Everything You Need to Know about Building an Email Subscriber List

As an insurance agent, it is crucial for you to possess an arsenal of qualified insurance leads and prospects that can be converted into future clients. This improves your chances of meeting your sales targets.

Online marketing is increasingly being used for identifying and converting potential insurance clients. Email newsletter is a very popular online marketing tools used by insurance agents across the world to achieve this objective.

Perhaps, it wouldn't be wrong to term email subscription lists as virtual gold mines that can help you attain your sales goals. Businesses use email newsletters and announcements to stay in touch with potential leads, offering them valuable information alongside ads and promotional content.

Email marketing is one of the most cost-effective channels of connecting with subscribers. Growing an email database may seem like a daunting task initially, but it will seem easier as you get the hang of things.

Email Subscription List is Not Spam

An email subscription list is different from spam. Spamming will get you nowhere, so avoid it at all cost. Your emails will get banned by the major providers, such as Gmail, Yahoo! and Bing.

Here are some tips on growing your email subscriber list.

Plan the Categories

It is common for subscriber lists to have two to three categories. This allows you to create custom sales pitches to meet the needs of different audience types. Brainstorm the most common categories relevant to your business. One option is to categorize subscribers according to the status of lead:

Current Client List: Your existing clients can be one of the categories. Many of your existing clients can be potential purchasers of other insurance policies and programs. You can also consider up-selling their current plans and services.
Prospect List: A prospect list brings together clients who have expressed interest in your products and services. However, these subscribers are still not ready to complete the buying process. It is crucial to stay in touch with the prospect lists. Create an email marketing campaign that will help prospects in making the buying decision.
Referrals: This is yet another category for your email subscribers. Look for friends, colleagues and acquaintances in relevant sectors who qualify as leads.

Don't create too many categories. Keep the system manageable.

Build the Email Subscriber List

An email subscriber list includes the email addresses of your contacts in a database. There are a number of paid and free programs that can be used for organizing the database.

Once you have created the categories, input your current, prospect and referral lists into the database. You can also import an existing database of contacts into the new database.

Keep growing the subscriber list.

Networking: Participate in social and networking events and collect business cards of prospects. Add their email addresses in the relevant categories of your subscriber database.
Leads: Another option is to purchase new leads from trusted and reputable leads providers. Lead generation companies conduct extensive market research to identify leads that are relevant to your business. While you may not get immediate results from the leads, a solid email marketing campaign can improve your marketing results over a longer period of time.
Opt-in: Another important source of growing email subscribers for businesses is the opt-in form given on the company website or blog. It is important to display the opt-in form prominently on the website. Include a powerful call-to-action to encourage users to share their email addresses. Keep the opt-in form simple, requesting visitor's name and email address. The more information you seek in the opt-in form, the fewer sign-ups you will get.

If visitors aren't signing up for the form, offer an incentive, such as a white paper or an ebook. You are likely to get more sign-ups if you offer useful information in the newsletter. It also helps to show some of your previous newsletters as samples on your site.

Organize the Email Subscriber List

After creating the subscriber list, it is important to keep it organized. The following tips will keep your email subscription list fresh and updated at all times:

Undeliverables and Drop-offs: Requests to unbsubscribe and bounced emails are an everyday occurrence in email marketing. Your current subscribers can change their priorities in the future and may choose to unsubscribe from your announcements. However, it is still important to keep an eye on your drop-off rate. If the drop-off rate goes up to 5%, there is a reason to be concerned.
Survey: You can also use your email subscriber list to get useful insight about the market trends. Create short surveys and encourage your subscribers to fill them out. Find out the kind of information they wish to receive from you. While the response rate of such emails is generally low, it is still a useful way of gaining insight about your customers.
Limit the Contact with Subscribers: While it is crucial to stay in touch with your customers, you still need to limit the number of emails you send. Excessive emails will only increase the cancellation rate. Also, ensure that every email offers valuable content that is of interest to the subscriber.
Third-Party Service: A number of third-party tools are available to assist you with your email marketing campaigns. You can avail these solutions for a more robust email marketing campaign with higher ROI. It is a good idea to check the reviews and ratings of different service providers before selecting the program.

While the process of building and managing an email subscription list may be time-consuming, it is an extremely cost-effective channel of identifying prospects and converting them into serious buyers.