Reviving Dormant Leads With Automated Drip Marketing – In 5 Easy Steps

For every year you’ve been a full-time health insurance agent, you’ve probably amassed a full box of unclosed leads. Now add all those clients who didn’t renew their policies.

That’s a lot of dormant leads. Throwing them away would be a big mistake, however — especially if you can use an automated email drip marketing strategy to revive them.

Whether you have 200 or 20,000, an automated drip marketing system can quickly put your unclosed leads through a revival process that will send a series of personalized emails designed to nurture and identify the prospects who may finally be ready to buy a new health plan.

1. Update Your Database

The first thing you’ll need to do is prepare your mailing list. Remember that automated drip marketing is primarily an email campaign. Having a clean database will be crucial for your success.

Updating your database may take some effort, but it will be a valuable investment of your time:

• Database. If you haven’t already, make sure to put your mailing list into a spreadsheet or CRM program. This will help you with your other database-preparation tasks.


• Email addresses. To fully automate your drip marketing campaign, you need to focus on the leads that have emails. Separate the leads without email addresses into a separate file that you may want to target later with postcards or phone calls.


• Invalid leads. If you did your job correctly when you first tried contacting these leads, you should have taken notes if any of the lead data was invalid. Take the time to correct what you can and remove what you can’t in your database.


• Duplicates. After compiling your database, start removing any duplicates. Most database and spreadsheet programs (like Excel) can now automatically look for duplicates.

As you update your mailing list, you should also try to highlight the potentially promising leads. These are the prospects who seemed really interested long ago but may have dropped away because of an emergency or unexpected change in their finances. After a few months (or years), they may be ready at last.

Finally, you can start inputting your updated mailing list into your automated drip marketing system. But before you do, you should take the time to prepare your messaging.

2. Soft Welcome

There’s a good chance that many of the prospects in your mailing list may not remember you, especially if you haven’t contacted them for a long time.

There may also be other prospects who do remember you, but never established enough trust to buy. This is why I recommend using a softer approach with your first email: you need to reintroduce yourself.

Your initial message should highlight the benefits of working with you. It should then provide links to resources on your website that prospects can use — without any sales pressure. This means that your website should have consumer-friendly resources, such as educational content and a multi-plan quote engine.

Your follow-up emails should then focus on nurturing your leads to a buying decision. To accomplish this, make sure each email contains…

• Educational info - Answer a FAQ (frequently asked question).


• Shopping tips – Give a quick tip that can help prospects improve their ability to shop for health insurance.


• Call to action – Make sure that each email has a strong call to action, so you can immediately engage prospects who are ready now.

One of the most effective calls to action for health insurance agents is an invitation to use your online quote engine. Revived prospects can immediately begin comparing qualifying plans and rates - and even start their application.

3. Updated Proposals

If you already have some basic information about the prospect, a powerful element to use in your drip marketing emails is an updated, personalized proposal.

This is where your automated multi-carrier quote engine will help tremendously. If you already use a professional health insurance quoting technology, such as the Norvax Quote Engine, you probably already know how it can slash your quoting time and help your sales pitch.

Now, it can help you increase your conversion rate even more by adding more “pop” to your drip marketing message. When you insert a personalized proposal in your drip marketing email, you not only tell your prospect how you can help them… you show them!

4. Make It Easy

Drip marketing needs to be easy — for both you and your prospects.

Although drip marketing may seem like a tedious, time-consuming task, there are actually powerful tools that let you market thousands of leads almost as quickly as it takes you to handle a dozen.

The LeadMiner email autoresponder, for example, will automatically send a steady stream of emails to your mailing list. Just select the email message you want to use and set how often you want them contacted. The program does the rest.

LeadMiner also integrates completely with the Norvax Quote Engine to ensure that each drip marketing message can contain an updated, personalized proposal.

Don’t forget, however, that you also need to make it easy for your prospects. So make sure that your emails contain multiple contact options:

• Your phone number
• Your email address
• Your website quoting engine

You also need to provide an e-application. Fortunately, if you have the Norvax Quote Engine, many of your carriers will have direct links to their online application forms.

5. Track Responses

Automating your drip marketing lets you keep your focus on the freshest leads in your pipeline and on the prospects who are most ready to close now.

Best of all, an automated system like LeadMiner will let you know when one of your dormant leads has awoken and may be ready for a call.

For starters, LeadMiner monitors when a prospect has opened your email. It also tracks when that client has opened your updated proposal and started using your quote engine.

When you see a prospect start reviewing and comparing plans, that’s a strong sign that they are or soon will be in the market for health insurance. They’re prime candidates for a transfer to your “active” list — instead of your dormant file.

You should also take the opportunity to give them something more. At the very least, send them a personal email. A phone call would be better!

If you haven’t noticed, drip marketing is really a form of lead nurturing. Automating your campaign with a system like LeadMiner will help you guide all your “long term” leads to a buying decision. But they can also help you revive many of your dormant and unclosed leads — without taking your focus off your hottest leads.