When my son started middle school, my wife and I gave him his first cell phone. Some of you may feel that's kind of young for a kid to have a cell phone, but in middle school he started taking a bus and hanging out more with his friends, and we wanted an easy way to contact him.
That was nearly 3 years ago and the experience has taught me a lot about how his generation likes to communicate. He rarely uses the phone to talk; if he makes a call to a friend once a week, that's a lot. However, he's constantly checking in with his friends through texting.
The same can be said for emailing. My son hardly emails with his buddies unless it's to share documents for a homework assignment; he prefers to text or Skype with them.
What my son demonstrates in his daily activities are instinctual to his generation—and the two main marketing realities that companies are trying to grasp across the business community:
- 1. Text messaging has far greater results than email
- 2. Visual communication is more memorable and reinforces relationships faster than written or oral communications alone.
The power of video
I've written a lot on the use of video by insurance agents. More are using simple smartphones and webcams to develop short videos to educate their clients and consumers about insurance topics and relevant issues. By using YouTube, Facebook and other outlets to share these 90-second to 3-minute resources, agents position themselves and their agencies as reliable sources of important information.
Harnessing the power of video is a tried and true method for building relationships with clients and prospects that helps them through the process of getting to know, like and trust you as a professional advisor on insurance needs.
eMarketing
Email marketing has been around almost as long as email itself. The quality of emails and impact they have has ebbed and flowed as the technology supporting it has improved. When HTML became the norm, the visual interest and the ability to capture the recipient's attention grew enormously over a plain text email.
The influence of that medium was enhanced greatly when embedded video came along in the late '90s and early 2000s. But at the same time, hackers and spammers began leveraging this new environment as a way into company databases. As a result, firewalls became a lot tougher and stripped out unknowns from emails, so lots of the cool stuff wasn't making it through to people.
Along the way, several vendors came on the market, offering fancy templated email platforms that resolved some of the issues.
Horse to water
What we're finding now, however, is that similar to direct mail, it doesn't matter as much how terrific the message looks if the receiver isn't reading it. For direct mail marketing, it's said that if you get a 2 percent open rate you are doing great. Of course, I'm not sure how you can track effectively what gets "filed in the circular file" and what actually gets read, but I take the studies at their word.
It's a little bit easier to track email marketing: studies have shown that on average email messages are opened six times more than snail mail. Of course, that's still only 12 percent. According to Hubspot's 2012 Mobile Stat Report, it takes 90 minutes on average for a person to decide to check, find and respond to your email. On the other hand, it takes, on average, 90 seconds for someone to read a text message.
The power of texting
When we think of texting, we really should think about it in two different ways: typical text messaging, like my son does with his friends; and alerts that target specific people with valuable information. Many of the mobile apps that we all use, such as Facebook, Twitter and Yelp, send out alerts that pop up on our phones whether we're looking at them or not.
Each approach to SMS (short message service) communications is proving to be a more effective way to connect with clients and prospects than email. Just to give you an idea of what I mean, take a look at some of these statistics:
- 95 percent to 98 percent of text messages are read within minutes of receipt
- 86 percent of consumers send or receive a text message every week
- 30 percent of consumers interact with a brand via text message
- More than 2 trillion text messages are sent every year in the U.S.
- Nearly 10 trillion text messages are sent globally.
A recent survey of mobile users by Hipcricket (Hipcriket.com) found that:
- 57 percent of respondents said they would be interested in opting in to a brand's SMS loyalty program
- 80 percent of respondents said they have not been marketed to via SMS by their favorite brands
- 90 percent of mobile users who had participated in an SMS loyalty club felt they had gained value from being a part of the program.
If you take anything away from these numbers, it should be that as marketing trends show a move to the mobile environment, the format and style of marketing is as a necessity, changing.
Easy as 1, 2, 3
For insurance agents, the value of text marketing is in both the ease of use and the personal nature of it. A number of solutions provide the platform for texting and keyword/short code marketing. The keyword approach is when you see businesses put in ads or signage, "Text keyword 'AAAInsurance' to 69302" and when you do, any number of things can happen.
- It can respond with some information
- It can link you to a website or to a video message
- It can begin an autoresponder campaign.
If you've never done this before, use your mobile phone to text the keyword "rggcom" to 69302 to see a brief message from me. It's very simple to do and you can have different keywords for different circumstances.
One agency uses the keyword "insureme" to send people information about insurance from them.
During disasters such as Superstorm Sandy, keyword texting could have been used to send out information on what to do should a fallen tree damage your home or how to handle losses following the power outage.
If your clients were without power for an extended period of time, text messages is an effective way to keep in touch with them and convey vital information when sitting at a computer is not practical.
And agents can leverage straight text messaging to keep in touch with people for a variety of reasons that assures them that the recipient is eight times more likely to open it and read it. Simply ask for the new prospect or client's mobile phone number and permission to communicate with them that way. Now you have a more effective conduit to them.
Consider using text messages to confirm appointments or reminders of an upcoming policy renewal. Maybe you've added new coverages and you wanted to let your clients know; most good mobile platforms allow you to do mass text messaging and plan them in advance.
What about the traditional birthday greetings? Yes, you could send your generic "Adam Smith Insurance Agency" cards with all the staff's signatures pre-printed on it. But what if your customers got a birthday message notification on their phone during the day, regardless of where they are? You can do both, but the immediacy of the text message gives it more meaning.
Or how about sending out text messages with a link to a mobile newsletter, written and configured for a mobile device? True, you can do all of this via email, but 12 percent open rate versus 95 percent open rate seems pretty clear.
Remember, if a tree falls in the forest and no one is there, does it make a noise? Well, if your email is sent but isn't opened, does it have any value? When you are given permission to text with someone, it's more like you're both holding a tin can with a string tied between them—a lot more likely you'll get your message through.
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