Ask the Expert

“I can not really afford to compete for search engine attention. But I do occasionally send very tasteful unsolicited email flyers to lists that we compile by hand.  How else are we supposed to get eyeballs to our site?” —
Jay Odom, Deerfield Advisors Insurance

A: A question that’s on a lot of agents’ minds as the cost of search engine advertising continues to increase. Here are a few tips.

Email marketing is a great starting place to drive visitors to your website, and extremely cost effective. I suggest you include optimizing that avenue as well as trying out some new tactics.

Consider what links you’re including in your emails, and where.

A lot of people only include a link to their site’s homepage in their emails. But you may want to consider driving people to other pages on your site that are more informative. Or you could send them straight to your quote engine with an invite like, “Visit our site to compare rates and benefits now.”

This approach may be more appealing to prospects in the research frame of mind — and you’ll get more clicks to your site.

You also mention you’re sending email “flyers.” Here at Norvax we’ve tested both image heavy HTML “postcard” style emails and no frills “plain text” emails.

We found that depending on the list we were sending to, sometimes those plain emails with just a couple hyperlinks outperform the glossy ones. Try emailing out a HTML and plain text (as in no formatting like bolding or italicizing words) versions to two samples of your list to see what performs best for you.

For other strategies, check out some of my past articles.

Use offline campaigns to drive people to your site

Submit online press releases

- Jeremiah Desmarais, Vice President of Marketing - Norvax
Questions or comments? Email him at jdesmarais@norvax.com

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