Here’s an interesting question:

“I’m a personal lines insurance agent, and I would like to be able to have a 95% closing ratio, high retention, and a great system for getting my clients to give me referrals.”

All I can say is WOW.  When I was in the insurance business, I created ways to prospect that were not normally done within the industry.  Of course, back then, we also did not have compliance departments breathing down our necks, as most of the insurance agents have today.

Any of my readers can massage the suggestions I’m going to give here to fit their own industry or business.

The first thing I did was to create a prospect list.  I started with 100, and then increased it to 1000 individuals whom I wanted as clients.

Then I accumulated articles and any other free information I could locate, and kept in touch with them over a period of at least one year.  My thoughts were that if after one year, they still didn’t want to do business with me, then color me gone and out of their life.

By doing this, I developed a relationship with them.  Of course I also created unique letters to send them with various forms of GRABBERS.

For instance, I created a letter like the following where I sent a shoe with the letter.

Jeff…Now You Can Increase Your
Net Worth By $1,000,000.   Effortlessly!
            (Include one Right shoe with your Letter)

Dear Jeff,

As you can see, I’ve sent you a “right” shoe with this letter.

I did it for two reasons:

First, because what I have to share with you is so important, I needed some way to make sure this letter got your attention.

Second, because I want us to start off on the right foot, I thought sending you the shoe was a good way for me to get my foot in your door.

Anyway, here is what this is all about…

(Continue with the rest of your offer)

Think of ways to adapt this letter to the product or service you are selling.

Another thing you can use is to offer my book, “10 Marketing Mistakes That Steal Your Cash” to your prospect and clients. Go to www.kenvarga.com/report.php and take advantage of the free book offer.  It’s free and will bond you with your customer.

In prior blog posts, I gave you suggestions to the last two items of your question…high retention and a referral system.  Refer back especially to the last post on “How To Create Lifelong Customers”, and to the post on April 26, 2008, “Growing Through Referrals”.

Technorati Tags: Closing Ratio, Getting Referrals, growing referrals, Referrals, retention, retention rate

Some of the questions I received were about how to use SEO (search engine optimization) to generate sales.

This one of those questions that would take a couple of books to do it justice. Using search engine optimization (SEO) is both a science and art.

A few years ago, SEO was fairly straightforward. Over time, as Google became predominant and made page relevance supreme, the game of SEO has changed. It requires much more tedium, monitoring and adjusting of your keywords. Large companies are paying high bid prices for popular keywords so they will show up high on the search results page. In addition, Google is constantly changing its algorithms to improve relevancy. So even if your page is high in the results today, this doesn’t mean it will be high tomorrow. SEO is an ongoing process.

If you decided to use SEO yourself and you wanted to do it well, be prepared to invest in a good course to learn it, and then be prepared to spend some time every day giving it your attention. If you have the funds, it would be more efficient for you to outsource the SEO work and spend your time selling and marketing.

Now with that said, you do have to make sure that your existing web pages have relevant keywords in them so people looking for what you offer can find you. Make sure those keywords are in the page’s Meta Tag, and make sure they are sprinkled throughout the text on the page. The consensus appears to be that about 7% of the words on your page should be your keywords. If much less than that the relevancy of your page might drop. If much more than that, then Google might think you are “stuffing” your page and penalize you.

In addition to your keywords, if you keep your copy focused on your topic without much wandering, you’ll be contributing to your page’s relevancy.

All in all, you may find that using other methods to drive prospects to your site, such as postcards and other offline methods, may be more effective than SEO to attract insurance prospects. Again, run the numbers and see.

If however you are convinced you want to go the SEO route, a good person to learn from is Brad Fallon. His site is www.bradfallon.com

I hope this is helpful.

Technorati Tags: Grow Your Business, SEO