 When I first heard of agents and agents told me that they're spending $20,000, $30,000 a month on, on direct mail, I thought what a dumb idea. Why would someone spend that much money on postcards and direct mail if they can take that same amount of money put it into Facebook advertising or YouTube advertising. They can make a lot more. But when I really started crunching the numbers, I realized that with postcards, you could make potentially a lot more if you do it the right way. Welcome to this training called why and how insurance agents spend $20,000 a month on direct mail and postcards and why they continue to do that every single month and still remain profitable. My guest today is Samantha from postcard mania. And what we're going to talk about is how insurance agents like yourself use direct mail, which may appear to be a very outdated marketing strategy. But to some agents, that is their best source of marketing. They've been able to grow very successful agencies purely from sending out direct mail and postcards. So we want to share some of those strategies with you so you can implement them for your business as well. Samantha, go ahead and introduce yourself. Who are you? And give us a little quick rundown of who you are. Sure. So my name is Samantha Heald. I'm the corporate sales marketing manager here at postcard mania. I've been here for the last 16 years. So I'm quite experienced. I know I look young. But yeah, postcard mania has been around for the last 22 years and we do direct mail. We do online marketing, website development and a lot more. Super cool. And you guys just celebrated your 22 year anniversary last week, the time of this recording. And you mentioned us that recently of how much postcards you guys send out as a company. Can you share that with me? Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, we send out currently it's about 180,000 postcards every week just promoting postcard mania. So that's what we send out to try and generate calls for our own business. But overall we're sending about three and a half million postcards for our customers as well as ourselves. Yeah, that's doing direct mail. Yeah, that's just insane because when I first heard of agents and agents told me that they're spending $20,000, $30,000 a month on direct mail, I thought, what a dumb idea. Why would someone spend that much money on postcards and direct mail if they can take that same amount of money put into Facebook advertising or YouTube advertising? They can make a lot more. But when I really started crunching the numbers I realized that with postcards you could make potentially a lot more if you do it the right way. So that's what we want to establish in today's call is how to market through postcards the correct way because one thing that I have learned over the last few years in doing this is that not all direct mail and not all marketing is created equally. I was talking to a, I think it was an all state agent not long ago and he said, yeah, I've tried out postcards through my company and it just hasn't worked out really well. And when you look at the type of postcards that are being sent out, they're just not really targeted. The copy isn't good. The design isn't good. It doesn't get that the same amount of call ins as some of the postcards that you will show on today's call. So that's one thing I wanted to establish first is that just because you might have tried postcards in the past and then work out for you, it doesn't mean that it won't ever work out. You just have to change your approach, change your design. Do you agree with that Samantha? 100%, 100%. Awesome. So I want to play a quick game with you where we'll do some quick math just to get people informed on what's a reasonable return on investment could look like when you spend money on postcards. So let's assume that as an agent, I'm spending $2,500 a month on postcards, $2,500 a month. How many postcards would that allow me to send approximately? I would say you could probably get out about 5,000 postcards for a budget of $2,500. Okay. About 5,000 postcards. And the typical call in rates is what percent? Usually. I would say about 1%. Okay. It's about 1%. Yeah. And if you send out more postcards to the same address and if it's very targeted around their renewal, then it could be higher than that, right? But to be conservative on this call, we're going to say 1%. That would give us 50 call-ins, right? Correct. Cool. So if someone is calling your agency and they're asking for a quote, they're calling when it's convenient for them, the likelihood of the salesperson closing that sale is really hot because this is a very interesting prospect. So most agents would say that they'll close half of those people, maybe even more than half of those people, but I want to be super conservative and say, look, let's just assume you only close one out of four people, which if you're closing only one out of four people from incoming calls, then you don't have a good sales process. So that's something I could help with is help with the close ratio. But to be very conservative, let's just say your team isn't training how to close and they only close one out of four. How many sales would that give us? If we have 50 calls that come in, we close a fourth of them. About 12. 12, yes. So 12 sales made out of the $2,500 that you spent on the direct mail. And an average commission for an agent, a lot of times about 250, 300, sometimes more, let's just take the bottom number and say 250. That would mean that you earn $3,000. I know my handwriting is weird when I'm writing sideways. You could potentially earn $3,000 in commission from the 12 sales that you made, even though you spent $2,500 on postcards. Are you getting this? Like that is, that is the exact precise reason why agents continue to spend more and more money on direct mail. So Samantha, that all state agents that I was talking to that told me that he spends $30,000 a month in direct mail. He said the biggest problem I have right now is that I just don't have enough people that work for me to take the incoming calls. That's a good problem to have. One of the best problems to have because he has people calling in. He's making a lot of sales. It's just that he can't continue to spend more money because he doesn't have enough people. He said he would want to spend over $100,000 a month of marketing if he had enough people. But really, this is what I wanted to demonstrate is that not everybody starts off by spending $20,000 a month of marketing. They start off by spending $25,000 or more depending on your budget. And then once you make your money back and you see this working, that's when agents really start to scale up. Is that what we're seeing? Yeah, absolutely. And one thing I actually wanted to mention too, it's like we do a lot of online marketing in conjunction with direct mail. And during the recession back in 2008, we actually decided to cut some of our postcard money and invest it more into the online marketing. And when we did that, we didn't notice it right away, but we tanked. We had down week after down week after down week. And one of the things that we realized is that postcards actually produce better leads and they actually produce, they close at a higher rate and actually produce a higher amount of money once we close them. So that's something to take into consideration too, is really weighing what you're actually making off those online leads compared to direct mail. Yeah, I'm so glad that you bring that up because your