Grow strong connections with your new customers and you'll help spread positive feedback about your business.

For new insurance agents, getting those first few customers can seem daunting. Will they come? Do you have the knowledge to receive them? With a solid marketing strategy, you can not only bring in customers, you'll feel more prepared to keep them with your agency in the long term.

Good reviews have always been crucial for any business, but in the digital age, they are more important than ever. Now, when customers search for an independent insurance agency, they’re likely to scan the results of that search. If they see anything negative (usually limited to the first or second page), then boom: They’re probably going to move on. This makes it crucial to have good reviews to push down any possible negative press.

Good reviews serve another purpose too: good SEO (Search Engine Optimization). When your business name is linked with industry keywords as well as praise on multiple sites, a search for your goods or services is more likely to pop up. This means a campaign to garner lots of great reviews is well worth it for independent insurance agents, so get going with the five easy, cost-effective tips below. 

Southern Oak Insurance inspires confidence in your new and existing clients.

At first blush, advice about when independent insurance agents should send emails might look more like advice about when not to send emails. Why? Because there are quite a number of days and times you should avoid wasting your words, as well as a few that will get you the most attention. Once you know when these times are, you can optimize emails to gather insurance leads and reap the benefits of a solid email marketing campaign.

Launching an email marketing campaign can be tough, and can feel easy to make mistakes in this new and ever-evolving field. However, independent insurance agents can’t afford to give up this valuable source of insurance leads. Rest assured that if you stay away from the basic "don’ts," you will reap the rewards of email marketing with little trouble.

How to use LinkedIn well is the subject of whole libraries, but it’s harder to find information on how not to use the professional social networking site. Yet when you’re just starting out, that’s sometimes the more useful approach. Below are the five worst things independent insurance agents can do on LinkedIn; avoid them, and you’ll be fine.

We all like variety. Although independent insurance agents routinely need to attract the same kinds of customers to the same kinds of products, that doesn’t mean you can’t vary your email marketing approaches to keep them interested. Using these email subject lines will put an extra kick in your email campaign, earning higher open rates and preventing them from sending you to the trash. Plus, it may just help keep your customers’ and prospects’ inboxes from becoming dull.

Good reviews have always been crucial for any business, but in the digital age, they are more important than ever. Now, when customers search for independent insurance agents, they’re likely to scan the results of that search. If they see anything negative (usually limited to the first or second page), then boom: They’re probably going to move on. This makes it crucial to have lots of good reviews to push down any possible negative press.

Eleven years have passed since Florida suffered from the devastation of Hurricane Charley, the last really big hurricane to hit the state. This news might be a major relief, but according to an article in the Washington Post, this just means that the state is overdue. Nobody wants to see another big hurricane destroy property and threaten safety, but it probably isn't realistic to assume that it won't happen just because it hasn't happened for over a decade. And most long-time Floridians know that these storms tend to strike in waves.

In addition, the population and property value in the paths of potential storms has only increased since 2004. In fact, the state's population has grown by one million people since Wilma, a 2005 hurricane. This means that future storms have the potential to damage more property than previous ones.

While many consumers are tempted to shop for Florida homeowners insurance solely by price, independent insurance agents understand that the cheapest coverage won't really help their clients if it does not provide the right coverage or come from a company with a commitment to their clients. Consider these 5 important considerations for quoting homeowners insurance in Florida.