One motivation for this article was my actions when I arrived home last night. My wife was away at a seminar so I collected the mail from our mailbox, let myself into the house and was greeted by our pets (acting as if I had been away for months instead of since this morning). I took off my coat and hat and discarded most of the mail as “junk” on my way to the kitchen. Then I stopped and looked back at the half-filled trash can containing dozens of pieces of mail, most of which were obviously marketing pieces to get me to go on vacation, replace my windows, change my health insurance and (one) from a major insurance company wanting me to consider “quoting” for lower prices on my auto insurance.
Each piece of mail in my trash can was expensive for the marketer to create and send and was trying to influence me to alter my buying habits and spend money on their product or services. The only mail I kept was something from my bank and a statement from my broker – both identifying someone I recognize and expect to contain information that I wanted or needed to read. THE SOURCE OF THE MAIL WAS RECOGNIZED AS SOMEONE I ALREADY KNEW!!
Let me know if your experience is similar to mine. We are deluged with so much junk mail (and email) that we don’t pay attention to any of it unless we can filter out those sources that are meaningful to us.
Many agents and producers mistake a “marketing letter (or email)” for a “marketing campaign”. A marketing letter is just that – a letter (or email) sent to prospects (in letter, card, brochure, fold-out or in any other forms) meant to elicit a response and generate interest in doing business with the entity doing the solicitation.
Most marketing letters are ignored – never read – never even opened. They comprise the “junk mail” that you and I get in our mailboxes every day. Imagine how you respond to that junk mail when you review your mail every evening. Now, imagine your piece coming into a business, large or small, in which the recipient isn’t even the first one to see the item (or may NEVER see it) as the mail is reviewed, opened, scanned and sorted before the desired recipient is given those few pieces that are appropriate for him to pursue.
Does this mean that you should not market your agency or your products? No – of course not – the best way to go out of business is by NOT telling your clients and prospects who you are, reminding them of your usefulness and familiarizing them with the reasons they should do business with you instead of with your competitors.
On the other hand, a MARKETING CAMPAIGN is a process of getting your message out to your intended market strongly enough and frequently enough to a) get them familiar with your name and identity, and b) to get them interested in doing business with you.
No marketing campaign will ever be effective in a single-shot delivery of a single message. The consuming audience is too jaded with billions of pieces of advertising for any single-shot message to make a difference.
A marketing campaign is a combination of art (getting your message across effectively) and science (doing so frequently enough and in a form that will familiarize the prospect with you and your product). If either the art or the science is flawed, the campaign is useless.
The SCIENCE of Marketing
The science of marketing defines how best to reach your target market and how often in order for them to recognize you as an expert in your field and be familiar enough with you to permit you to offer them your product and concepts.
The major advertisers respond to the need for marketing frequency by mass marketing – TV, Radio, magazines and direct mail (by the millions of pieces). They ‘shotgun’ their market because they have trouble segmenting it sufficiently to ‘rifle’ their marketing to ONLY their intended audience.
Example: Yesterday evening I “relaxed” in front of my TV and searched for news and commentary that interests me. I, like millions of other consumers, have given up on network commercial television in favor of streaming the content that specifically interests me. And, because I’m too cheap to buy the services that omit advertising, my streaming provides an opportunity for advertisers to “rifle” their marketing to the most likely consumers of their products and services.
Over the next hour, I saw the same advertisement for a service (getting rid of time shares) no fewer that four times. I’m not a potential customer for that particular service, but I understand that the consumers of this broadcast are likely to have invested in Time Shares in the past.
The local insurance industry could take advantage of the Streaming market segmentation – and we, the small, local businesses actually have an advantage (if you use it properly).
We already have the tools to determine whether or not we have an excellent product and market (carrier) for business property. If you don’t have a competitive product with distinguishing points of differentiation that would be attractive to your audience – simply DON’T start a marketing program. Your goal is NOT just to educate the consumer. Your goal is also to point out differences between you and your competitors (local or national) that would influence the consumer to buy insurance products they already have or need from you instead of generic products from the industry giants.
So, we would hone our marketing to that specific target and achieve economies that are impossible for the national giants. For instance, at the Super Bowl, Anheuser Busch spent millions on a few ads for beer. But they know that only a part of their viewing audience is beer drinkers. They threw away their money by showing their product to Teetotalers. What if they could have shown their ad ONLY to beer drinkers, allowing the non-beer drinkers to view an ad for soft drinks, instead. They would have gotten much more ‘bang for their advertising buck.’ And, we don’t even have to comment about the debacle created by their misguided Bud Light advertising. That was as stupid as directing beer ads to toddlers.
