If you’ve never used marketing and sales automation tools before, you may wonder what the big deal is. If you are familiar with such tools, you know the answer is that automation tools are crucial for boosting your lead generation business, nurturing customer relationships, and improving your ROI. I imagine all of us in the insurance and mortgage businesses wants to improve one of those things, if not all three. That’s why today’s subject is a primer on these new tools and how they can improve your mortgage or insurance business.
Learn to Use Your Automation Tool
We all know someone who bought a fancy device, didn’t read the instructions, and never used it. Your automation tool is too important to your business to wing it. So learn how to use all the important functions. Most tools come with extensive documentation, either online, via web tutorials, or printed materials. Some even offer one-on-one onboarding for your team.
Start With CRM Integration
Your first step applying an automation tool to your mortgage or insurance business should be connecting it to your existing CRM. These days, many tools play nicely with major CRMs. For others, you can often trade and sync information via CSV or Excel files. This step is crucial for what’s next, so take the time to get it right.
Begin Automating Basic Email Interactions
Whether you’re in insurance or mortgage, you’ll frequently send thank you’s or info packets in the course of business. These simple email communications can be automated easily via an autoresponder. These important but regular tasks are a great place to get your feet wet with automation.
Try Personalizing Your Automated Emails
Everyone’s familiar with how a mail merge works. Automation tools offer a next-level version of this same principle via email personalization. You could start out by addressing email messages to a mailing list’s preferred name, but you can go well beyond this, citing a prospect’s preferred mortgage program or insurance product needs.
Move Up to Automating Your Social Networking
Once you’ve got a handle on email automation, it’s time to test out automation on your social networking. As you know, Facebook and Twitter can eat as much of your time as you give them. Try batching and scheduling your social posts with your automation tool. You can also automate simple social messaging replies to new followers or subscribers.
Plan How You’ll Market and Nurture Leads
Collecting info for customers and prospects is great, but it’s a must to have a plan. Only collect what info you need and then use it. For insurance customers, this could be check-in emails with current customers, customer anniversary emails, or referral requests. For mortgage customers, closing anniversary thank you’s, referral requests, and refinancing deal emails are all possible — if you’ve collected the necessary information.
Integrate With Your Metrics Tools
Next, dig down deeper into your data with metrics tools. Google Analytics and Google Adwords integrate easily with most systems. The data you’ll collect will let you start to make decisions about your marketing, where conversion points are, where customers are coming from, and what KPIs to focus on.
Optimize Your Online Sales and Marketing Funnels
Your email is automated. Your social is automated. Why not automate your website, too? You can do this by building custom landing pages and online forms, as well as fancy branded email templates. Landing pages can make a huge difference to your online lead generation, so don’t skip this step.
Track Your Customer’s Journey
Refine your funnel and your automation further by digging deeper into your metrics data. Track your customer’s journey through your sales and marketing funnel. Simple tracking codes can be assigned to blog posts, landing pages, subscribe buttons, and more that allow you to track mortgage or insurance customers again and again as they interact with your marketing and sales materials. The data you’ll gather will give you a solid basis for focused pipeline refinements.
Put It All Together
Now it’s time to put all the pieces together. A drip campaign should be your next step. These types of lead nurturing campaigns are what let your business name stay top-of-mind to customers and prospects. Drip marketing is highly customizable, with many applications for insurance and mortgage businesses. Buyer tips, product info, success stories, and industry-relevant news are just some of the many possibilities.
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