Transcript:

Hi, it’s Aaron Kassover from AgentMethods talking about insurance agent websites, and, more specifically, talking about using email marketing to drive prospects to your website and to grow your business.

And I want to talk today a bit about some of the first things we talked about in the components of an email, the sender, the email address, and, of course, the subject line, and give you some tips on how you can sort of improve those and some ideas for increasing your open rate and your conversion rate in your campaigns. 

So the first one is your sender name, and there are really a couple of two main approaches you can use.  The first is to use your name, so I’d use Aaron Kassover, or the second is to use your business name, in my case, AgentMethods.  You can use either one.  And generally, you want to kind of go with what you think is going to be most recognizable, so if people know your business, use that; if people know you, use that.  On the other hand, if an email really is sort of not just a marketing campaign but you’re reaching out and trying to communicate and connect with them and build a relationship, then you probably want to use your name as opposed to your business because business names just sort of sound distant and sound sort of formal, don’t have that close one-to-one relationship, that level of trust that you may be trying to building with some email campaigns.

Now, one thing to think about is that you want to go with a name that’s both recognizable and sort of familiar, and we had a situation where we had some people that were sending a campaign out internally and some of the emails came from Dvora and some of the emails came from Cathy, and they were going to people who didn’t know us.  And the emails that came from Cathy were three times more likely to be open than the ones that came from Dvora.  And poor Dvora, that’s her name, but we found that having sort of the traditional American or western sounding name does impact open rates.  There’s sort of a belief that spam comes from maybe eastern Europe or Asia or something else, and so when you see Vladimir or Dmitri or something like that in the name, you think it might be more likely to be spam, when, in fact, there are plenty of Americans with names like that, but it’s just something that we see happen where American sounding names have a higher open rate.  So that will work out for you if your name is Mike, so something to think about.

Now, the sender email address, you don’t have to use your personal email address.  We generally tend to use support at agentmethods com in our emails, even if they come from me.  And the reason why is if someone replies back or one of our customers replies back with an issue, that goes right into our support team and we know that email won’t get dropped.  My inbox gets filled up very quickly with lots of different emails and I might not be as fast to reply to a customer with an issue as somebody from support at AgentMethods.com.  So think about what the best email address is to use.  If you can get your email address or even the domain name, add it to their address book or if you can get them to just even reply, it’ll often get automatically get added to the address book.  That will very often get that email address automatically put on the white list so future campaigns will be sent through and will get delivered much better.  Something to think about.

So now let’s talk about subject lines.  Subject lines are probably the most important part of your email campaign.  They will get your email opened or deleted without being looked at.  And so just a few ideas for writing good subject lines, and sort of the general first most important thing is simply not to sound spammy.  If you’re promoting something that sounds too good, too much urgency, too many caps, to many exclamation points, then it’s going to seem like you’re trying to sell something and you have an agenda that doesn’t fit in line with your audience. 

The second one is to make the subject line interesting, relevant, maybe something that your audience is going to care about, so when they see these few sentences, they’re going to say, “Oh, this is something I want to know.”  And the more you can get those relevant words to the front of a subject line, the better.  So think about those first two or three words in the subject line and try to figure out what’s relevant to your audience in those words as opposed to having it kind of later on in the word. 

Now, in some cases if your brand is strong, your name is not using your name, we’ve seen open rates be lifted by in the subject line using the brand name and then a dash.  So if I’m sending an email out from myself, from Aaron Kassover, in the subject line I may put “AgentMethods-“ and then rest of the email subject.  That way people see AgentMethods, they say, “I know who AgentMethods is, this is an email I’ll look at.”  So that is something to think about, as well as putting your brand name in the subject line.

Now, a few ideas to try when you’re writing your subject line:  The first one is to get people’s attention by making them curious; having a subject line that’s going to make them think, “Oh, I wonder what they have to say?  What’s going on?”  So the subject line is going instill some curiosity.

The second one is to talk about the benefit or impact for your customer—how is this going to impact them.  Remember, this is about them and not about you, and so you have to think about not what you want, what you’re trying to sell, or what your perspective is, but what they care about, what their going to see as being important, and make sure that’s what you focus on in the subject line.  Start maybe something about saving money, are you going to help them out somehow, are you going to make things easier for them, what’s the next result of what you’re offering to them, what’s the benefit to them.  Of course, keep it short.  After about five words, your subject lines start to get cutoff because they just go beyond the space that’s being displayed.  So you want to make sure it’s short and the most important words are at the front.  And then, often personalize, if possible.  You can do a mail merge where you put their name in the subject line and people are drawn to seeing their own name. 

