Promote Your Insurance Agency Website

I just read a very good article from our friends at “Poor Man’s Playground” about getting feedback for your insurance agency.

I have long encouraged agents to take control of their online reputation. Monitoring feedback left by others at various online rating and search services is a must. Encouraging positive feedback is even better.

I recently concluded a purchase on eBay (where buyers and sellers are sometimes referred to as the ‘EBay community) and received an email soliciting not just my direct feedback, but also a request to rate my experience via the eBay seller rating function. Here’s the email (names omitted to protect the innocent:

Read More: http://poormansplayground.blogspot.com/2009/01/your-insurance-agencys-community.html

Last week I talked about the importance of customer reviews on major search engines. This week I will be talking about ways you can increase the amount of positive feedback your insurance agency has online. Everyday your agency is receiving phone calls, emails, walk-ins ranging from quote requests, change requests, typical insurance questions and more. These are all opportunities to write a policy, up sell a policy or just maintain good relations with your clients. When a customer gives your agency or staff a complement, ask them if they mind posting a comment about your agency on one of the search engines. Generally most of the customers will either have an MSN, Yahoo or Google account already so adding a comment should be very simple for them.

Don’t expect them to do too much work…

Have a template email ready to send them. In your email thank them for their complement and include links to where they can write a review about your agency.

Sample Email: (Feel free to copy or modify this email for your own use)

Dear Joe Smith,

Thank you very much for your kind words earlier today. We greatly appreciate it and strive to do our best to satisfy our clients. If you don’t mind can you please post a comment about us on one of the major search engines; Google, Yahoo or MSN? Doing so will only talk a few moments and will greatly help us out.

You can access any our online listings by using the links below.

Google (Insert link to your local listing on Google here)

Yahoo (Insert link to your local listing on Yahoo here)

MSN (Insert link to your local listing on MSN here)

Once again, thank you very much. Don’t hesitate to contact us if you have any questions.

Your agency name,
Your agency website address
Your email.

Once you have that email template ready to use forward it to your staff and inform them about the benefit of sending the email to your customers. Some agencies will even have contests for the person who gets the most reviews posted. A $20 Starbucks gift card can be very persuasive…

Now that you have the template email ready, send the email to your friends and family and have your staff do the same. This is a very good way to kick start your local listings reviews.