On the surface, email marketing might sound a bit outdated – who among us doesn’t have 900 unread junk emails crowding up our inbox? 

The truth is, though, there is an art to creating meaningful content that customers will appreciate rather than ignore. Let’s discuss some actionable tips you can use to nurture your audience with email marketing. 

Offer valuable information for free on your website in exchange for emails 

The biggest reason that marketing emails become junk emails is that customers aren’t expecting them and don’t want them. The best way to collect customers’ emails is to simply ask for them in exchange for something valuable and relevant to your service. 

Many businesses offer to send newsletters with industry updates, exclusive promos, and interesting articles to entice customers. Everybody wins – customers receive relevant information, and your business receives a self-selected list of interested leads. This is a simple and effective strategy that will help you build trusting relationships with your customers and grow your list of contacts organically. 

Invest in an email automation service 

If your business is new to email marketing, you’ll want to invest in an automation service and save yourself the headache of manually sending emails to your lead lists. Mailchimp, Hubspot, and Active Campaign are three popular email automation services that allow you to draft, schedule, and send emails over a scheduled period of time. You can even create strings of emails called automations that send based on certain triggers. All you have to do is draft the emails. 

These services also provide analytics dashboards that will allow you to see how your campaign is doing. You’ll be able to track things like open rates and click-through rates, so you’ll know which emails are effectively garnering audience attention and which aren’t. 

Send emails at regular intervals (but not too often!) 

Developing a regular email cadence can help customers learn to recognize and trust your brand over time. Eventually, when they need your service, your company’s name will be top of mind. 

Every company’s optimal cadence is different. Consider how often your content will be valuable to your audience. If you offer a robust newsletter with multiple suggested articles, your audience likely won’t have time to read your emails every day. However, if you plan on sending something simple like a coupon or a holiday greeting, you could send your emails more frequently. 

As a rule of thumb, if you want to send more than two or three emails a week, ask the customer when they sign up for the newsletter how often they want to receive your emails. According to a survey from Hubspot, 34% of people unsubscribe from email lists because emails come too often, so be considerate of your audience’s overflowing inbox! 

Request customer feedback 

One of the best ways to cultivate a positive relationship with your customers is to request feedback on what your customers want from your emails. Sending out surveys and polls is a great way to find out what your customers are interested in, especially if you’re in the market for new ideas. It also lets you know what your customers think about your product and service, which can help you to create better offerings in the future. 

Hire professionals to help you get started 

Developing new, interesting content and dispersing it at strategic intervals takes time. Trust the experts at 1GS to help you get your email automations drafted, optimized, and ready to be sent so you can start building relationships with a broader audience. 

Life insurance lead generation is a vital aspect of the life insurance sales process. It allows agents to focus on working interested leads instead of simply searching for them. This allows agents like you to build trusting relationships with their leads and close more sales.

Let’s discuss 3 effective life insurance lead-generation methods to help you optimize your lead pool.

Social media

Social media platforms like Facebook and LinkedIn are powerful tools for life insurance agents to connect with a broad audience. With a combination of interesting content and efficient audience targeting, you can organically discover an audience that suits your ideal customer profile. (For more on using social media to develop your target audience, you can read our blog here.) For example, you can hone your target audience by using hashtags relating to life insurance and associated topics in your posts. Many people purchase life insurance later in life, so you can set the age range of your target audience from 40-80.

Depending on the breadth of geography you’re targeting, your lead list could be thousands of names long, and nobody has time to cold-call thousands of leads. Clearly, we aren’t done. Those life insurance leads need somewhere to go that isn’t a spreadsheet.

Insurance CRMs

Specialized CRMs, or customer relationship managers, are an excellent next step in your life insurance lead generation strategy. They’re an effective way to keep track of the life insurance leads you collected from social media and easily determine where they are in your sales pipeline. With this software, you can create automations that send your accumulated social media leads specialized cold nurture content, such as blogs on the importance of life insurance. This process helps to build trust and brand recognition, which can make your leads more interested in speaking with an agent about life insurance.

With the cold nurture process being handled by a program, you can free yourself up to speak directly with leads that have already shown interest in purchasing life insurance. CRMs like InsuredMine are tailored to the life insurance industry specifically.

Life insurance groups

You can also search the web and social media for active groups that discuss and ask questions about life insurance. This step requires a bit more hands-on engagement than an automation, but it also allows you to cut out the initial lead-collecting step as the group members are self-selected and already interested in purchasing life insurance.