Finally, you can test, test, and test, see if it works, see what doesn’t.  Send emails out to yourself, send emails out to a Hotmail account, a Yahoo account, a Gmail account to make sure that the subject line is displayed properly, and make sure the emails get delivered and that when you send email campaigns out, try different things and really see which works and which doesn’t. 

So that’s what I’ve got.  As I said yesterday, or on Friday, if there are things that you are interested in hearing about for insurance websites, if there are some unanswered questions, make sure you let me know.  I now have 19 videos left.  And so get me those questions and I’ll make sure I address them before this journey is over.  Thanks for watching.  I’ll see you tomorrow.

Transcript:

Hello, it’s Aaron Kassover from AgentMethods talking about insurance agent websites.  Now, this is my 80^th video.  I’ve been doing these once a day, Monday through Friday, for four months now; hard to believe.  I’m going to do 100 of these, and so I have four more weeks left, 20 more videos.  So I thought I’d start today by bringing this up, but if there is a question that you want me to talk about, if there’s something that you are interested in learning about insurance websites, if there’s something you’ve been wondering, if there’s a video that I’ve done in the past that you want more detail on, now’s the time to let me know.  And you can either put a comment in the videos or send me an email at aaron at agentmethods.com, and let me know what you want to hear so I can make sure I cover it in the next four weeks before this adventure is over.  So take a few seconds and do that.

Now, onto today’s topic—we’re talking about email marketing.  And yesterday, I talked about the components of an email campaign, and today I wanted to go over just kind of quickly what you can track in an email.

And there are just a few things that you get metrics on.  One of the great things about email marketing is that when you send a campaign out, you get a bunch of data back on what works and what doesn’t.  And so you can really use email marketing as a way to get a lot of insight into your audience, what they’re interested in, what they respond to, and you can really granularly see what is producing results and what’s not.  But there are a few things that you can track and there are some other things that you can’t.  So I’m just going to go over the things that you can track. 

The first thing you’ll see is the bounce rate of an email.  And generally a bounce will happen because you have bad email address.  If you maybe bought an email address or you bought a list and you got some bad ones, or maybe somebody changed email providers, changed jobs, you’ll see those emails just bounce.  Sometimes if you’re blacklisted, if you’re on a spam list, people that subscribe to the spam list will just do a hard bounce for all emails that come in and they’ll just send them back to that spam provider.  So if you see that there’s a sudden jump in your bounce rate, it might mean because you’re walking that threshold of getting blacklisted because of sending out too much spam or too many spam reports.  So that’s bounce rate.

The second thing is your open rate, and open rate is a little bit deceiving.  It’s not exact.  The way that open rates are counted is that when you open an email, a file is downloaded from the server that sent the email out, a small file, and it just counts those downloads.  Now, sometimes that file gets caches on the internet, or sometimes people have those files turned off, so you can’t see those opens.  So use open rate as a grain of salt.  You may also see one person opens up an email multiple times really quickly, and that’s just because they’re paging through their email or the way their system’s working, it’s just grabbing that file a bunch of times and getting counted, over-counted.  So open rate is a good way to sort of compare campaign to campaign, but I wouldn’t bet your life on a specific open rate.  Use it as sort of an indicator.

Click-through rate is when somebody clicks on a link in the campaign.  And this, you actually can track very specifically because the way that click-through rate is calculated is links are redirected through a counter before they get to the final website.  So if you click on a link in an email, it goes through a counter, the counter counts the click-through as who clicked through, and then moves them on to the webpage.  And so you really can be very specific about click-through rates.  They will show you what link on a page a person click-through, even if you have multiple links, maybe there’s a big bold link and then there’s one in some text if they go to the same page, you can still see which of those links they click-through, and, generally, your email service provider, email marketing provider will make sure that those tracking linking are unique to every recipient, so you can even see not just what the click-through rate is, but who clicked through.  And so this is really cool if you send a campaign out to go and look at your prospects, maybe it’s about life insurance, you can see who clicked, and then you might make a note to call those people because you know they have some interest here.  So you can use click-through rates to get a lot of data back on selling, and I really recommend watching that closely. 

