How to Stay in Touch With Your Clients
Your insurance business is based on relationships and customer service. Here are some easy ways to stay in touch and better connected with your customers.
When your clients purchase a policy from you — or ideally several policies — great customer service should continue beyond the first premium payment.
While any well-trained insurance agent knows to leap into action when a claim pops up, it’s important to ask yourself what value you’re adding to your client-agent relationship outside of filed claims.
You’ve already built enough trust with your clients to turn it into a policy, so here are three ways to make sure you’re maintaining that connection:
Sending an email is the method with the lowest amount of effort, but that also goes both ways.
If your client has a policy question that wasn’t “big” enough to warrant a call, regular emails give them a convenient, no-pressure line of communication with you.
You’ll need to strike the right balance to make yourself an asset rather than a pest, but this approach is thankfully easy to tailor.
Create a new email each week, touching on a subject of interest to all, and be sure there’s at least one non-insurance actionable tip.
Ideas for Tailoring Your Email Content to Match Your Specialties
- Car Insurance: How and when to check tire pressure on a road trip, which dash cams are consistently voted the best, the best ways to keep windows clean and fog-free.
- Home Insurance: How often to change HVAC air filters, why you should always know where your water shut-off valves are, power outage safety steps for food storage.
- Life Insurance: What fitness trackers can tell you about your sleep cycle, ways to reduce stress with simple routines, which type of home safe is right for your valuables.
While none of these ideas are explicitly linked to insurance types, the information they provide will put your clients in the right mindset for upselling policies or trusting their existing policies further — hopefully providing some word-of-mouth for your business in the process.
Social Media
Social media is a connection method that benefits you the most — it arguably gives you the most freedom to put your “sales hat” on without alienating new clients while providing potentials with a handy way to get in touch.
In order for your social media presence to be a successful one, you’ll need to be consistent. It’s better that you post frequently in one channel than infrequently in three. Start with the social media platform you’re most comfortable with — Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, etc. — and build a business persona gradually.
Remember those email subjects? Here’s where they can be retooled and recycled, giving you twice the reach for your efforts. Post a shortened snippet of each tip/discussion about a week after the matching email goes out to your clients.
For those who read your email, the post will serve as a reminder, and for those who haven’t, it’s a new and interesting way to establish authority in your area of expertise.
Always include a call-to-action (CTA) — “Want more [home/auto/life] hacks like this one? Sign up for my weekly emails here!” CTAs make it easy for new subscribers to sign up for your newsletter and/or email blasts.
Whenever possible, use your social media page to tell the story of what you offer. If your clients are okay with it, adding pictures of yourself with a smiling family signing a policy provides you with a chance to “tag” them, putting a face on your efforts.
Real-life images can also be organically leveraged into a soft pitch — “Just helped @John Smith sign a policy for his awesome new 2020 Elantra — I’d love to help you do the same, call me at 555-5555!”
If your social media platform of choice has a review feature, you can also ask for reviews in your first follow-up contact with new clients to bolster your presence.
An important note: be sure to keep your social media presence professional at all times. While it might be tempting to wade into controversial subjects for the sake of views and activity, more often than not you’ll end up regretting it.
Cards / Mailers
Contacting folks through regular mail seems a bit dated these days, but the fact that most agencies are relying on digital means has had a curious effect: mail has become interesting again.
This doesn’t mean there isn’t a significant hurdle to capturing attention — chances are your target market, regardless of age, is primed to ignore solicitations.
If a mail campaign is in your budget, consider using some unique features to break through those “junk mail” blinders.
Tips for Targeted Mail Campaigns
- Some printers offer the ability to print an image of the recipient’s home, courtesy of Google Maps and public data, directly on the outside of the envelope. This is a phenomenal ice-breaker for home insurance!
- Get creative with your mailers — such as die-cut postcards and clear postcards, which add a “shake them out of it” element to a stack of mail.
- Try ultra-personalized, handwritten postcards to congratulate on the birth or graduation of a child. This type of information can be gleaned from those aforementioned social media connections.
Contact in the digital age should still look like an “old fashioned” handshake — intentional, meaningful, and powerful.
Staying in touch with your clients is vital for the long-term success of your business, and ultimately it’s an effort that will more than pay off in extra policies, new clients, and overall business reputation.