The process is simple: if a forum member asks a question about life insurance, you regularly provide thorough answers. Over time, members of the community will learn to trust you for the good advice you’re providing, which increases the likelihood that they’ll reach out for a quote. LinkedIn is a useful and trustworthy platform on which people will ask for professional advice. Consider spending a few minutes of your day searching for life insurance groups and engaging group members in a discussion.

Of course, the crucial ingredient for all these methods is time and expertise. That’s why 1GS helps agents like you create a sustainable inflow of leads, which frees up more of your day to work your qualified leads. Speak with an agent today and learn how you could start improving the quality and quantity of your leads.

Social media is an invaluable tool for businesses, whether you’re building trust with your customers, doing market research, or scaling your audience reach. There is a major drawback, though — it’s a significant time investment to keep your company’s online presence updated and active.

If you’re managing a small-scale operation and you aren’t quite ready to hire a marketing team, there are social media management tools designed to streamline and semi-automate the process. Let’s compare 3 of the best SMM tools for business owners along 4 metrics: scheduling, price, analytics, and usability.

1. Brandwatch 

Best for: People that like personalization

Brandwatch offers 2 plans for different organization sizes:

The Essential plan caters to small teams, providing a content scheduling calendar along with audience analytics and a comment management suite.

The Full Suite caters to large companies looking for a broader market. It includes everything from the Essentials plan plus social media advertising and competitor analysis tools.

Brandwatch provides users with a high degree of personalization on the platform. You can design your inbox using multiple feeds and filters and create customized response templates for bulk responding. This can be very useful for developing a workflow that suits your company’s KPIs exactly.

Consumers report two notable drawbacks with Brandwatch, however: the price starts at a hefty $108/month, meaning that smaller companies might want to look elsewhere for a budget-friendly price. There is also no multichannel posting, so you have to add posts to each channel one at a time.

Scheduling: Content calendar allows you to draft, edit, post, and schedule all in one place

Price: $108, notably higher than competing SMM tools

Analytics: Provides deep analytical insight into audience activity both in its entirety and on an individual level

Usability: Users report an overly-complex range of products from multiple companies, although the scheduler itself is relatively straightforward to use

2. Loomly

Best for: Users looking for an intuitive experience

Loomly offers a range of price points, starting at $26/month for 2 users and 10 social media accounts all the way up to $269/month for 30 users and 50 accounts. 

This social media management platform provides an intuitive, straightforward user experience when creating and scheduling posts. The calendar supports drag-and-drop scheduling and provides topic ideas for each post, which makes the drafting and scheduling process a breeze. Loomly also offers audience insights for each post on each platform, and users can apply filters to compare posts or ranges to determine what posts performed the best. There is a community management suite where users can respond to comments and direct messages as well as track when their account is tagged. Loomly also supports multichannel posting, which can greatly simplify expanding your company’s presence across a variety of popular platforms.

Loomly offers a simplified user experience at the cost of personalization: you can’t modify your inbox or homepage to your preference, and the user interface in general is largely fixed. If you’re looking for an easy-to-learn platform for social media posting, you can’t go wrong with Loomly.

Scheduling: Drag-and-drop scheduling and a list of content ideas beside new posts make scheduling simple

Price: Starting at $26 and up to $269, Loomly has a plan for anyone from individuals to large teams of collaborators

Analytics: Insights for individual posts and date ranges make comparing post successes easy, although these analytics are somewhat limited compared to other platforms’ offerings

Usability: A clean, intuitive experience if you aren’t looking for UI customization

3. Sendible

Best for: Agencies that span many social media platforms

Sendible promotes its “Scale Plan” prominently, coming in at $199/month, although they also offer a Creator plan for a competitive $29/month.

Sendible supports posting on almost any social network. Beyond the most mainstream choices such as Facebook and LinkedIn, you can also directly post to WordPress, Tumblr, Blogger, and more. You can easily post videos to Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube as well.

Along with scheduling and drafting features, Sendible also supports Canva integration so you can more easily design visual content within the platform. You can also repeat-post successful posts to keep your profiles active when you’re too busy to draft new content.

Sendible’s most significant offering is its geo-targeting feature, which can be useful for a company that primarily does business in specific areas. This can be an effective tool for both small companies that only operate locally, or large companies that may only have licensing to operate in certain areas.

