You may have heard of "drip marketing". The term has been picking up some buzz in the insurance industry. New Web tools make effective drip marketing easier than ever… and are creating a new opportunity for insurance agents to tap into a steady source of exclusive leads.

What is drip marketing? The term just means a campaign that touches your prospects repeatedly over a set period of time.

Why Do A Drip Marketing Campaign?

A lot of agents get caught in a trap of selling like crazy, then when the leads dry up everything is put on hold. They run around and scrape together some more leads. Then it’s sell, sell, sell all over again. This system seems to work good enough for some agents, but it’s not the most efficient use of your time.

With drip marketing, you spread out your marketing efforts over a longer period of time. If done correctly, you’ll get leads coming in at a steady rate. This ensures healthy, regular growth, rather than growth in fits and starts.

How To Start Your First Campaign

If you don’t have a big marketing budget, you may think drip marketing is out of your reach. Printing up a bunch of different mailers can get pricey fast. And scheduling strategic follow up phone calls is time-intensive.

An easy – and effective – solution is to use popular Web-based drip marketing tools designed specifically for insurance agents.

They’re called email autoresponders, and here’s how they work:

1. The lead comes in. You get a new insurance lead – it could be a purchased internet lead, a lead generated from your website, or a lead you enter into your lead management database manually.
2. Your first autoresponder message is sent out. Your lead instantly gets a new email message, sent by your autoresponder system. No matter how busy you are, you know your new leads always get your personalized message right away.
3. Your lead receives a series of follow-up messages, spaced out over intervals you choose. Your emails keep touching leads over the course of weeks and months. When they’re interested in talking to an agent about a policy, there’s your sales message and contact information right in front of them.

Autoresponders give you control over the frequency of your message. Any time you want to make an adjustment, you can. And the messages you send aren’t set in stone. Easy edit features let you tweak your wording and change up your offers to reflect seasonality, or to introduce a new product.

Learn more about how email autoresponders work, or get more sales and marketing ideas in our Insurance Marketing Resources.

If you’d like to talk about how email autoresponders work with internet leads, talk to a Lead Specialist today.