Do you have an electronic newsletter you would like to distribute regularly? Do you have announcements you'd like to broadcast to your customers occasionally? Would some of your customers profit from e-mails you could send them with "e-clippings" of relevant on-line articles? Would electronic Thanksgiving cards be an up-to-date substitute for the paper versions you've been sending for years?
Managed mass e-mailing can be a powerful way to market your agency and your Web site and to communicate with your customers. And, at least on the surface, it's free. But to be successful, you need to carefully lay the groundwork. And above all, you must not annoy your customers or prospects with spam (unsolicited e-mail).
Three broadcast channels
Until the widespread adoption of FAX in the 80s, mailings were your only practical way to distribute information to multiple customers or prospects more or less simultaneously. But paper mailing is not inexpensive. With the cost of postage, paper, printing, and labor each piece is likely to cost $1 or more. And more often than not, anything that looks like junk mail (unsolicited paper mail) ends up in the addressee's circular file. Finally, mass mailings are difficult to pull off with an agency staff already fully occupied so mailing out-sourcing is usually required.
Many agencies have found that including broadcast material with an invoice or other official agency correspondence elicits a better response than single purpose marketing mailings. But that's of use really only for existing customers.
Blastfaxing can provide a better response rate than paper mailings, but it requires knowing the appropriate FAX numbers and having a way to conveniently broadcast the FAX to many addresses in one simple operation. Blastfaxing services exist (www.blastfax.com is one), and typically charge $.18 to $.25 per FAX. Though less expensive than paper, FAX provides only low quality and black and white images of your communication piece. And because they do not go directly to the addressee, but must be hand carried, they sometimes do not arrive at their destination.
Mass e-mailing requires knowing the recipient's e-mail address, but it can be done with zero out-of-pocket costs and what you send can be attractive and even interactive. And it goes directly to the person addressed, without proceeding through a gating/disposal process. But unlike paper (or even FAX to some extent), unsolicited electronic mail is considered by most people to be intrusive and obnoxious. Mail and FAXes can be quickly discarded. Spam intrudes, takes up space in one's computer, and in some cases deliberately contains a virus.
Because mass e-mailing has such great potential and because it can be used to reinforce your agency's Web site, we'll spend the rest of this article looking at how to set up and administer effective mass e-mailing. We'll pay particular attention to Internet-based list managers and how you can use them to your advantage.
Getting the e-mail addresses and qualifying them
You likely have e-mail addresses for many of your customers. You should have a standard procedure in place to pick up new e-mail addresses and confirm those already on file. Acquistion/confirmation can be done during every CSR-customer interaction, via a field on a payment return stub, and on your Web site (more later).
Most of your commercial customers and many of your personal lines customers are eager to receive and send e-mail (as appropriate) when you are working on something they've requested or acknowledged they need. They may be less eager to be solicited for something they haven't asked for. Therefore, when collecting e-mail addresses it is very important to identify which customers are willing to "receive unsolicited e-mail from this agency from time to time that informs you about important insurance issues or service."
In the jargon of the Internet, you need to let your customers "opt in," that is, agree to accept e-mail that is not connected with a specific insurance transaction they've requested. Some businesses adopt an "opt out" policy for unsolicited e-mail. They assume the addressee wants to hear from them unless the addressee tells them otherwise. "Opt out" policies are a good way to terminally offend your customers and prospects.
Selective opt in
It may make sense to offer your customers/prospects more than one opportunity for opting in. If they're not sure what you intend to send them, they will probably not opt in at all On the other hand, if you provide them a number of choices they're likely to find one or more to their liking.
For instance, if you offer several different electronic newsletters on different topics, you should let the customer know about each and let the customer choose among them. If you intend to produce issue-oriented
e-mails from time to time (e.g., on insurance and home businesses), letting the customer choose from an interesting and substantial list makes the agency appear expert and magnanimous.
List management
The concept of mass e-mail looks promising and the idea of multiple choice opt-in is a good approach to customers and prospects, but how do you actually do it?
The best way is to let your customers and prospects take care of everything themselves. Let them manage their inclusion or exclusion from any or all of your e-mailing plans through your Web site. Your job then is to get your customers and prospects to your Web site (and to the opt-in area) and then to publish high quality useful information to the parties that have chosen to be on each list.