Ultimately, this platform is designed for companies trying to scale their social media advertising significantly. If you’re a smaller company, there are likely better options — while this platform offers a lot of reach in terms of supported platforms, the interface is clunky and not terribly intuitive.

Scheduling: Supports posting to almost any social media platform, plus Canva integration to make drafting visuals easier

Price: Sendible promotes its $199 “Scale” Plan for agencies most significantly, but there are lower-tier plans available as well

Analytics: Geo-targeting feature allows you to gather highly specific information about audience members in certain areas

Usability: Clunky and not terribly intuitive, users looking for a simple experience may want to look elsewhere.

Looking for more in-depth assistance with maintaining your company’s social media presence? Check out our social media management page for examples of content we’ve created in a variety of industries and multiple pricing tiers to suit your company.

Are you tired of sifting through unqualified or disinterested leads? Your advertising might be talking to the wrong people.

Thanks to the ubiquity of social media, there are plenty of ways your brand can find its target audience and optimize your advertising. Let’s discuss three tools on three social media platforms (Facebook, Instagram, and LinkedIn) that your business can use to optimize its audience.

Facebook

The Meta Business Suite is jam-packed with analytics and tools that could benefit your advertising efforts. But for today, we’re going to focus on the Ads Manager toolkit.

The Ads Manager is an all-in-one platform that allows you to design and publish ads for both Facebook and Instagram, as well as define the type of audience your ads will be presented to. Here is the “Audience Definition” section of an ad set:

How it works is that Facebook identifies users’ interests based on their prior activity, location, and age. In combination, these demographics can provide a simple method of targeting users already looking for what you’re selling.

As you can see on the right, you can even determine how broad your potential audience is. If your target audience is too specific, you’ll have a hard time reaching a suitable number of leads. If your audience is too broad, you might be spending a lot of money on unqualified or uninterested leads.

LinkedIn

If you’re marketing a B2B product, LinkedIn offers the best tool for finding your target audience — it’s called Sales Navigator:

More so than Facebook or Instagram, Sales Nav focuses on a user’s professional life. You can create lists of users using filters such as job titles, years of experience, and company size. This is an excellent method of automatically creating lead lists of the right kinds of professionals for your product or service. You can also use filters to exclude certain industries, company sizes, or job titles, which is a no-brainer method of filtering out professionals in your same industry and unqualified leads.

For example, if your company is selling employee benefits to mid-sized companies, you can specify executive job titles under the “Role” filter, exclude lower seniority levels that wouldn’t be making these decisions like “Entry-level”, and set the “Company headcount” filter to include companies with no more than 50 employees. In a few minutes, you’ll have potentially thousands of executives to reach out to!

Instagram

While those first two examples focus on creating an audience based on predictive metrics, Instagram offers a method of reviewing the success of your marketing after it’s been posted:

Other platforms offer insights like this as well, of course, but Instagram is an instructional example due to its breakdown of where the impressions are coming from. By reviewing the insights of a post after it’s launched, you can determine how well your audience targeting is working. For example, we can determine from the image that strategic use of hashtags can help you reach users that are already interested in the subject of your post.

By using a combination of pre- and post-publishing tactics, you can continually improve your company’s marketing strategy. But the tools that social media platforms provide are just the tip of the iceberg! Learn more about a potential client’s digital purchasing journey and how you can get your brand’s name in front of them by speaking with a 1GS marketing expert. We’ll handle the reporting and analyzing for you; all you have to do is speak with your new leads.

Organic SEO is a digital marketing strategy that helps your website find a larger audience by ranking well in Google’s search results. But it doesn’t happen overnight; it takes ongoing effort over months to see the results.

Whether you’re running a well-established company or you just opened up shop, implementing an SEO strategy on your website is critical to your business’s long-term health. Let’s discuss 5 methods of improving your website’s search engine optimization, researched and approved by our in-house SEO experts.

Maintaining a blog

Blogging is one of the most powerful tools for improving your site’s Google ranking. Industry-relevant content that speaks to your market niche can draw potential leads to your website, increasing your overall traffic. Offering a wide variety of content is an excellent way to reach a broad audience, but quality content can convince users to stay on your website to learn more about your industry or services.

You can determine what your target audience is looking up by using a keyword planner, which ranks keywords by the volume of searches they appear in on a monthly basis. We recommend posting a blog at least once a month to help maintain your website’s SEO health since search engines prioritize more recent content. Like we said — SEO is a long-term investment!

