I’m no relationship expert.

Just ask my wife.

But I know you need to go out of your way to show appreciation for the other person in any relationship, otherwise it will deteriorate and eventually die.

But you don’t want relationship advice from me. (trust me)

Let’s talk about your agency instead.

• How healthy are your customer relationships?
• Do they know how much you appreciate them?
• Do you go out of your way to make sure they know how you really feel?
• What are you doing to make them feel all warm and fuzzy inside?

Client relationships are just like personal ones – they require work.

And if your business strategy doesn’t include processes to go out of your way to say “thank you” to your customers, they will eventually leave you.

With Thanksgiving coming up later this week, I thought it’d be a good time to explore ways to say “Thanks!” to your insurance customers. I already started by giving travel tips to those planning vacation. As for the rest – here they are:

Retention is necessary to build and maintain a successful insurance agency.

Every agent knows that.

You know small boosts in retention will grow long term profit immensely.

You know it costs more to get new customers than to keep current ones.

And you probably know the pain of losing more policies than you wrote in a week.

You don’t hear as much about these two things:

1. Retention is a sales strategy – Every single thing you do to improve retention makes customers more likely to refer you.
2. Retention requires established processes –  Unless you decide exactly which methods in this article are going to work for you and establish formal procedures in your office to follow through, you will not see results.

I wrote this article so you couldn’t say, “I don’t know how to effect our retention.”

Here’s 34 ways to improve your insurance agency’s customer retention. No excuses, decide which retention strategies you like and take action!

Selling insurance is hard.

Really hard!

In fact, making a sale is so hard that agents often forget the most important part of building a successful insurance agency:

Developing a ROCK-SOLID relationship with every client.

There’s no better time forge that relationship and boost the lifespan of your clients than immediately after the intital sale, but it’s easy to miss because it’s so exciting just to close the deal.

That’s why I recommend creating a formal Welcome Kit for new clients.

According to a recent survey by J.D. Power & Associates over 92% of internet users have used reviews to make a purchase sometime in the last 12 month. That’s pretty much everyone.

Reviews matter.

People don’t have time to waste shopping around or money to lose on a bad service or product. Using the collective experience of a group of people is a great way to speed up your shopping process and avoid getting burned. Why get a referral from one friend with one situation when you can compare the average reviews of 100 people who had 100 different experiences?

I’ve worked with hundreds of ridiculously successful insurance agents.

I’ve also worked with lots of bad ones.

For years, I struggled to find one unifying characteristic – one trait or skill that was shared by all the successful agents and absent in the others.

Every time I thought I found it I’d meet another agent who, by his success or failure, would disprove my latest theory.

Until I finally figured it out…

Every successful insurance agent is not a great marketer. They’re not all good conversationalists. They’re not all organized, interesting, or hard-working. They’re not all well-written, well-read, well-mannered or well-spoken.

Insurance agents live and die by the quality of their employees.

Nothing is more important.

Not your location, your office, your marketing, your products, your search rankings, your signage, your website, your community, your networking, nothing!

You need the best people.

Your domain name plays a huge role in the online marketing success of your agency.

Let me explain…

If it’s too complicated clients won’t share it with their friends. If it’s too long no one will ever visit it. If it’s easily mis-spelled people will think you went out of business and your emails will be sent to the wrong address. If your domain name is cheesy, customers and prospects won’t take you seriously!

And if your domain name is easily forgotten, so is your agency.

Changing your domain name in the future is possible, but it’s a pain in the butt technologically, can damage your search rankings for years, and can force you to reprint thousands of dollars worth of business cards and other stationary.

I want insurance agents like you to avoid domain name mistakes I’ve seen other agents make, so here’s a crash course on choosing the right domain name.

For many agents I know, updating the agency Facebook page with with frequent, interesting, and engaging content is one of the most time-consuming and annoying parts of social media marketing.

To quote one of my favorite agents: “It’s a big fat pain in my a**!”

That’s why I created a free online tool to help agents find interesting information to post to their facebook page in under 60 seconds.

It’s 100% free and I wanted to show you how it works so you can see it’s the fastest and easiest way to get ideas for your insurance agency Facebook page.

Good processes are the key to success in your insurance agency.

That’s why I put together a resource with the most important processes for successful insurance agencies.

I’ve included important considerations and helpful resources for each process below.

There’s a lot of information on this page so I also made a few links to help you get around:

Insurance Agency Processes featured on this page:

I like marketing you never have to think about that happens automatically.

Don’t you?

Your email signature another great opportunity for automated marketing.

If you don’t already know, an email signature is a message that your email system automatically adds to the bottom of every email you send.

Email signatures are traditionally used to prevent you from re-typing your contact information over and over but they present an awesome opportunity for savvy agents like you to put insurance marketing on auto-pilot.