The How and Why of Lead Nurturing for Insurance Agents Posted on February 27, 2013June 1, 2016 by Nicci Troiani What is lead nurturing? Lead nurturing is a marketing process designed to educate and build relationships with your leads and prospects who are not quite ready to buy yet. Why do agents need lead nurturing? 1. Only 25% of new leads are ready to buy and another 25% are not going to buy. You need to properly maintain communication with the other 50% without being the pushy, sales type that they are now conditioned to ignore. By sending them informative, educational information about insurance and financial products, you are building a relationship. The prospect needs to be able to trust your advice, so that when they are ready to purchase, they know where to go. 2. Automate your follow up Following up with new leads and maintaining communication with current customers is a problem that all insurance agents face. It is easy to only focus on “hot” leads and let all others fall by the way side. By using a system that will allow you to send automated email marketing campaigns and trigger tasks and reminders to you, you minimize the time and effort on your part to follow up with all of your contacts, which gives you more time to focus on those ‘hot’ leads and make more sales. 3. Score your leads Whether you purchase leads or simply collect business cards, all leads you get are at a different part of the buying cycle. Tracking behaviors such as email opens, link clicks, white paper downloads and webpage visits will give you an idea of who is most interested. You should be focusing on contacting people who have indicated that they are interested with behaviors like these. Ideally, using a sales and marketing software than can track and score this information for you will save you time and the headache of trying to keep track yourself. How do I start nurturing my leads? Use current marketing materials You don’t want to use material that sounds salesy and chances are, most of your current marketing material does. Your current marketing materials can make a good outline or starting point though. Use what you have and do some additional research if necessary to write a few short and educational articles about your industry. Give the prospect tips on buying but don’t mention your product or service. Leverage other people’s content Start following blogs and publications that write about insurance. They need to provide good, educational information (but isn’t written by a competing agent). Keep and archive good ones that your find (I like Diigo.com for keeping track of articles that I like). Start a blog A blog is a great way to not only attract people to your website, but to keep ideas in writing. Old blogs can be revamped into a new e-mail marketing campaign so its great to have content like this on hand. Send your content out to current prospects via e-mail You should develop an e-mail marketing campaign with your new content. Don’t put long articles into your e-mail, no one will read them. Stick to a short introduction and then a link to the article or blog. Again, this can be a link to someone else’s article as long as it isn’t a competitor. Give new leads your content via social LinkedIn groups are a great place to post your content. Find groups that make sense to post your content (writing about group insurance? post in small business groups) and write a short description with the link. Also, post your links on Facebook and Twitter. You never know who may click to read and become a prospect in the process.