Learn About Texting for Insurance & How to Get Started with Insurance Texting Software

Texting for insurance SMS marketing, alerts, reminders, and policy updates can be a game-changer for agents, brokers, and claims handlers.

Why?

Because text messages have clear advantages over email and voice — especially for customer and client communication.

So in this article, I'll explore:

1. What insurance text messaging is
2. Why insurance agents, brokers, and others should text
3. How to get started with insurance text messaging
4. 8 ways agents, brokers, underwriters, and claims handlers use insurance texting
5. Free Insurance text message templates and examples

By the end, you’ll know how to integrate business texting into your existing insurance messaging and communication process.

Let’s get started.

Communication throughout the insurance process involves lead generation, insurance sales, claims investigations, policy reviews, damage evaluations, and payment arrangements.

These processes take time to complete and they involve a lot of communication. Whenever there’s a snag in this process, it's most often because of slow, inefficient communication.

Processes stall when insurance representatives don’t get responses to emails or phone calls from clients, customers, contacts, or teammates.

Below is a side-by-side comparison of email, voice, and texting for insurance communication.

Insurance texting vs. email

Almost every organization, business, and insurance agency use email to reach people. Email is the most widely adopted communication method in the world. It’s not going away.

But email inboxes are overflowing. It's hard to cut through the noise of spam messages. Sailing through email filters to get insurance messages read is hard too.

So emails often go unnoticed. This also means that they suffer from low open and engagement rates. In fact, the average open rate is 20% for email and spam rates are around 53%.

Here’s the breakdown for insurance email marketing vs insurance SMS marketing:

It’s clear that texting leads, contacts, and clients can lead to greater value and more impact.

Plus, texts are usually more concise than emails, making them easy to read and respond to. And many people see texts immediately, which is why texts have up to a 98% open rate.

You’ll always need to send emails regarding insurance policies. But texting for insurance gives you a new, faster way to engage with people and get your messages read.

Insurance texting vs. voice

Voice calls are another essential communication tool. They’re great for immediate and personalized conversations.

But calling every individual customer or client could take hours. And with autodialers or some other voice service, you can’t automate calls like you can with texts and emails.

And telephone culture is on the decline too. People are seven times more likely to respond to a text from an unknown number than a phone call. Similarly, only 1 in 4 people won’t listen to voicemails from unknown callers.

However, people do check their phones every four minutes. This means your contacts are very likely to read and respond to your texts. This high engagement rate makes insurance processes handled over text quicker and more efficient.

Your customers, contacts, and clients want quick, convenient interaction on their terms—and texting provides that convenience.

SMS allows insurance agents to convey information quickly and efficiently without having to play phone tag.

A common mistake many insurance agents, brokers, and claim handlers make is using their personal phone and personal numbers for work.

By doing this you:

• Unnecessarily expose your personal number to clients and other business contacts
• Can’t send, receive or manage text message conversations in bulk on a personal line
• Limit your and your teammates' messaging oversight, consistency, and tracking capabilities

So you need an insurance texting service with advanced tools and features to text with clients, teammates, and contacts.

Here’s how to get started:

1. Select an insurance texting software

There are many business text messaging services to choose from. So consider what features you need before you buy.

For insurance SMS marketing and texting insurance leads you’ll need A2P carrier-verified delivery and bulk texting features. Without these tools, your text messages won’t get delivered.

You’ll also want to look for a business texting service like MessageDesk that offers a shared team SMS inbox.

An SMS inbox allows you and other teammates to send, receive, route, organize, and manage text message conversations across your organization. You can even add comments and tag and mention teammates within individual text threads.

MessageDesk offers all of the above business texting features and more.

2. Create a free account

Regardless of the platform you choose, create a free account first.

You’re always free to sign up for a free trial if you’re interested in MessageDesk. You can also meet with a messaging expert to help you get started.

3. Select an SMS phone number

Next, you’ll need to get a text number for business.

You can also text enable your existing business landline or another number with number porting. MessageDesk even gives you a way to text-enable phone number extensions.

Once you’ve selected your SMS phone number, you can import all your contacts into your text messaging service. MessageDesk lets you do this quickly and easily using a CSV file.

4. Compose and schedule texts

MessageDesk makes it easy to personalize text messages and save them as templates with media, tags, and links.

Once you’ve set up your SMS phone number, you can send two-way texts immediately. You can also schedule one-way text message broadcasts to groups of contacts at a later date.

5. Set up automated text messages

Automated text messages will save you and your team the most amount of time.

Business texting services like MessageDesk come with autoresponder texts and out-of-office auto-replies. Both features make reaching your audience more efficient.

Autoresponder texts are keyword based. When someone texts a keyword like “SCHEDULE,” “QUOTE,” or “HOURS,” they get an immediate auto-response text message. You can even chain autoresponders together for multiple replies.

This feature also works when you’re away or out of the office. You can set your office hours in MessageDesk and automatically send a text when someone texts you during non-business hours.

This can help you and your team scale your messaging and set communications expectations.

I’ve covered how to get started with insurance texting software. But what are some specific ways insurance agents, brokers, underwriters, and claims handlers can use business text messaging?

Here are five ways insurance agents, brokers, and underwriters use insurance texting to save time and boost engagement.

1. Create insurance marketing SMS campaigns

Text message marketing is a great way to start text conversations that promote services, build brand awareness, and generate more leads.

SMS marketing for insurance agents is for sending short, personalized text messages, and texting photos and images.

