Dip your toes into AI with insurance-marketing automation

Many insurance agencies are looking for ways to dip their toes in the AI pool but are being met with skepticism from staff who are not necessarily on board with this change.

Navigating these waters can be tricky, but there’s an easy place for agencies to jump in.

Integrating AI into the insurance marketing process is an easy, non-threatening way for staff to experiment with this new technology while providing value to the agency. And AI is just the tip of the marketing iceberg. Leveraging a marketing platform not only opens the door to AI but also offers agencies a host of other useful capabilities, such as automation and content libraries.

Let’s explore how adopting a marketing automation solution with integrated AI can get these land skeptics on board the AI boat and paddle together toward a bigger bottom line.

Swim in a sea of content

Email campaigns are an important part of any marketing strategy. This can include newsletters that give clients and prospects an easy way to stay up to date with agency announcements and educational content, or dynamic promotions that include targeted messaging and content assets. While these email communications are valuable, cost-effective ways to keep lines of communications open, they also can be very time-consuming.

Marketing automation solutions allow agencies to leverage the power of AI to craft engaging emails quickly. Many systems allow users to build their own campaigns from scratch and offer a variety of pre-built options so they can literally “set it and forget it.” Some products also include a built-in content library with options to add the agency’s branding and contact information. Having a sea of content at the ready can save a lot of time and potentially eliminate the need to write content from scratch.

Reach into a targeting tacklebox

Once the email content is created, an agency needs to determine the audience it will target. This is an important step because sending the wrong type of outreach to a contact wastes the agency team’s time and efforts and could annoy the contact.

Marketing automation provides a tacklebox full of tools that take the work out of list segmentation so agencies can quickly identify prospects using their own data. Integrating a marketing automation solution with the agency’s foundational management system allows its team to create hyper-targeted prospect and client campaigns leveraging contact, account and policy information with minimal manual effort. Actions taken within the marketing automation solution like click-throughs and email responses can also flow back into the agency management system, enabling agents to easily track contact with a client or prospect without having to manually enter the information.

Automating the targeting process also allows agencies to create dynamic lists. Criteria only need to be set once, and the system will automatically update the list based on those criteria when contacts are added or updated. Lists no longer need to be manually updated. Segmentation automation also ensures compliance with email marketing laws and other regulatory restrictions by making sure anyone who has unsubscribed from the list does not receive emails.

Using these tools to target audiences gives agencies the ability to throw a line to client accounts that may be starting to sink and need a little extra attention to right the relationship.

Easily throw a life preserver

Regular touch points with relevant content demonstrates to clients and prospects that an agency is interested in a long-term, advisory relationship, not a transactional one. This is especially valuable to customers who are at risk of leaving and may need a bit of nurturing.

A marketing automation solution allows agencies to leverage their contact lists to determine which audiences may need extra attention and which audiences may be oversaturated. If too many emails are sent, they become noise in the recipients’ inbox, so it’s crucial to get the balance right. The marketing automation solution takes the manual efforts of segmenting contacts into groups that need nurturing and establishes a staggered cadence of communication with each group.

With this approach, agencies can easily send targeted communications to different groups at different times, preventing email fatigue and ensuring that they are sending interesting and relevant content to their recipients without dedicating a staff member to this tedious task.

Let the insights flow

Understanding how email campaigns are performing is an important part of determining whether contacts are over or under-saturated. Automated marketing solutions can help agencies gain insight into the success and effectiveness of marketing campaigns.

Email analytics are the best indicator of a campaign’s success and should be watched closely. They can help determine how often agencies should email contacts. For example, sending emails too frequently could increase unsubscribe rates, resulting in a loss of future touchpoint opportunities with those contacts.

Performance insights empower agents to make corrections before they start to sink. Staff no longer wastes effort on something that is missing the mark, and contacts don’t receive information that is not relevant to them. This also lets the agency see what information their contacts are interested in to sell smarter. Learning more about a client or prospect’s needs enables the agency to target recommended products, helping to keep the campaign successful — or afloat.

Dive Into AI with marketing automation

Marketing automation tools are a great place to test out the AI and automation waters. Automated processes enable agencies to spend less time managing communications and more time building their business. Automating mundane tasks like list creation and email drafting will surely have the skeptics in every agency joining the AI and automation pool party.

Anupam Gupta is chief product officer at Applied Systems.

Also from this contributor: How to break down insurance customer data