list from Cole X-dates! Get started selling to the right people with Cole Information.