Insurance representatives often use SMS insurance marketing campaigns and text blasts to:

• Market new insurance plans
• Share updated contact information
• Announce savings opportunities

Additionally, you can advertise your texting number on billboards and physical signage. You can also add a click-to-text button to your website or a landing page.

All of these methods can encourage people to text you for quotes, estimates, and more information. They’re great ways to nurture and grow a text message subscriber list too.

Before you start texting insurance leads, just be mindful of consent and TCPA guidelines. You need to make sure the insurance SMS marketing platform you use supports opt-out keywords like STOP and HELP.

These consent mechanisms are required by law. They make it easy for people to opt out of future messaging from your organization.

MessageDesk comes with built-in opt-out and opt-in features. You can stay compliant and manage consent for every contact.

2. Follow-up for insurance sales

Insurance representatives often send insurance sales text messages to book meetings and follow up with prospective and existing customers.

Texting for sales teams makes it easy to personalize and schedule messages at scale.

For example, MessageDesk lets you save templates and incorporate tags so your customers, contacts, and clients receive personalized texts—even when sending bulk messages.

Two-way texting also empowers agents and brokers to engage with prospects, clients, and customers promptly. Instead of waiting for an email response, they can get an answer via text.

3. Decrease appointment no-shows

People often miss appointments because of miscommunication.

But SMS text message reminders and confirmations can change that.

In fact, 64% of people say that an appointment reminder is the most valuable text they've received in the past year.

With dynamic templates and automated text reminders, you and your team can even reduce no-show appointments.

4. Send payment reminders

Your clients and customers are busy and may forget to pay their insurance bills on time. Maybe your phone calls went to voicemail, or perhaps your payment reminder emails ended up in the spam folder.

Either way, SMS payment reminders can remind people of their payments. You can also set up automatic payment reminders with MessageDesk to save your team some time and energy.

5. Document requests

Sending, receiving, and sharing documents takes time and can be expensive.

With SMS and multimedia MMS messaging, you send and receive PDF files and text SMS links to other types of documents.

Texting for insurance can streamline the process of:

• Requesting income documents
• Sending pay stubs
• Sharing signed documents
• Sending receipts
• Getting photocopies of IDs and driver's licenses

6. Improving customer service, support, and engagement

SMS customer service helps streamline engagement. It gives customers fast ways to initiate conversations and allows your team to immediately respond to inquiries.

This is because texting is a conversational messaging tool. It makes it easy to initiate two-way exchanges for more personalized customer service.

And when a customer texts your number, your entire team can receive texts and respond to messages in an SMS inbox. The inbox ensures everyone gets a prompt reply.

7. Send text alerts and policy updates

Text alerts and policy updates are frequent uses for insurance SMS. Texts work particularly well for insurance company alerts because they’re quick, short, and go directly to a customer’s phone.

It’s easy to send a text alert with MessageDesk. All you have to do is create a group of contacts and schedule a text message broadcast.

8. Collecting feedback and asking for reviews

SMS gives you an easy way to gather feedback from your clients, customers, and contacts. Just include a link to a form or survey.

You can also use text messages to ask for Google reviews from happy clients. This leads to referrals, more business, and greater customer loyalty.

Below I’ve included a list of free insurance text message templates and examples.

Feel free to copy, paste and edit any of these insurance SMS samples. You’re also free to check out my list of 60+ text message templates and examples.

Insurance SMS Marketing templates

Insurance sales text message templates

Texting can help leads and prospects move through the customer journey. It's a particularly great tool for insurance brokers texting quick follow-up messages.

Billing reminders and past-due alerts

Help your customers and clients make their payments on time with automated reminders.

Car insurance text message template

Health insurance text message templates

SMS templates for health insurance and health insurance SMS messages should be mindful of patient health information (PHI) and HIPAA compliance. As a best practice, the SMS content for health insurance shouldn’t include any sensitive personal information.

Life insurance text message templates

Life insurance SMS messages and life insurance marketing SMS are great ways to advertise policies. Check out these life insurance SMS message examples.

Insurance renewal reminder SMS templates

You can use SMS reminders to help encourage existing clients and customers to renew their policies.

Insurance document request SMS template

Texting makes it easy to request and share documents with customers. Here’s a document request example:

Appointment and scheduling reminders

When you schedule a meeting with a client or prospect, you want them to show up. You can schedule reminder texts for the day before or the morning of the meeting.

Happy birthday texts

Insurance agencies rely on strong relationships with their clients and customers. Sending them automated birthday texts to wish them well on their special day shows that you value them.

Text photos of damages and PDFs of estimates or quotes

Need a client to send you a photo of the property damage? Need to share a PDF of an updated policy? Simplify the process with a text message.

Texting information about policies and coverages

Keep your contacts, clients, and customers informed about coverage or policy updates. A quick insurance policy text message can go a long way.

Insurance reimbursement text message template

Refunds and reimbursements require swift management to keep clients and customers happy. Texting them updates about their refund status ensures they receive prompt, up-to-date information and offers them peace of mind.

Collecting feedback and online reviews

Feedback, surveys, reviews, and testimonials help build trust. You can text your existing or previous clients and customers a link requesting their feedback.

Final thoughts and next steps

Whether you want to send clients key policy details or offer stellar customer service, texting is a reliable communication method. SMS messages are short, direct, and concise. Plus, they have an incredibly high open rate.

So why not incorporate an SMS platform as part of your insurance agency or brokerage communications strategy?

MessageDesk's business texting software can help you keep connected to customers, contacts, and clients. Start your free MessageDesk trial today or meet with a messaging expert for a demo.