And the last thing you’ll see email providers give you is a forward rate, a percent of people who forward to a friend.  And this is another one that you really need to take with a grain of salt because they usually will have a button at the bottom of the email that says forward to a friend, so they can click on that button and go and type in their friend’s email address.  Most people don’t do that.  I don’t do that.  Most people just click on the forward button in their email and then put in their friend’s address and off it goes.  If they click on the forward button on their email, that doesn’t get counted; only the ones that click on the “forward to a friend” in the footer or somewhere in the email body.  So forward rate is one that is sort of artificially low, whereas open rate might be artificially high.

So those are the main stats you’re going to see.  You can use this data to get a lot of insight into what’s working with your email campaigns, how to improve them, and like I said, the click-through rate, you can even make yourself a little list of what prospects you should call because you might have a sale waiting in that click-through rate data.

That’s what I’ve got for insurance websites and insurance email marketing.  I will have more on this on Monday.  Thank you for watching.

Transcript:

Hello, it’s Aaron Kassover, talking about insurance agent websites, and talking about sending out email campaigns.  I’m going to spend the next few days sort of going over email marketing, talk about what makes up an email campaign, and give you some tips on how you can use this to drive prospects to your website to generate leads and to grow your business. 

So I’ve just started out today, I’ve written up here in my beautiful handwriting, my hardly legible handwriting, the components of an email campaign, or a single email.  I want to go through those and just kind of explain the basics of what makes up an email, so that when we talk more about this later on, we have a good reference to use.

So the first thing is the sender’s name, and this is the name that shows up in the “from”; it might be your name, it might be your business name, it might just be your first name, it might be your first and last name, but deciding on you want your name to be when you send an email out. 

The second is the email address that the email comes from.  And you don’t necessarily have to use your normal email address, you could use a special address for our campaign, or you could use “support@” or “info@”, but having a sender’s email.

The next is the “to” address, the “to”, “from”, the “bcc”, and the “cc”.  Now, really we don’t think too much about cc and bcc unless you’re not using an email marketing tool.  If you’re just sending emails out from your computer from outlook or your email application, then you’ll definitely want to be aware of the bcc and the cc to make sure you put your email addresses there so that not everybody gets a copy of all of the email addresses that the message goes to.  The last thing you need is for somebody to “reply to all” and then somebody else replies to all, and somebody else replies to all, and the next thing you know, your entire list is yelling at each other because they’re all replying to each other at the same time.

Subject line, every message has to have a subject line.  You can leave it blank, but if you do, you’re not going to get your message read, and so make sure you have a subject line that is going to get people to open your email; this is what they’re going to see when the message pops up in their inbox. 

And then, of course, you’ve got your message body, which is the content of the message.  And there’s a couple of different formats a message can take.  The two that we really care about are plain text or HTML, and so you’re going to decide if you want to send your message out that HTML, which means you can do things like colors, you can do layouts, add images.  Of if you want to have just simple plain text, which means you’re limited to just black text on the message.

And then finally, your email campaigns should have a foot, which will be in the body, but a footer has to have a couple of things to comply with CAN-SPAM regulations.  It has to have a link to unsubscribe, it has to have the name, phone number, and address of your business, and so you want to have your unsubscribe list and your business address in the footer so that you’re complying with CAN-SPAM requirements.

So that’s it.  That’s what you need to have to have an email.  I’m going to go through a lot more about email marketing in the next few days, so stay tuned.

Hello, it’s Aaron from AgentMethods talking about insurance agent websites.  And I’m going to spend the next few days talking about email marketing. 

Email marketing is a great tool.  It’s a great way to ask people what to do next.  I always talk about having a good call-to-action and guiding your prospects along the path, and email marketing is a great way of kind of reaching out to them, getting to them in their inbox, and bringing them to your website to do something or take a next step.  It’s really an effective tool.  We use it a lot.  And we use it to promote our websites, to promote our webinars, we promote our eBook, we promote our videos, like this one, and we always see a huge up spike whenever we do an email marketing campaign.  It works. 

Now, I’ll spend the next few days going over different components of an email.  I’ll talk about how emails are structured and how you can emails to be as effective as possible.  I’ll give you some tips on maximizing campaigns.  But before I do that, there’s something even more fundamental than the email itself, which is your list, your marketing list. 

