As an insurance agent, you likely have email templates you send frequently for things like prospecting, new client welcomes, customer feedback requests, cross-selling and more.

Here's how to determine the best times to send certain messages to the right audiences and how to do it at scale.

When to cross-sell

For most policies, you’ll have the most cross-selling success by reaching out when it’s convenient for your customer to add a policy, such as before renewals or while they’re purchasing other policies. Try reaching out to your personal lines clients about bundling home and auto or even umbrella insurance 45-60 days before renewal. Commercial lines clients typically need more advance notice to make decisions about purchasing additional policies, so try reaching out at least 90 days before renewal.

Since life insurance rates are dependent on clients’ age, reach out shortly before each person’s birthday. If you know a customer is getting married or expecting a child, reach out to congratulate them and talk to them about their options for protecting their new family members.

There are some policies you should cross-sell seasonally. Typically, these are policies meant to protect policyholders from natural disasters common in your region, for example, earthquake or flood insurance. Reach out to your clients at the start of these seasons to offer coverage while the risk of damage feels more pressing. If you offer recreational vehicle coverage, email your clients once your weather starts warming up to see if they’ve purchased any new equipment.

Prospecting and win-backs

Most of the time, you should send your messages to prospects and prior customers based on their ‘X’ dates. Check in a couple times throughout the year to maintain a positive relationship and then reach out again 30-60 days before their ‘X’ date with an offer to requote them.

If you make a change at your insurance agency that could persuade prospects or prior clients to consider your agency, email them about it. For example, if you add texting to your lineup of agency tools, open a new location or start offering additional types of insurance—let all your customers, prospects and prior clients know.

Managing responses

Before you send a mass email, consider if your staff can handle the responses. If you’re directly asking for feedback, for example sending client sentiment surveys or review requests, you should space those communications out. You need to give your employees time to address customer concerns that come up in surveys. And it’s best to have a steady stream of positive reviews over time vs. all at once because this helps boost your Google search ranking.

Whenever you’re expecting many responses to an email, break up the number of emails you send into smaller groups so your staff can quickly put together quotes for people who respond.

Events and announcements

If you know bad weather is coming, reach out to your customers with safety tips and instructions on how to file a claim if needed. If a tragedy happens in your community, you can also reach out with a thoughtful message.

Email clients if you’re sponsoring or hosting a community event to invite them to attend. You can also notify all your clients at once about carrier changes, updates to your business hours or other events that affect all your policyholders.

If you sell Medicare, reach out at the beginning of annual enrollment to give your customers enough time to review their options and reach out with questions. And offer to help Medicare Advantage clients make changes at the start of the calendar year.

Send one-time emails and date-specific messages automatically

With ClientCircle, you can quickly send a message to entire groups of clients at once or set messages to be sent automatically based on specific dates for each client. We have dozens of ready-to-go templates available to choose from and everything is customizable to fit your needs.