Send an email, get a customer. Is that how email marketing works? While email marketing may seem like a simple form of insurance marketing, it's just one part of the constantly shifting field of inbound marketing. How is email marketing changing, and what trends should you note as you create a plan for the coming year?

Focus on Your Marketing Target

You've always tried to hit the right tone and create the right offer as part of your email marketing strategy. Today, data has to be at the center of your insurance marketing strategy. Your job is to gather information about your customers and their preferences so that you create highly-accurate portraits of both your typical customer groups and your individual customers. There is no more one-size-fits-all email strategy. Let your customer data guide your email marketing.

Have Less Design Stress

You try to be diligent in your branding, creating emails that feature your logo and all of the colors and feel of your website and other marketing materials. With new design tools from email providers, you'll be able to easily customize the look of your emails so that you'll spend less time focused on the look and more time focused on the message and content of your emails.

Create a Customer Journey

Your website probably features sales portals that allow leads to move smoothly from the home page or a landing page into deeper sections of your website. They can refine their search, answer their questions, and sign up for more information. While email marketing campaigns have focused more on collecting email addresses than customer information, expect insurance marketing to move from simple email address collection to a customer journey that uses the collection of an email address as a first step in gathering more data and customizing offers for a customer.

Analyze Your Success

As email marketing becomes more refined, you'll see better analytics tools that move beyond open rates to give you more data about how your customers interact with your emails. You'll be able to integrate email and analytics and look at how customers renew their insurance based on your email or examine whether they return to your site again after an email prompt. You'll get new metrics for success based on your email analytics.

Create Content For Mobile

More and more customers access your website on a mobile device, and the same is true for email. You'll need to spend more time making concise headings and mobile-friendly text that's easy to scan when it's in email format. You'll ensure that all of your insurance marketing efforts reach your customers successfully on their mobile devices.

Use Diverse Communication Tools

Many email-like tools are emerging to help you communicate with your customers. For example, you might choose to use a bot on your website to engage with customers who have basic questions and to gather information so that you can further refine your product offerings for that lead. These communication tools can work in tandem with your email marketing campaign, encouraging leads to sign up for future emails to remain connected to your company.

At the American Agents Alliance, we're here to support your insurance marketing. Learn from other insurance agencies at our annual American Agents Alliance Convention and take a look at our many membership benefits.