Now, the success of your email campaigns begins and ends with your list.  If you have a good list, you’ll see good success.  If you have a bad list, you’ll see bad results.  And really what I’ve seen is that if you bought a list, if you’ve gone and purchased a list or if you’re buying names, renting names from somewhere else, that you really shouldn’t expect much from lists that you’re buying.  And the reason why is because you don’t know if these people are in the market, you don’t know if they’re interested in what you’re selling, you don’t know if they know who you are, and so those factors combined really make it hard to be successful with email marketing.

Now, the best lists are ones that you can [inaudible 01:46] off, and these are people who have requested that you contact them, they know your brand, they know your name, they know what you sell, and they’re interested.  And so you’re going to have really good results with them. 

Now, building a list takes time, it’s a slow process, there’s really not a way to do it overnight.  It starts with one email and adds up over time.  So to begin the email marketing process, the first thing that you have to do is begin collecting email address from your prospects, from your customers, from everybody you talk to, and save them all in one place.  And over time, this will grow.  It will become a fairly significant list, but you have to start with one.  And so start with that first name right now, go and start collecting email addresses, make sure you’re creating them in a centralized place so that when you start doing email marketing, whether it’s tomorrow or a month from now or a year from now, you’re starting with a good list, a list of people who know you, who are in your market, and you know you can be successful with your campaign.  So start with building list, and we’ll go from there.

That’s what I’ve got today.  I will have more about insurance websites and email marketing tomorrow.  Thanks for watching.

Transcript:

Hello, it’s Aaron from AgentMethods talking about insurance agent websites.  Now, forgive me for going on a bit of a rant here today, but I was contacted by an AgentMethods customer last week.  And they were upset because they launched a website and really haven’t seen any business on it.  And so when I got to talking with them, I learned pretty quickly that they haven’t done any promotion of the website. 

And this seems to be kind of a common misconception that you can go and turn on a website, just launch it, and then do nothing more, and the business will just find you magically somehow, people are going to come to your website, you’re going to get traffic, you’re going to get leads, it’s going to be great, you’re going to make tons of money, and you’re just going to kick back and cash the paychecks.  And I wish this was true, but it’s just not true. 

You can’t just turn on a website and have people find you.  I use the analogy that I’ve said in a previous video that it’s sort of like if you got a new phone number and you didn’t tell anybody about it and it wasn’t listed in the phone book, how many calls would you get on that phone number?  And we know the answer is zero.  The same thing is true with your website.  If you don’t promote it, if you don’t optimize for search, if you don’t drive traffic to it, you’re not going to see any benefit.  I’m sorry, it’s going to take some work.  It will pay off; we know this works, but it takes some time. 

Now, if you find that you are not getting traffic on your website, let’s go back and sort of just do a quick survey of some things you can do.  So the first thing is you can promote your site offline, put it on your business cards, put it on your letterhead, put it on your mailers, put it on every sort of thing that leaves your office, every ad, everything else that you do.  And this way, people that already know about your agency who have become familiar with your website, and will start to go there to learn more about the things that you offer, just naturally. 

The second thing is to make sure that all of your current customers know about your website.  So send them an email, tell them about it, mention it, give them fridge magnets with your URL on it, whatever it takes so that they know about it, because this way, they’ll be able to refer their friends and family to your website and drive business to you that way. 

And speaking of referral sources, you want to develop online referral sources just as you have with offline.  And this means developing relationships with people who would refer you that have websites and doing link exchanges so that they link to you, you link to them, doing guest writing on their blogs, and just doing whatever you can to get them to refer their website traffic to your site. 

Now, you can also do some pay-per-click advertising; you can invest some money in pay-per-click, and I’ve got a bunch of videos at how to do that well, how to optimize your pay-per-click spend to get the most out of that, and that’s a great way to get some traffic quick, especially on a new site. 

And then I’ve done a bunch of videos on search engine optimization, so go back and watch those videos, learn about it, it does take some time, but long-term, this is the best source of free leads to your site.  It’s not going to happen just magically by itself, but it will happen if you do the work. 

And then, finally, use email marketing, and I’ve talked about how email marketing is a great tool for us to see really big traffic spikes on our website, and the same thing is true with you.  And so to that point, I’m going to spend the next few days talking more about email marketing.  And so I’ll go over some of the things you need to watch out for and know to be success with email marketing. 

But I think the point really is simple.  If you want to see success with your website, you have to do the work.  I’m sorry to be the bearer of bad news, but it’s true.

