View this article online: https://www.insurancejournal.com/magazines/mag-features/2010/07/19/159911.htm

Marketing Knowledge Equals Sales Power

The interactive revolution has brought incredible advances, not least is the ability to track the effectiveness of e-mail marketing. No longer does the partnership of “hope and prayer” play a role in evaluation and analysis of a marketing campaign. The results are right there, within days after a campaign has been deployed. And these comprehensive, real-time reports allow agents to accurately measure the effectiveness of every campaign they send.

Thanks to the digital revolution, e-mail marketing can help agents:

• Find out how many recipients opened a campaign e-mail, clicked a link, unsubscribed, forwarded an e-mail to a friend, and more. Find out exactly who is checking out the e-mail, how many times they’re doing it, and when they did it. Agents can get an overview for the life of the campaign or drill down to minute by minute detail.
• See what subscribers are interested in. Not only can agents see the total number of clicks for every link in their e-mail, they also can find out who clicked that link, when they clicked it and how many times. By including a forward to a friend link in a campaign, agents can easily see which subscribers are forwarding their e-mail and how many people they’re forwarding to.
• Easily compare multiple campaigns. Statistics like open and click rates are useful, but it’s when agents start comparing results over time that the data shines. By comparing statistics like opens, clicks, bounces, unsubscribes and spam complaints, marketers can see what content subscribers find relevant and just as importantly, what they don’t.

In short, with a single click, information that has never been available until now can provide insight into the habits, interests and intent of an e-mail recipient. Make use of that information and turn marketing knowledge into potential sales.

Increased sales results will start when agents include the following four key steps:

1. Track
2. Segment
3. Analyze
4. Re-market

Tracking: Look at trends to get an idea of exactly what is and isn’t working in the marketing e-mails. Tracking opens and clicks can tell who is interested in a product or service, and what articles are most compelling. If an article contains a click-through to an inquiry form, the sales results are also stark evidence of the true results of that e-mail.

Segment: If the original databases used to deploy an e-mail were provided in a well-segmented fashion, subsequent e-mail results are considerably easier to discern. Agents can still see all the statistics relative to opens, clicks and so on, but those same results are automatically isolated into specific data segments. Be sure to provide data in a usable format.

Analyze: Although e-mail marketing is blindingly fast, beware of “analysis/paralysis.” Agents should figure out what they need or want to know before the e-mail is deployed, and focus just on that. The results don’t lie, so agents should make plans and changes accordingly.

Re-market: Beyond dissemination of the results, continue to market based on a deep understanding of subscriber’s needs and wants. Re-marketing can include any number of follow up tactics. If the volume is huge, send another e-mail customized to a specific interest as demonstrated by click-through results. If the volume is more manageable, get the sales force to follow up with those same respondents one-on-one. The tactics are endless.

Using e-mail marketing, knowledge is more powerful than ever. And now agents can put that knowledge to work and immediately laser focus their re-marketing efforts to generate sales.