When you’re ready to mine the gold hidden in your email subscription list, one of your most powerful tool will be the e-newsletter. With the right e-newsletter, you can stay in contact with prospects, clients and referral sources and develop new insurance leads with little cost.

But not all e-newsletters succeed in generating new leads and converting prospects into closings. At best, the wrong newsletter will let leads get away. At worst, they can drive away potential business.

So how do you create a top-notch e-newsletter that can feed your sales pipeline? With the right tools and the tips below, you’ll soon be on your way.

Understand the e-newsletter’s purpose

The purpose of a marketing e-newsletter is to drive potential clients and prospects into your sales pipeline!

The newsletter’s layout, design, content and frequency all serve this purpose. This may seem obvious, buy many beginning internet marketers quickly forget this fact.

It’s not supposed to tell people what’s going on in your office or what you did on your vacation. It’s to develop potential clients into actual customers. Any purpose less than producing potential sales means that it’s not fulfilling its marketing purpose.

Give subscribers what they want

The email subscriber’s purpose is not opposed to yours – but it is different. They joined your email subscription list to be informed and educated about insurance product, service or carriers.

Finding content is often the biggest challenge for brokers and agents who want to issue regular e-newsletter. But it doesn’t have to be. Keep in mind that you’re writing a newsletter, not an encyclopedia.

It needs to have enough substance to satisfy your subscriber’s basic demands – otherwise they may drop off from your emailing list. But too much content can be too much of a burden. Consider putting some of these simple items in your e-newsletter:

• One feature article
• Highlight the pros and cons of one new program
• Testimonial from a satisfied client
• Expanded definition of an insurance term or program
• Insurance industry news
• Quick intro to one of your staffers
• Special offer
• Upcoming events
• Updated quotes

Your marketing e-newsletter should be easy to create and maintain, especially if you’re a small office. You can’t afford to spend hours on a newsletter, when you should be closing deals instead.

So where do you find that all-important feature article? If you don’t feel comfortable writing it yourself, check with your carriers or on the web for possible articles you can reprint (with attribution). Some carriers may even gladly provide a regular column if you have a sizable subscription list.

In addition, you can easily find free articles on the web by simply typing "free insurance articles" into Google. Several directories maintain publicly available, royalty-free articles that you can insert into your e-newsletter and your website.

Call to action

All your marketing emails and newsletters should include a call to action – an invitation for the readers to take the next step. With a little creativity, every story can close with a call to action that is linked to your website, email or phone number.

For example, if you highlight the pros and cons of a new program, end it with a link inviting readers to contact you for more information or a personal meeting to see if that product is right for them.

When you include a testimonial from a satisfied client, close it with a quick invitation for readers to experience the same level of satisfaction first hand.

Finally, you don’t need to stuff the full content of each article into your email. Just give them the catchy headline and first paragraphs in the emailed newsletter-with a link to your website for the rest of the article.

Ideally, your condensed e-newsletter should appear in one email screen, with the full e-newsletter made available in your website.

Use Templates & Online Specialists

Creating a professional-looking e-newsletter is easy if you have the right tools. You don’t even need to have a full-time designer/writer/editor/publisher on your staff.

Online services such as ConstantContact.com and VerticalResponse.com provide full email and e-newsletter services for as little as $12 per month. They even provide easy-to-use templates that make it seem as if you have a full-time e-newsletter publisher on staff.

All you need to do is insert the content and set-up the mailing list. In addition to providing e-newsletter templates and handling the emailing of your newsletter, they’ll manage your mailing list to track "unsubscribe" requests, email bounce-backs and even collect additional subscribers.

E-newsletters are effective marketing tools that don’t cost very much to use. However, you must commit yourself to preparing and sending them out on a regular basis. Whether you decide on a monthly, bi-monthly or quarterly schedule, stick to it.