To understand a bit more about how to best nurture your leads, you need to have a better idea of what lead nurturing is. This is the marketing process that helps educate your prospects and build a relationship with your leads that aren’t ready to commit to buying yet.
Why Should Insurance Agencies Nurture Their Leads?
Of your leads, up to 50% may still be undecided when it comes to whether or not they want to work with your agency. A follow-up strategy is critical to keeping these individuals engaged and showing them your value. The goal is to build trust, and that trust will benefit both your prospect and the agency when the prospect needs advice.
Consider Automating
Gathering new leads and maintaining contact with current clients is a problem for everyone. It becomes common to focus on the “hot” leads. When you have the chance to set things up for automation, such as email marketing, or reminders, do so. This will minimize the amount of time you have to devote to following up and allow you to focus on your “hot” leads, therefore translating to an increase in sales. The right insurance agency management system can help you with this.
What to Do with Leads as They Come In
Where your lead comes from is part of gauging how “warm” it is, but tracking behaviors will also help. This means tracking downloads of white papers, link clicks, who opens emails, and who visits webpages. Tracking that data lets you know who is doing their research. Contact people who are behaving in a manner that shows their interest. There are several options in marketing software that will help you track these details.
How Often to Follow Up
You do not want to become a pest to your prospect, but research shows it can take as many as 13 times contacting a prospect before they become a client. Too many phone calls and you are annoying, too few and they do not remember who you are. Contacting once a week and not calling more than once a month seems to be the right balance to turning a prospect into a client.
The First Follow-Up
You need to know more than how frequently to contact leads; you also need to know when to start contacting them. Ideally, you want to make a “thank you” phone call or send an email thanking them within 12 to 24 hours after you get the lead. This timeframe isn’t overly pushy, but it ensures that your insurance agency stays in the leads’ minds.
Incorporate Technology to Follow Up and Nurture Leads with Ease
Some of the best insurance agency management systems make it even easier to follow up with your leads to nurture them. For example, Jenesis lets you text and email directly from the software. It can even integrate with Outlook and Gmail to make communicating with leads even easier. Or you can take advantage of the drip marketing campaigns and the ability to import customers and prospects.
How to Nurture Leads
There are several ways to start nurturing your leads. You will want to combine all of the following tips as you create and follow a strategy.
Don’t Sound Like a Sales Pitch
The primary rule to remember is not to sound like you’re making a sales pitch. Focus on providing advice and guidance.
Take Advantage of Other Resources
You can also leverage other blogs and content that offer educational information. Just be careful not to do so from competing agents. Prepare yourself to do this by archiving good sources that would be helpful for your clients.
Create Your Own Blog
Starting your own blog is a fantastic way to not only drive traffic to your site but to keep information collected in a single spot.
Reuse Your Blog Content
This blog content is priceless as you can also reuse it in emails, infographics, and social media posts to keep in contact with your leads. While LinkedIn is an excellent place for sharing your content, Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram are also good options.
The best way to incorporate blog posts into your emails is to include a brief summary and a link to the full article. You can even do the same thing with articles from other websites, but once again, be sure never to link to or share content from competitors.
It Becomes a Habit
Once you develop a nurturing leads cycle, it becomes a habit. That lead you nurtured becomes a client, and you will continue nurturing them as a client. This cycle helps them want to refer you to their friends and, therefore, grows your business through referrals.
Don’t just connect at renewal time. Remind your clients of events and resources in their area that are specifically helpful to their needs. Avoid general promotional material and lean toward educational and informational items to share.