What we can do as insurance agents is to carefully target our markets toward the products and suppliers that can best serve a market segment.
Could you imagine Busch showing a beer commercial just once? Of course, not. With their production cost, they must show it enough to get people to think of their brand when purchasing beer. That’s why they hire the best creative people and design ‘cute’ ads meant to entertain as much as to sell concept.
Similarly, a “dry” letter introducing yourself, may seem stoically professional to you – but is likely to seem too dry to read to a consumer or business owner who doesn’t even like insurance. Take a hint from the ‘Big Boys’. Make your advertising and marketing cute and attractive to draw attention.
Many agents have bemoaned (or boasted) the result of low-cost advertising that was sent to a great many people with little response or was viewed or heard on radio and television many times – but at 3:00 AM (also with little positive response). They use these efforts to claim that advertising and marketing don’t work.
Have you ever seen the highest profile ads on TV at 4:00 AM? Probably not, because you, like most other folks, are asleep at that time of night. But the other reason you may not see the best ads at that time of night is that the advertisers know when you are likely to tune into see a show that will impact you with advertising.
If you want your advertising and marketing to work, don’t pay for off-hour advertising or use little read magazines, counting on frequency to replace high impact. It doesn’t work!
The best advertising science for the insurance industry (translated as the most effective) is multiple contacts with your prospects frequently enough to familiarize them with your name and in a variety of ways to envelope the prospects with your message.
Of course, you cannot expect a marketing campaign to be constructed (or to work well) for one (or a few) prospects unless the return for writing his insurance is very high. Typically, a campaign’s construction is warranted when you are going to touch at least a few hundred prospects.
A campaign is pre-constructed. This means that all parts of the campaign are finished before the first part is implemented. A good mix will include letters, brochures, newsletters, postcards, drop-in calls and appointments.
Multiple-touches in a one-, two- or three-year period work best because it is likely that the prospect will hear from your agency many more times in that period than he hears from his incumbent agent. We have had our best results from a five-step one-year program and a 15-step three-year program. If a prospect does not respond to our effort over three years of contact, we feel that the prospect is not interested in our offer.
DRIP MARKETING
Perhaps the most important part of the Science of Marketing in the insurance business is to implement a Drip Marketing, rather than Mass Marketing approach to advertising and marketing. This means that instead of sending 500 letters and waiting for the phone to ring, you will get much better results from sending 10 letters at a time and following each letter with a physical call two days after the correspondence (or any other form of contact) to elicit response, answer any questions or to suggest a meeting.
In a Drip Marketing Campaign, the timing is very important. But the timing is not evenly spaced. For instance, a one-year drip campaign can look like this:
Day 1 Letter One
Day 40 Brochure
Day 100 Newsletter
Day 130 Drop-In
Day 200 Letter Two
Day 270 Post Card
With every contact followed up by telephone within two or three days to confirm the piece’s receipt and invite a meeting.
Using a skewed schedule, you are likely to hit everyone at least once or twice each year when they are thinking about their insurance.
The ART of Marketing
This concept of marketing is deceptively easy. You must make your message appealing to the audience for which it is desired to impact. That means that you can’t write about insurance from the perspective of an agent or an underwriter. The desired customer doesn’t care about your views and perspective — he only cares about his own.
However, like any other form of art, when marketing is done by professionals it looks easy. But when you sit down to write a marketing piece (a part of a marketing program), the result may look as different as the Mona Lisa next to a stick figure with a smiley face – both may have enigmatic smiles, but one reminds you of the mysterious nature of woman while the other reminds you of Walmart’s sales specials.
Unless you are particularly skilled or talented in creative writing and advertising, we suggest that you use a professional to design your marketing products.
A combination of consistent and frequent drip marketing and interesting and entertaining messages and means will provide you a solid return that will add business to your agency with greater revenue than cost. Missteps will be expensive. Shortcuts always take longer. And you are personally as likely to create successful marketing for yourself as you are to successfully pull your own teeth.
Let folks who already know how to attract insurance customers help you with the Art of Marketing. Follow our advice on the Science of Marketing in order to achieve strong results from every campaign that you implement.