Email continues to be among the most effective marketing toolsavailable to insurance agents to grow their business.

But it continues to evolve. It's not your older brother's emailanymore. (Email hasn't been around long enough for your dad to haveused it.)

Email began with the convenience of easily communicating with alarge group of prospects at once. It was all about getting agetting a messsage across across toprospects and clients, and it's a lot more effective and efficientthan printed communications. Then highly visual electronicnewsletters started circulating, which piqued people'sattention.

Services such as Constant Contact, MailChimp and iResponse addedfeatures from images to videos to links to social media,pre-designed templates made creating newsletters even easier, andautomated lead-capture forms tied directly into the email marketingplatform helped close the loop, automating it from start tofinish.

At the same time, social media, online marketing andadvertising, along with search engine optimization (SEO), developedadditional means of marketing, which some people thought were moreeffective. Businesses were all looking for that guaranteed channelto success. Spoiler alert: It doesn't exist!

Mobile application

When you added into the mix the footprint of mobile, everythingI mentioned previously took on a whole new feel. Online ads, socialmedia and email marketing all had to rethink their approach. Whennative apps for iPhone and Android were included, the choice forthe best online marketing approach became almost impossible.

Some businesses pulled away from email to focus on websites anda robust search engine opitimization (SEO) and socialmedia strategy. Still others focused much more on mobile apps. Butemail continued to evolve and succeed. Because of these changes inmessage delivery, effective emails are shorter and linked to videocontent or social media posts and blogs. It's the way we reusecontent to get the most out of the message. If you have a regularblog, using social media to alert your followers to a new post isone way to spread the message.

Opening the email door

Email has an average 30 percent to 40 percent open rate, whichcan go up or down depending on the quality of the mailing list.Much of its success depends on the subject line attached to it,however.

Here's where it gets complicated. Understanding the psychologyof consumers and what will get someone to open an email requires aPh.D. Some studies point to certain words as more effective thanothers. Still other studies say short, simple subject lines workbest.

We've all heard that subject lines that refer to the “top 3”this or the “Worst mistake” of that, claim to have high open rates.But the recent negative reports on “clickbait” headlines havecarried over to email subject lines with spam systems automaticallypushing them into junk/spam folders.

Getting the subject line right is critical, as is the “From”email address. Some addresses trigger other systems to identifyemails as marketing or newsletters taking them out of themainstream inbox your recipient regularly sees.

Navigating your way through these email minefields isn't easybut it is worth the effort. Systems like Constant Contact,MailChimp and iResponse, for example, offer a variety of resourcesthat can help you choose the right subject lines, best time of dayto send and the template that best matches the conduit throughoutwhich it will be received.

But there are no e-mail marketing platforms that can make up forhaving the wrong message, not sending it to the right audience andnot listening to the response you get.

Finding the right technology to support your engagementefforts is the best combination to reaching the marketing successyou're after.

Rick Gilman, APR, CMP, is president of APPsoluteMarketing, a communications and public relations consultingbusiness specializing in mobile marketing and APP development forsmall business. Contact him at [email protected]. Opinionsexpressed in this article are the author's own.