According to recent study results, independent insurance agents took a beating last year. Thanks to the disruption of the pandemic, independent many agents found themselves selling fewer policies.
However, COVID-19 hasn’t been all bad for insurance sales. Survey results also reveal that the pandemic has spurred more people to think about buying life insurance.
If you are looking to build your client base back up—now’s the time to start. However, you need to be smart about where you invest your energies.
Otherwise, you might end up wasting time and money on expensive or ineffective promotion methods.
Ready to reel in those clients and drive sales? If yes, read on for several ways you can attract more clients in 2021.
Carry Out Email Marketing
Email marketing can be a powerful promotion tool. If you do it right, email marketing can build trust, increase customer retention, and drive sales, all for an amazing ROI. According to reports, email marketing has an ROI of $42 for every dollar spent. This is far higher than many traditional marketing methods.
If you are new to emailing marketing, the first step is to build your email list. You can do this by asking existing clients to opt-in to receive newsletters and promotional materials from you.
You can also build up your email list by giving visitors to your website a chance to sign up. A popular method for increasing signups via your website is to offer visitors a freebie in exchange for their email addresses. This could be something like a free ebook, a discount code, or a checklist, or other resources.
When it comes to structuring your email marketing strategy, it’s essential that you balance self-promotion with value for the receiver. Nobody likes to be continually marketed to, so try to disperse promotional materials with emails that offer free information to the people on your list.
By doing this you’ll increase open rates. You’ll also build trust, and guide your leads down your sales funnel.
Grow Your Network by Offering Incentives
Another top strategy for growing your client base is focusing on referrals. Many insurance agents forget about the power of referrals. However, referrals can be a great way to generate warm leads.
To encourage referrals, the first place you can start is by asking clients to recommend you to family or friends who are looking for insurance advice. You’d be surprised how many people will be happy to do this, especially if you have given them good service.
If you want to incentivize referrals, you can also offer a discount or coupon code for every referral that buys a product from you. Another way to incentivize referrals is to run a social media giveaway where participants qualify to win a free product. To enter, you can get participants to like, comment, share your post, and tag friends.
This has the benefit of netting you increased exposure and generating referral clients.
Another often overlooked referral source is notifying beneficiaries. Whenever you write a life insurance policy for a client, you name one or more beneficiaries. If you call and notify these beneficiaries of their inclusion in the policy, this also opens up a natural opportunity for you to offer your services to them.
At the same time, you’ll also be providing value, by telling them they’ve been named as a beneficiary.
Audit and Optimize Your Website
If you do not have a website for your insurance sales business, it’s essential to create one.
If you already have a website, auditing and optimizing it can go a long way to increasing your customer base and supporting your overall marketing strategy. Have a fully well-functioning website is also integral for increasing customer success.
The first place to start is by going through your site and making sure it’s fully functional.
Do all the menu items work? Do drop-down menus display correctly? Can visitors easily navigate around your website?
These are all important questions to ask when going through your site. Besides manually checking for issues and navigation obstacles, you should also leverage tools to check for things like broken links and page errors.
After tidying up your site and increased its functionality, you should also take some time to optimize it. If you have an understanding of SEO, you can research keywords, incorporate them into your site, increase its speed, and carry out other site optimization protocols.
If you do not have any experience in SEO, then you can also consider outsourcing this to an SEO service.
Along with optimizing for SEO, to increase your client base you should also look at optimizing for conversions. For example say you have a landing page with a green call-to-action button that says “get insured.”
By implementing A/B testing you can experiment with different colors and calls-to-action. For instance, you could make your call to action button red, and change the text to “get affordable life insurance.” The A\B test will then reveal to you which version of the page performed better and resulted in the most conversions.
Tweaks like these can go a long way to boosting your customer base while requiring minimal effort from you.
Leverage Social Media
Another area to gain customers is on social media. However, you need to have a plan before you post.
Sit down and strategize what platforms to target, and how. Think about what content to post, and layout a posting plan and schedule.
This will help you be consistent in your posting (something that’s essential for growth on social media). It will also help you create a cohesive strategy, where the intention of one post ties into another.
For instance, you could do a series of tips on shopping for insurance, share some of your testimonials, or even create informative Youtube or Tiktok videos around insurance.
Like with email marketing, when it comes to your social media marketing strategy, the aim of the game is to intersperse purely promotional content with free value. Make sure you monitor your analytics to pinpoint what content your followers engage with most, and how you can leverage this to promote your brand and build your client base.
One last tip, make sure you make full use of platform functionalities to increase exposure. For instance, if you are on Instagram, try out reels or stories. If you’re on Youtube, why not try going live?
Invest In Targeted Ads
Another way you can use social media is for paid, target ads. Social media advertising allows for highly refined targeting, more so than Google ads.
For instance, you can target ads to people based on things like their job title, online behaviors, interests, etc. This allows you to really hone in on your target audience.
Because you can zero in on your target audience, this reduces wasted ad spending and nets you better conversions.
Attend Conferences Where Possible
Another way to increase your client base is by attending industry conferences and events. This will allow you to network with potential clients.
Research and attend conferences where possible, and work to identify which ones your ideal customer base attends. Once you have done this, consider offering an on-the-house workshop that ties into your products. This will allow you to draw potential clients into your sales funnel.
Carry Out Content Marketing and Start a Blog
Once you have optimized your website, you should also compile a content marketing plan and start a blog. Content marketing is an impactful marketing strategy that can tie into and boost your other marketing efforts.
If you start a blog and publish content that answers questions your potential client base has around insurance, this will draw them into your funnel. If your content appears in search when they are looking for information, this may guide them to your product or contact page.
It can also spur them to sign up to your email list, where you can further market to them.
To plan out an effective content strategy, focus on addressing the problems your product aims to solve and the common pain points of your clients. Also, ensure that your content is SEO optimized and well written.
Test Out Influencer Marketing
Influencer marketing is a top strategy you can leverage to increase your client base. To start, begin by identifying influencers with loyal followings. Ideally, their content should be compatible with your offering in some way.
From there, you can ask potential influencers to review your products and services. If they are happy to promote them you can then work out a partnership deal whereby they promote your products and services to their audience.
Looking to Build Your Client Base? We Can Help
Building a strong client base can feel like uphill work if you’re not sure where to start. However, now that you’re armed with these top tips, there’s nothing stopping you from getting started.
However, building and growing a high-performing insurance sales business isn’t always simple in practice. If you feel you need more than a list of tips, we’re here to help.
Here at ILIAA, we offer insurance sales coaching, training, and on-demand support. If you want to take your life insurance business to the next level and start more driving sales, take a look at our membership tiers today.