InsuranceNewsNet Magazine September 2011 : Page 38
C ontrary to popular opinion, direct mail is far from dead for annuity sales. In fact, direct mail can yield greater than a 10 percent response. Not only that, but it can be done using the cheapest possible postcard and mail rates that exist on the USPS planet. I do love using the Internet to generate appointments, and there’s a great amount of leverage in technology. But there’s noth-ing quite like a flood of inbound phone calls generated by cheap postcards. When I started in the insurance busi-ness, I had to generate all my sales from cold prospecting. After a couple of years of cold-call hell, I decided to give direct mail a try. I spent about two months writing the 38 InsuranceNewsNet Magazine September 2011 copy, acquiring testimonials and design-ing the piece. To save money, we printed the mailers in the office, bought a mailer folding machine and manually tabbed them one by one. From there I got a bulk postage permit and got everything in line for the mailing, which took an inordinate amount of time. Then I took the big stack of goldenrod tri-fold mailers down to the post office and giving the stash to a guy who looked like Newman from Seinfeld. (You know, the post office guy who Jerry hated? I could have sworn it was his twin brother.) If this all sounds like a big pain in the neck, I can assure you it was. But what happened next was even worse. After all my months of blood (paper cuts), sweat and tears, my marketing piece finally went out in the mail. Then reality hit. Out of the hundreds of mailers I sent out, I got only one single call. I was crushed. I rethought everything I did, and the next time was completely different. I started getting phone calls, and they just kept coming… and they didn’t stop! On that mailer, I made more than $18,000 in commissions, and it only cost me a grand total of about $500 to mail. From there, I turned up the heat. I finally got smart and had a mail house do the mailings for me. We printed 6,000 at a time and dropped 2,000 mailers per week for three weeks each month. If I was too busy, I would tell them to hold off so I could catch up. It was the most exciting time of my career, knowing that I had a faucet I could simply turn on,
Publication List