How to get people to visit (and revisit) your Web site and how to create or acquire great content are topics for other articles, so here we'll provide more details on the mechanics of e-mail list management and mailing.
Do it yourself?
OK, so you need to maintain multiple mailing lists, (probably best done through some sort of self-service function on your Web site) and you need to do mass mailings from each list once in a while. How hard can that be? Can't you do that with an e-mail link (to you) next to each list choice on your Web site or a multi-choice form that would transmit the choices to you? Then you could add the addresses to the right mail group in Outlook or add the right codes to your ACT! contact records. Then, you could use Outlook to do the mailings.
Well, you could do that, but it would be very clumsy. You really want the information you collect on your Web site to automatically update your e-mail lists. The process proposed above causes more work for you or someone in your agency. You're likely to get tired of the laborious process and eventually abandon it.
While you can theoretically e-mail hundreds of recipients the same e-mail out of Outlook, that's going to take some processing time and might not even be possible with your current ISP.
What happens when a recipient wants to be taken off a list? Does he return your broadcast e-mail with a plea to be left alone, making more work for you and presenting the danger that you won't get around to making the change quickly enough?
Rather than setting up a system that requires a good deal of manual effort and can go badly wrong, it may make sense to delegate the function to an organization that does this for a living and has figured out exactly how do it right.
One example: Topica
A good place to begin your mass e-mail education and experimentation process is with Topica (www.topica.com), a free e-mail list management service. Topica does not want you to use its service to do unsolicited e-mail (Spam) or advertising. But it does support distribution of electronic newsletters and announcements. It can also provide moderated or unmoderated e-mail discussion groups, a feature you might want to use for in-facing, rather than out-facing, services.
Topica is free. So how do they support themselves? When your Web site visitor opts to join one of your lists (for instance, to get your agency's personal lines e-news-letter), the visitor is linked to the Topica site for confirmation and then presented an opportunity to sign up for many other lists (some sponsored by major brands).
After experimenting with Topica, you may decide you're willing to pay a modest fee to avoid your customers seeing advertising. (See www.bcentral.com, a Microsoft site that offers ListBot [free list manager] and List Builder [subscription-based].)
How it works
You register separately for each list you want Topica to host. For each list, Topica provides HTML code you can copy from their page and then paste into your Web page at the appropriate location. The code provides a link on your site to the list-joining area in Topica where your visitors can subscribe to this particular list. The subscription process is complete when your visitor returns the e-mail Topica sends for confirmation. The visitor then shows up on your subscription list, visible to you through Topica
When you choose to do a mailing using a list, you compose the e-mail with Outlook (for instance) and then send it to the name of your list (with a password) at Topica. Topica then does a mail merge of the list into your e-mail template and sends all the mail out. Topica adds unsubscribe instructions to each e-mail so your customer or prospect can opt out easily if he chooses to.
You can create or modify your lists through an import process instead of or in addition to providing self-service list maintenance through your Web site. You can also export lists for use in other venues.
Your e-mail may draw responses and you can direct Topica to forward them to you or to hold them for you to come and look at. The latter can be a convenient way to keep marketing response e-mails out of your operating e-mail inbox.
Send the newsletter or a link?
Should you send the newsletter itself or just a link to the location you store it on your Web site? One could argue either way but perhaps there are more advantages to mailing a link. If your newsletter e-mail contains only a sentence or two and a link, it will download more quickly than if it contains the full text and graphics of the newsletter. The idea is to let the user decide whether and when he wants to see the actual newsletter.
And, perhaps more importantly, by sending a link rather than a self-contained newsletter, you encourage your customer/prospect to return to your site, a behavior you want to reinforce.
Time to take a look?
You can use mass e-mailing effectively to market your agency and your Web site and it can be done in conjunction with more traditional mail and FAX channels. It's especially attractive because it is very inexpensive, gets to the right party, and can look great. It can put the customer or prospect in charge of the process and it can bring visitors back to your Web site again and again. You can create the process and infrastructure yourself or outsource it to an organization that is an expert. If you don't use e-mail effectively today as an element of your out-facing marketing services, maybe it's time to take a look.
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