A solid email marketing strategy is imperative to increasing lead conversion. Whether your agency sees only two or 20 leads a day, how you market your services ultimately affects how your clients see you. 

Email is your first chance to make a lasting impression on consumers, so make it good and make it memorable. According to an article from Modgility.com, email communication remains one of the most effective means of building relationships and trust. However, a study by Velocify showed that 40 percent of leads never get an email prior to connection by phone.

Delivery speed, value messaging, and follow-up strategies all make a difference in high response, high conversion emails.

How can your agency achieve this? Implement these tips for a stronger email strategy:

Automate

Time is key. Contacting your leads as quickly as possible increases your chances of getting business from them. In fact, 78 percent of leads close with the agent who contacts them first.

You can set up an automated email trigger that will allow you to initiate contact as soon as you receive a lead. Lead management software programs offer great services and features for email automation. These programs speed up the process of contacting leads by notifying you when a lead generates so you can be the first to call.

Track

Do you have a way of knowing how many leads open your emails? Sure, you can see a response rate, but that doesn't reflect the open rates. Open rates can help maximize responses.

There are tools available that allow you to see who opens your emails. Even if a lead only opens your email, another automated email will follow up. This second follow-up email should contain a brief call to action that directly encourages a response.

Brevity and urgency are key ingredients in an email looking for replies.

Share

You want to keep your leads interested, and you can do so by sharing educational content. It'll help them learn more in a fun, interactive way.

Some ways to do this include sharing videos, adding in humor, and giving the facts straight. Keeping leads engaged with interesting material will spark more interest in your agency and its products.

With social media playing such a huge part in our daily lives, it makes sense to incorporate it into business endeavors as well. Insert social media sharing links in your emails to encourage your leads to spread the word.

Incentivize

In addition to keeping leads interested, you want to keep them coming back for more as well. You need to provide an incentive. Making offers that are valuable but limited can make customers believe that what you have to offer is the absolute best. This will make them want more of it.

Better yet, include the incentive in the subject line to immediately grab the customer's attention. Your subject lines should be brief and create a sense of urgency.

You want your emails to scream, "Open me! I'm full of important information!" At the same time, make sure they don't come off as too "spammy."

Personalize

As you learn more about your leads, make your messages gradually sound more personal. You're not just in it for the business or profit; you're also hoping to establish strong connections with your clients. After all, good relationships can often lead to referrals and a steady retention rate.

Showing your clients that you are genuinely interested in their lives will speak highly of you as an insurance agent.

You're marketing your emails to people you now do business with on a friendlier level. Showing a little emotion and kindness can go a long way. Moreover, you want your clients to feel like they can trust you, because that's one—if not the only—way they're going to stick with you.

Optimize

Improving email response and open rates requires testing emails. For example, test two different subject lines to compare which one yields higher open rates. Test different message and calls to action to compare response rates.

Try rephrasing your calls to action that go at the end of emails to see how responses convert. These can include encouraging a call back or suggesting a good time to call the lead. You'll want to perform these tests frequently to ensure that your opens and responses are running at their best rates possible.

Agents view email marketing as an incredibly strong sales tool, but what do consumers think? Contrary to what you might believe, email marketing is also quite beneficial to the consumer. It's exemplary of excellent customer service used correctly and enthusiastically.

As an agent, one of your main goals is to create an outstanding first impression on your client. Email marketing helps with this. Clients want instant gratification, they want direct answers, and they want them immediately.

Sending out emails that are concise yet comprehensive, interactive, and engaging will paint you as an agent who cares not only about their line of work, but also about the interest of their clients.