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Call today: 720.344.0312 Recent LTC Articles Planning Your Fall Campaign for LTC Sales What You Should Know About Direct Mail To Make It Work The Register September, 2006 By Wilma G. Anderson, IAR, RFC With the passage of no call laws, some agents and advisors are struggling with how to develop qualified LTC leads for their financial practice. Since you can’t do telemarketing anymore, what can you do? One answer is Direct Mail. People get tons of direct mail that they mostly ignore. To succeed in this area, your direct mail package must be so compelling and attention-getting that prospects will respond by calling or writing to You. When they contact you first, you can legally call them back because then you are not considered to be a telemarketer. Let’s look at how you can make direct mail pay. While this article focuses on marketing long-term-care insurance to your marketplace, the same principles can work for selling the other products or selling your advisory services. Creating Compelling Direct Mail for LTCI. You can use an off-the-shelf direct- mail package to market LTCI or you can start from scratch and create your own direct-mail package. If you go the latter route, look for an advertising agency with a track record in healthcare direct mail. (An ad agency’s experience in print and broadcast advertising doesn’t necessarily carry over into healthcare direct mail.) Ask the agency if it has done direct mail for healthcare clients like hospitals or insurance companies, especially organizations that target senior citizens. An experienced agency should know what works best in your marketplace to get the attention of retirees. Give the creative director, copywriter and designer at the agency guidance on what you want to accomplish. You can collect lead pieces from other organizations and point out the things that you like and dislike. This helps the creative staff in the agency know your preferences for language, motivation, offers, etc. Prepare a short, written profile of the desired client you are trying to attract: age range, affluence, income, occupation, location, special interests. When I went through this exercise, we wound up with three variants. The background colors, the signatures (Wilma G. Anderson, W.G. Anderson, or Wilma Anderson), and the artwork were different for each lead piece they created. We test- marketed all three, sending each piece three times to specific zip codes, spaced six weeks apart, and gauged the response. Surprisingly, the lead pieces all pulled the same response rate, and after the first three months, we got a 2.5% to 3.5% response rate —the percentage of recipients who mailed back the return postcard. This is quite high, as a 1% rate is considered quite acceptable. These lead pieces still get the same response rate, even though the market is now crowded with direct mailings about LTC insurance. One of the secrets to my own direct mail campaign has been the consistency of mailings to the same zip codes for the past 10 years. I buy a new mailing list every quarter to capture the names of those who have turned 60, and those who have recently moved into the zip codes I prefer to work in. Building Response The response mechanism is crucial. You have to have an easy way for people to respond and get in touch with you. A tear-off postcard makes it easy. The aimed at LTCI postage-paid card should ask for the recipients’ birth dates and phone numbers and offer to do a free comparative analysis of LTCI policies. Have the card sent back directly to your office instead of a third party so you can respond fast while the prospects still remember sending the card to you. A simple direct mail strategy boosts response a lot. Have the mailing company imprint the name and address of each recipient on the return card, as well as on the outside of the folded lead piece. Then, when prospects send the card back directly to your office, they just have to fill in their ages and phone number. Make it as easy as possible for the prospect to respond! I tested another lead piece offered to agents, which was made available by a major insurance company. It looked great, but prospects had to do more work. They had to fill in their name, address and phone number on the response card. Results? It got less than a 1% response. Another trick is to have your lead pieces mailed from another state. It sounds strange, but this really does increase the response. Targeting Your Market — the Mailing List. Now that you have a great lead piece, you’ll need a first-rate mailing list. Your list criteria must match the product or service you are selling. Middle-income Americans 60 to 74 years old are the best prospects for long-term-care insurance. For younger people, long-term care seems like a more distant concern. But people 60 or better are starting to see their health change. They also know friends and family members who have become less vigorous. They see long-term care insurance as a necessary part of their retirement planning. It’s a real, immediate concern to them. These are the prospects most ready-to-buy. Middle-income retirees with $100,000 to $600,000 of liquid assets are the most motivated buyers. Don’t rule out more affluent clients, but remember that there are fewer of them, and they’re more likely to already have a financial advisor, and do not respond as readily to direct mail. The great American middle class is your best bet. An experienced list broker can obtain a good mailing list for you. The list should be limited to people 60 to 74 years old who have more than $40,000 in annual income and live in single family homes, retirement communities, or senior high-rises. Select specific zip codes in your area. Since your agents will visit prospects in person, you’ll want to limit your mailings to people who are within driving distance of their offices. Be selective about the filters you use. In much of the country, you might want to mail only to single-family homes. However, if you’re mailing to Manhattan or parts of Florida, this filter would rule out too many prospects. The Zip Code is another valuable filter. For various reasons, some Zip Codes produce much better results than others. The only way to find out which ones will work for you is to mail and test. In my agency, it took a year to figure out which 13 Zip Codes are the most responsive. One mailing won’t do the trick. Take a page from the big LTCI marketers, like GE Capital. They know that repetition is the key. Most people need to hear from you three times before taking action. It’s best to mail once every six weeks to the same people; once a quarter is the minimum level for effectiveness. Over time, your response rate should climb. If you’ve done three mailings and still haven’t gotten a good response, there’s something wrong with your list or your lead piece, or you need to re-evaluate the zip codes you’ve been mailing to. A minor change in strategy can make a big difference. Lists become outdated because people move in and out of the area and turn 60. Buy a fresh list every quarter to capture the new folks who’ve moved in and those who have recently had a birthday that now age-qualifies them for your direct mail program. Respond Promptly. When the response card comes in, someone must call the prospect back as soon as possible — no later than 72 hours in any case. The people making the calls, whether agents or staff at your office, must identify themselves immediately. They should say something like this at the start: “You recently sent a card to our offices and asked for some information about long-term care PROTECTION plans.” Once the representative has established the connection, he or she can set up an in-home appointment. Direct Mail Programs for Annuities. With annuities, I recommend a quite different approach — because the annuity sale is more straightforward and less beset with emotional issues for the prospective client. Mailing large (5” x 8’) postcards is a simple, easy, inexpensive way to make sure your message is seen and read. When a large postcard arrives in the mail, it sticks out because of its size. We all tend to pick larger items out of a pile of mail first, turn the card over and quickly read the message. When that happens with your prospects, you’ll be winning the first battle to get their attention. Consider a “drip” marketing program. It’s called a drip program because it’s repetitive. Send a series of large postcards, on quality paper, to targeted prospects. Even if they throw the card away after reading it, the message was sent, delivered and read, and an image was created in their mind. Often, you must mail the same person four, five or six or more times before you penetrate their armor and get a response. When you send a series of cards, you’ll be creating and strengthening message while establishing an image — and building your response rate. Send a series of postcards to investors 60 to 74 years old in targeted zip codes every week. The postcard includes a toll-free number for recipients to call and request a free booklet about annuities. Make sure the booklet and a letter from your office are mailed out within 24 hours. A week later, have someone call prospects to make sure they received the booklet. To the prospect’s ear, this sounds like a service call and there won’t be a tendency for them to hang up immediately. Since they called you first, this is legal. Ask them if they have a question about one of their current annuities that you can answer for them while they’re on the phone. A trained salesperson can usually line up an appointment then. Direct mail can be a win/win situation. It works for many of the products and services we sell. Grabbing the attention of our prospects with a direct mail piece about a product they need, or want can be the stepping stone to the 2nd, 3rd, and 4th product you can sell to each and every client. With each sale you’ll be able to clearly show that client having an RFC® is the best choice as their financial advisor! Click here to return to list

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