That’s what I’ve got today.  Thank you very much for watching.  I will have more about insurance agent websites and email marketing tomorrow.  

Transcript:

Hello, it’s Aaron Kassover from AgentMethods talking about insurance agent websites, and talking about how you can use analytics to improve your prospect’s experience, increase conversions, get more leads, make more money, etc.

So I want to talk about exit pages.  An exit page is the last page somebody looks at on your site before they go somewhere else.  The close the browser or they type in search engine and go back and search for something else or they good to Facebook.  Exit page is the page where they leave.  And this is where we’re losing our audience.  On an exit page, they’re leaving for some reason, maybe because they’ve read everything they want to read or maybe because they haven’t found what they wanted to, maybe because we haven’t really done a good job guiding them to the next step, conveying a good sense of urgency, communicating the value you bring, and really kind of compelling them to go on to the next page.

And on these exit pages, when we find sort of the topics of pages, these really need to up the urgency of our offer; we need to sort of up amplitude, and not just have content there—often you’ll find exit page is just a content page, but you really need to reinforce the value that you bring and why they should contact you.  And what this means is removing barriers, just like in sales, in general, removing barriers to risk, maybe there’s a trust barrier about entering data, maybe they’re not really sure they want to proceed, maybe it’s reminding them how you can help and letting them know that there’s really no obligation, that you’re just here to help. 

Remind them that using an agent doesn’t cost anything; maybe they’re worried about going with you instead of somebody else, going direct, it’s going to cost them more money.  And ultimately, you have to communicate to them at the bounce page why it’s easier for them to fill out your form to become a lead than it is to go somewhere else.  You have to convince them that you are the lowest barrier to getting what they need, that it’s least risk, easiest, and really kind of reinforce why they should proceed.  Do this with text, do it with images, make sure thins are bold, make sure it’s really clear, but you have to communicate this to your audience on those critical bounce pages.

And so let’s go back to the browser, just look at Google Analytics for a second, and we’re going to look at bounce pages, and I’m just going to show you how you can use the advanced segmentation to really zero in on the pages that are most important.  Let’s take a look at the browser.

So you can see here we’re on the top exit pages here on Google Analytics, and you find this by logging in, under content, you’ll see top exit pages.  And what we see now is just a list of all the pages on your site ordered by exit.  Now, you’re going to almost always find 99% of the time that your home page, just your main route page, is going to have the vast number of people exiting from there.  And the reason for this is because on this page, anybody who bounces, who comes to your site and then leaves right away, this would be their exit page.  They come to the home page and leave.  And we want to decrease our bounce rate, but that’s not the goal of this exercise.  The goal of this exercise is to focus on the exit page of people who haven’t bounced, who have come into the site and spent some time going around looking at pages, but then left. 

And so what I like to do is use one of the default advanced segments that Google Analytics give you, which is removing all bounce, so non-bounce visits only.  And so we’re going to look at just those visit—you can see it’s the very last choice here—and we’ll see that that changes the order of pages.  Now, we still see that our route pages or home page is the highest bounce page, but that’s only because it got the most views.  It’s actually not the highest by percent of exit.  If we sort by percent of exit, you’ll see that which people get to this page and then just leave.  So our Medicare premiums page, everybody who looks at that bounces or exits.  Tell-a-friend, we have a 50% exit rate.  And so this is a way to kind of see which pages are just stopping your visitors in their tracks, and it’s a good place to go to reinforce your value proposition.  So look at both the percent of exit and the actual number of exits; those are two different data metrics that will give you some good information on who’s bouncing and why.

Now, once you’ve got these bounce pages, you figured out sort of what your top maybe four or five are, then you’ll go back to your site, go look at those page, and see ways, maybe it’s at the top and the bottom, to reinforce your value, the reason why a prospect should contact you and really compel them to continue on.  This will mean going outside of the content of the page because it’s probably going to be sort of not in the immediate topic, but it’s really important you do to try to reduce these exits and you get your prospects to convert.

Give it a try.  This can really help you improve your conversion rate; improve the number of leads you get on your site.  This is one of these fine tuning things that really does have a potential to dramatically increase the number of leads you get from your site.  So spend the time, think through what’s going on in these pages and how you can get people to stay, continue on, and become leads.  It will help you out tremendously.

That’s what I’ve got today.  I will have more about insurance agent websites tomorrow.  Thank you very much for watching.