Optimizing your website copy

All of the copy on your website could benefit from an SEO tune-up. From your home page to your “About Us” page, your website can only benefit from optimized copy. Otherwise, you could be leaving qualified leads on the table for competitors to scoop up.

Just like your blogs, your website copy should include keywords that are relevant to your industry and the specific product that you’re selling. For example, if you’re an insurance company that’s registered to sell insurance in a specific area, be sure to include the name of the city or state in which you’re registered to sell. This can improve the likelihood that qualified leads in the area will find you.

Not sure what keywords to prioritize? Speak to a marketing strategist at 1GS to start planning your SEO strategy today.

Speeding up your website

The speed at which your website loads can have a significant impact on your site’s search engine ranking. Therefore, increasing your site’s speed is a tried-and-true method of improving your organic search ranking.

Plus, a fast-loading website is more likely to keep visitors longer. 53% of mobile site visits are abandoned if the page takes more than 3 seconds to load, so a fast-loading website serves a dual purpose for increasing website traffic.

There is no single method of improving the load speed of your website, so we’d highly recommend hiring an experienced developer to investigate the backend of your website and make necessary changes. 1GS also provides this service to our customers as part of our website tune-ups.

Developing user-friendly website architecture

A website’s architecture plays an important role in its search engine rankings. Well-organized content is easier for search engines to scan and understand, which can improve the likelihood that your content will coincide with more users’ inquiries.

Ideally, any user should be able to navigate your site regardless of their computer skills to guarantee a positive user experience. If you’re unsure of the best way to structure your site, 1GS is ready to help. We can offer insight into the best design and layout options for your site to perform well in Google’s search results.

Adding videos to your website

Videos are a great way to add visual content to your website, which is another factor search engines consider when evaluating how well your website is designed and optimized. Two of the most important metrics that search engines consider for SEO are the length of time users spend on your site and the number of backlinks referring back to your domain. Videos improve both of these figures.

Videos also offer a greater variety of content for users to interact with. If a user is in a hurry and doesn’t have time to read your blog, a 2-minute video is a much easier sell.

Are you ready to improve your website’s Google ranking and reach more potential customers? Schedule a call with us today, and we’ll get started right away.

As of June 2nd, 2021, all private health insurance companies that plan on advertising on Google require a G2 Certification. Let’s go through the essentials, including what a G2 Certification is, who needs it, and how you can get it.

What is a G2 Certification?

A G2 Certification is an application process that verifies a health insurance company’s eligibility to advertise online in all jurisdictions where they do business. Any entity licensed to sell or promote health insurance and Affordable Care Act plans needs this certification to advertise with Google. The following are examples of entities that require this certification to advertise:

• Private health insurance providers (government entities are exempt from this process)
• Managed care organizations
•  Individual agents/brokers
• Third-party administrators

How much does the G2 Certification cost?

There are two associated payments with the G2 Certification: the one-time application fee, and the annual certification/monitoring fee. Both fees scale based on the number of states or locales you’re applying to advertise in. The following are the application fees you can expect from this application (taken from the G2 website):

The annual monitoring fee breaks down like this:

• 0-20 licensed states/locales = $39 per state/locale up to 20
• 21-40 licensed states/locales = $780 + $29 per state/locale over 20
• 41+ licensed states/locales = $1360 + $19 per state/locale over 40

What does the application process entail?

To help you get an idea of what this process entails, you can review the following steps:

1. Submit your application fee for the current number of states you currently have valid documentation for. If the number of states or locales that you service changes, you can contact this email address for further instructions: [email protected]
2. Receive and complete the application that G2 sends to you. You’ll need the following information to complete it:
3. Business identification information (name, DBA, website, contact information, NAIC/NPN code)
4. Valid documentation for each state or locale you’re applying for (license copy, Certificate of Authority, Letter of Certification)
5. Proof of ACA qualification, if applicable
6. Submit the application and await approval. This can take up to 14 days.
7. If your application is approved, you can then submit your first annual certification fee.
8. G2 sends your unique certification, which you can then submit to Google’s healthcare advertiser application. (You’ll still need to obtain a Google certification to begin advertising.)

How do I start advertising?

Once you have your G2 Certification, you can schedule a meeting with a 1GS marketing strategist to start setting up your company’s unique marketing funnel. We’ll bring the research and the resources — all you have to bring is your certification.