Promote Your Insurance Agency Website

It has been a while since I have had a free moment to write a post. Things have been busy here at Confluency Solutions but we have been developing some really great tools for insurance agent websites. I’ll cover some of those in the coming weeks…

Today I want to talk about email hosting and hosting in-house vs paying for someone else to manage your email.

Many insurance agencies have gone the route of paying to have an Exchange server hosted in-house. There are some good reasons in doing this such as full control of the email server and some of the other great functionality that Exchange Server can bring to your agency. There are also some cons, someone in the agency has to be familiar with Exchange server, Exchange server is expensive. (Up to 35k first year costs if you include, new server, backup server, additional networking, Exchange server licensing, battery backup, etc.) Another thing to consider is:

What happens when the server goes down?
What if it goes down at 2:00 am?
What happens if your agency gets struck by lightning or a natural disaster hits?

Hosting email in-house may be more of a pain and way more expensive than it is worth.

What if you could have the following for your insurance agency:

10 gig email accounts (Thats enough to last a life time)
50 megabyte attachments (That is over 500 JPEG images)
Top Notch Spam Filtering
Triple Redundancy Back-Ups* (Email backed up in 3 physical locations throughout the US *-additional cost)
Virus Protection
Company Directory
Shared Calendars
100% Uptime Guarantee!!!
Tasks (Assign tasks to agency users)
Email that is managed by professionals who specialize in email
And Much more.

Now, what if I told you that you can have this for your agency VERY inexpensively?

Feel free to contact me if you have any questions.

Part 2 of a 2 part posting talking about spam protection for your insurance agency.

Part 1

On average I receive about one spam email a week. This is how I combat spam:

For the last couple years I have successfully kept spam out of my inbox. I purchased a domain name for about $10/year. I then signed up for Google Apps. Free email account. http://www.google.com/a/ Doing this allows me to use Google’s Gmail service for my domain. Also included with this is their state-of-the-art spam filter. I setup an email address called a “Catchall” account. This account will accept all emails from my domain. Ex: If my domain was example.com and you sent and email to james@example.com or abc343@example.com then I would receive both emails.

Anytime I am required to enter my email address I use a false (but true) email address. For instance this weekend I purchased 3 sets of cotter pins from Sears online. Sears required me to enter an email address to complete my purchase. I gave them sears@example.com as my email address. I now know that any email sent to sears@example.com is an email from Sears. If I start receiving other email to that email address then I know that Sears either sold my email address or someone got lucky spamming me. (To date Sears has not sold my email address; this is only an example)

Later on if I decide that I want to receive emails from Sears, I will login to my Google account and create a filter to forward emails sent to sears@example.com to my email address.

I tend to check my Catchall email account weekly. Anytime I receive an email that is spam the first thing I do is flag the email as spam. This is why Google’s spam service is so effective. Google knows that if 1,000 people all marked a similar email as spam chances are it is spam; evolving daily into a very powerful spam filter.

Part 1 of a 2 part series about combating spam.

Fact: We all hate spam.
Fact: Spam will never disappear.
Fact: There are plenty of ways to protect your email from spam.

We all hate it, we all get it. It’s been around for years. Last week I discussed changing your out-of-office message to not include your email address. This is one of many ways to help combat spam for your insurance agency. There are other options as well.

Displaying Email on your Website

It only takes a few lines of code for a spammer to write a program that will scan your website for email addresses. (It’s actually fairly easy to do)

If you choose to display email on your website it is important to do one of three things:

Option A: Encode the email address or use javascript to print the email address. Although not 100% effective; it this option is better than just printing your email address.

Option B: Use CAPTCHA (Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart.) CAPTCHA is a challenge response test where a user will have to enter characters that display in an image into a text box. Even though the largest companies have had their CAPTCHA hacked it is more effective than just encoding your email address.

Option C: Do not display your email address on your website, instead use a generic contact us box.

Any of the options above are better than taking no action. In my experience making it harder for spammers to scan your insurance agency website is the best defense. Spammers will just move on to another site if they are not having any luck with yours

Don’t give any website your email address.

Not giving out your email address isn’t really practical since most ecommerce sites require an email address to buy and sell and many sites require your email address to create an account. Every time you enter your email address on a website you are increasing your chance of spam.

Part 2 – How I am able to keep 99% of spam out of my inbox.

See Also: What Google Knows about Spam.

It is a pretty common practice for many of us use an out of office message to let people know that we are unavailable and will get back to them.

This is a good place to show some value in your website.

Ex: I will be out of the office from December 20th to January 2nd. For common questions please visit our website: http://demo.cfluent.com/faqs

What to always include:
A phone number for your agency
A link or two to your website
An alternative contact number

What not to do:
Provide emails for other people in your agency
Give a long detailed auto-reply of why you have to take a week off because your dog is sick.

Why should I not include an alternate email in my out of office?
Spammers will also receive your auto-reply email. Basically, they now know two things. One that your email is a legitimate email and secondly that you just gave them a couple more legitimate emails to spam.