E-mail continues to play an important role for delivering messages directly to your target audience.

E-mail may not be as savvy as social or digital, but e-mail works: Companies using e-mail to nurture leads generate 50% more sales-ready leads and at 33% lower cost. And nurtured leads, on average, produce a 20% increase in sales opportunities compared to non-nurtured leads, according to HubSpot.

In addition to lead nurturing and customer acquisition, e-mail marketing is also a great vehicle for insurance marketers to industry to retain customers and boost loyalty.

If you are not using e-mail marketing, it's time to step up and add this strategy to your marketing toolkit. Especially considering that for every $1 spent on e-mail marketing, the average return on investment is $44.25, according to ExactTarget.

Here are five tips to help you get started:

Who are you trying to reach, and why? (Photo: iStock)

1. Understand your target audience

As in all industries, insurance marketers today are bombarded with data and are collecting as much data as they possibly can. But more often than not, marketers forget to ask, "Am I collecting the right data?" If it doesn't provide any insights into who your target audience is, data is, well just data. It clogs up your marketing systems, causes more havoc, more time, and more resources.

Your acquisition dollars should be focused on understanding your audience through a combination of your internal customer and prospect data, as well as third-party demographic data:

Internal data: This data includes anything sitting in a data warehouse, customer relationship management system or other sources that have not been integrated into your marketing database. Examples of internal data include customer service records, transactional data, credit card purchases, or e-mail.

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Consumer demographics: Data providers aggregate and source these data sets to compile additional consumer insights such as age, gender, and income. Data may be aggregated from sources including public records, phone directories, U.S. Census data, consumer surveys and other proprietary sources. Example of the types of consumer data selects that can be appended to your database include date of birth, home ownership, occupation, gender, estimated income, age, telephone number, credit card, hobbies, language spoken, purchase behavior, lifestyle interests, presence of children, and investments.

Knowing information about a customer isn't much help when you can contact them. (Photo: iStock)

2. Be sure your e-mail list is up to date

An average of 30% of subscribers change e-mail addresses each year.

E-mails go bad, and customers move and change their e-mail. Or as is often the case, you may have a huge list of prospects and customers — you know their name, where they live, but have no e-mail address on file.

By using an e-mail append service, you can add these missing e-mail addresses to your customer file. Your customer records, which most likely already consist of names and postal addresses, are matched against a third-party database to produce a corresponding e-mail address.

Related: 5 reasons to collect business cards at events

One of the most often overlooked components of e-mail marketing is e-mail validation and verification. When sourcing new e-mail addresses, a good e-mail append provider will run these addresses through a validation and hygiene process to ensure your newly acquired e-mails are clean and deliverable. The validation process identifies addresses known to be associated with spam traps, invalid e-mails and domains, role accounts, complainers, and known hard-bounces. This process also removes duplicate e-mails and corrects formatting errors.