Using distribution lists for email marketing? You’re doing it wrong

 Recently, I talked with a prospective (now) customer about how many distribution lists AgencyBuzz supports. I asked about his current email marketing strategy and why a large amount of mailing lists was important to him. What he said shocked me. He had a distribution list for almost everything: auto prospects, home prospects, auto customers, home customers, auto lost, home lost (these were repeated for each line of business his agency offered), age groups, cities, primary agents, referral sources, and many more. I admire his organization as many agencies that do email marketing do not even categorize their lists and simply send untargeted, mass email blasts.
However, this setup can cause long-term problems. Each time a contact changes status, someone has to manually move the contact from one list to another. This manual list maintenance is time consuming and can be an error-prone strategy. I want to suggest a better way.

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Marketing Smackdown: Email vs. Text Messaging

Some people are saying email marketing is dead. That it's being replaced by text messaging. And to a certain extent, they may be right. But I also think they're wrong, and here's why.
You need an email address for pretty much everything on the Internet today, from signing up for Facebook to purchasing something online. This is not going to change any time soon. As long as people have email addresses, email marketing will have a place in the digital agency marketing mix. Not every email you send will be read, but by consistently being in consumer's inboxes, you are more likely to get noticed.

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9 Mistakes to Avoid Making on Facebook

 You've decided to use Facebook as a way to connect and engage with your customers online. There are many great things you can do on Facebook: share a side of your agency your customers don't normally get to see, connect with your business partners in a new way by liking their pages, share your insurance knowledge and expertise.
However, there are some things to avoid doing as you might actually drive followers away.

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2013 Predictions – Insurance Agency Marketing

In 2012, ITC continued our pledge of helping insurance agents grow and succeed with their agencies through constant upgrades to our products: Insurance Website Builder, AgencyBuzz, TurboRater, and InsurancePro. Now, the New Year is upon us, and I am looking forward to the great things we can accomplish together in 2013. Let’s explore my predictions regarding insurance agency marketing in 2013.

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AgencyBuzz, Creating More Buzz for Your Agency in 2012

The AgencyBuzz online marketing system saw some phenomenal new features get released in 2012. These features are helping AgencyBuzz become the central online marketing tool for agents nationwide. Let’s take a look at the great features that were added to AgencyBuzz in 2012 and what you have to look forward to in 2013.

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Looking Back at Insurance Website Builder in 2012

One of the advantages of using the Insurance Website Builder online marketing system is the fact that our users receive new features and upgrades automatically. This is done in the background without requiring agents to modify or re-upload their website files to their hosts. In addition to the introduction of new features, Insurance Website Builder automatically updates the sitemap.xml file that notifies the search engines. With this automatic update, we normally see that Insurance Website Builder websites are re-indexed almost daily by the search bots.
So let us take a look at what we have added in 2012. 

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5 Website Mistakes to Avoid

If you're thinking about updating your current insurance website, or getting your first website, in the new year, there are some mistakes you definitely want to avoid.

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Creating a Partner Page the Right Way

Over the years, I have seen multiple interpretations of partner or trusted professional pages. Most of them get the point across but they are more often than not just a list of partners and some contact information. While this satisfies the need, simple lists do not draw people in, and providing only basic contact info does not build a measurable partnership between an agency and their partners.
So when I set out to design partner pages for the Insurance Website Builder system, I had a few goals in mind. Here we go:

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4 Tips for Building Relationships on Social Media

Social media has many uses: driving traffic to your website, promoting your agency and services, sharing insurance information and knowledge, and increasing your online visibility. However, my favorite use for social media is building relationships.

Getting more followers can be exciting. But if you're not having meaningful conversations with your followers and building relationships, your posts will be seen by very few followers. Try these four tips to make your social media efforts meaningful and start building relationships.

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How to Write a Great Blog Post

Last week I talked about finding the time to blog. Now that you've found the time, let's continue talking about blogging with how to write a great blog post.

The first step is to decide what to write about. This is an easy step if you follow my suggestion from last week to keep a list of possible topics to blog about. Determining the subject of your next blog post can easily take up much of the time you allow yourself to write. Save yourself that time so that it can be spent actually writing. Here are some quick ideas on where to look for content for your blog:

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