Your organization sends out hundreds – if not thousands – of emails every week to clients and prospects. Every one of these emails is a branding and sales opportunity.

But it would help if you were intentional about using this communication channel.

While email newsletters are a great way to engage with your clients, the regular emails you send out could provide a gentle reminder of all of the other products and services you have available.

Creating standard email signatures is nothing new. Outlook has the capability of creating multiple standard email signatures and allowing individuals to choose which signature they want to use on a particular email. The problem? There is no way to centrally manage the messages that are included in the email signature for all employees.

That is where an email signature service could be a valuable marketing tool.

Over the last few months, Zoom has become a popular platform to use for virtual meetings.

Zoom has a feature that allows you to quickly add a custom background to the image projected during a meeting.

Virtual Background

The Virtual Background feature allows you to display an image or video as your background during a Zoom meeting. This feature works best with a green screen and uniform lighting to help Zoom detect the difference between you and your background.

You can also upload your images or videos as a virtual background. There are no size restrictions when adding your virtual backgrounds, but we recommend cropping the image to match the aspect ratio of your camera before uploading it.

Example: If your camera is set to 16:9, an image of 1280 x 720 pixels or 1920 x 1080 pixels will work well.

Managing User Passwords – also known as Credential Management – is the number one pain point for independent insurance agencies, as revealed by an ID Federation survey of 400 agents. It takes an agency 30–60-plus minutes to add or delete a user.

Password Management has been a prior topic in this newsletter: Why Your Office Needs a Password Management Solution.

For their part, insurance carriers spend significant money on systems security, usually with a siloed approach that doesn’t recognize the reality that agencies work with dozens of carriers.

Passwords aren’t so safe anymore. Some agencies still store usernames and passwords on Excel worksheets or shared documents or write them down on sticky notes kept in plain view. Passwords cause slowness and inefficiency in a business that serves customers who demand speed and efficiency. Carriers see inefficiency, too, when answering numerous low-value “password reset” calls. Cybersecurity laws will increase time and cost demands on all insurance firms.

Now, there’s new progress: An independent agency and a regional carrier have broken through — to show that things can be different.