This article reviews what agencies and brokers should do once they have created a list of underwriting target prospects. List building is a separate topic from list maintenance and is worthy of meaningful discussion. That said, once agencies and brokers have created a list, they should quickly establish best list maintenance practices. Maintaining a clean insurance email list helps agencies and brokers improve their online reputation, increase deliverability, reduce complaints, and increase conversion rates. To have a clean list, you need to manage bounces, age your list, remove inactive users, and allow subscribers to update information. Here are four important best practices to follow related to insurance email marketing list health and maintenance:
Manage bounces: Create a policy where you will delete an email after four or more soft bounces. You should also delete all emails after a bounce. Hard bounces are usually removed by any quality email marketing engine, but you should check your email database to make sure this is being done correctly. Soft bounce policies vary by vendor, watch for soft bounces as they affect deliverability and reputation.
No longer in: Over time, people change email addresses, leave a business, or lose interest in your organization. An increase in the bounce rate may indicate that you need to increase your list maintenance. You must remove employees who are no longer with your company or who have retired after each campaign.
Delete inactive users: Create a policy where you delete contacts if they don’t open emails or don’t respond to calls to action after a specified period. Or break these users apart into multivariate test campaigns to see if you can induce engagement with a completely different approach.
Manage subscription: Give subscribers the opportunity to change the frequency of emails or update their information. This is usually better than a simple opt-out, as recipients may want to limit the frequency rather than completely exclude themselves from your campaigns.
Sending information that subscribers no longer want can increase spam complaints. Sending emails to inactive email addresses can damage your reputation with ISPs. Improve delivery, open rates, click-through rates, and conversion with proper insurance email marketing list maintenance. Proper list maintenance also helps insurance agency salespeople avoid honey traps. For those of you unfamiliar with honey traps, let’s go over this important aspect of list maintenance to better understand how it applies to insurance agency email marketing.
Suppose one of the domains your agency targets goes down (the company was acquired or the division is no longer working). After a period of about 6 to 12 months, many hosting companies will disable email for that domain. Then any email sent to these missing domains can be automatically routed to blacklists. An example is spamhaus.com. As your domain continues to be pushed to this missing domain (which often does not return a bounce), your ISP’s reputation suffers and your domain may end up blacklisted.
Following the best practices above can help insurance web marketers maintain a cleaner, healthier list. And it will help ensure that they avoid spam traps and honeypots.