CEO sent out a blog post right around when COVID started. And she shared how that exact experience of what you guys went through back in 08 when the economy tanked and how you guys decided to save like $10,000 a week on on marketing and how much it affects your business. And I feel like of all the marketing messages that I read during that time and really before that was the way she broke down that math was really interesting. So I'll include that link in below this video so that people can read that article for themselves. Okay, I know you brought a few examples of postcards. Can you walk us through some of those examples? Yes, absolutely. So one of the things that we have seen working really well right now for insurance is renewals. So that's basically targeting people that have their homeowners insurance coming up for renewal. So what we do, we actually have personalized postcards which allow us to be able to add the person's first name and then promote that their homeowners insurance is expiring in July and you can even put some kind of rate sheet on there as well. And that way it's super targeted and it's something that's going to grab their attention a lot more than just doing a generic postcard. So as you can see here, zoom in nice and close. Nice. So it talks about how basically the month of the renewal and then it has the person's first name. So that's going to be something that's going to grab their attention. And then on the back side you can see it also has like their property address and where they're located. So it's just a great way for you to be able to again grab the attention. We find that personalized postcards also produce a higher amount of leads and the response rate is better. So if you're looking for ways to also try different things and increase the results, there's also lots of different options. Just as you said, not every direct mail piece is created equally. So there's different things you can try to produce better. Yeah. And it's find the people whose homeowners policies up for renewal. There are various ways to do that. You guys have your methods of that. I know a lot of agents use sales genie to capture that information. So agents can bring the list to you and you can create the postcards or you can help agents from scratch find the people's whose homeowners policies up for renewal and really take the whole process and to end. Is that right? Correct. Either way, and if you guys have your own list that is totally fine. We offer it as a service so that we are full service and it makes it easy. But if you already have your sources by all means send it to us and we can still handle everything else for you. Awesome. Cool. I do have one other postcard that I wanted to show. Let's do it. I want to see I want to see all of them if you're okay with that. Okay. Good. Absolutely. Well, the next one I'm going to show is Google Street View that we have. So this one it's special because of the fact that on Google, if you type in an address, there is a picture that comes up of the home. It's not there 100% of the time, but probably like 95% of the time. So it's a great way if you're going to be doing a homeowners insurance rate and you want to promote it, that's going to be something that's going to grab their attention. So this is a great way. This is a real estate card, but this is a great way. This is the image that was pulled right off of Google. So you can use this and promote the homeowners insurance is up for renewal and then they've got a picture of their home. It's going to be just one more way to be able to grab their attention and increase that response rate. Mind blown. Yes. Yeah. I'm hoping people recognize that that post card you might pull it up one more time. So imagine sending customized postcards where you're not just having their address on the postcard, but an actual picture of their house. Amazing. So like doesn't get more personalized than that. I know if I received a postcard with a picture of my house, I would look at it. I would consider calling in. That's pretty cool. You'd probably hang on to it just to show your friends. I'd hang it up on the fridge. That's what I know. Exactly. So we have a couple more. They're pretty generic and basic, which we have options to create anything that you want realistically, but these are just a few examples. So here's one that's just pretty basic just includes the first name in there. Yep. The backside. It has the rate sheet as well. So that's a mock quotes. It's not an actual accurate quote, but it gives people an estimate how much they could save on their homeowner's insurance, which everybody gets letters from Geico progressive and some of these big companies with estimates. They're not actual quotes. So this would be something similar, right? Exactly. And honestly, it doesn't have to have a rate on there. If you don't want to do that, I mean, you can still have the person's first name and the property address. It doesn't have to be the rate on there. It's just one more way to make it more personalized. I mean, even if you wanted to and just take their home value and say we could base a quote off of your estimated home value of blah now, you know, there's so many different options available and it's just whatever data that we actually have in the mailing list. Got it. Yeah. We have one more here, which again is very generic, but this is just another way that you can do it. It looks a little bit more like a government issued type piece. So I wouldn't call that generic. I would call that good advertising because it really does look official. It does. It does. It looks like a government official piece. Yeah. It doesn't look like a marketing piece. So if nothing else, it'll get someone to at least read the the mailer. I received a letter yesterday. My wife took a picture of it said to me. She didn't actually read the letter, but she because she forwards a lot of the mail to me and I looked at it and my first five seconds was the first five seconds of reading that piece of mail that go crap. Like, did I forget to make my mortgage payment? What's happening? Because it said, urgence respond within five days. Like otherwise there'll be consequences type of thing. And I read through the entire letter and it said, basically it was an option to refinance the home. Right. But they made it look so official. They had a bald eagle at the top. So and it was all black and white just because it was it looked so official. It looked like a government piece. It made my wife take a picture and send it to me. So I think that exactly. So those are just some ideas, but honestly, like we custom design everything for you. All of our design services that we do, it's unlimited changes back and forth. You're not being charged by the hour or anything like that. So it's like, we really want to make sure you're a hundred percent happy before we send anything to print and we even have a flexibility to like when you're placing your order with us. If you wanted to bolt order for a couple of months worth of marketing, we can obviously change that design up a little bit more to for every piece that we send out, but most cases we want to keep it very consistent so that people get used to seeing those ads again and again and it kind of creates that brain in the fact. Awesome. You have to tell us about the way you guys track your calls because I think that's really neat because a lot of agents have no idea where their business is coming from. Their phone is ringing and they don't know if it's coming from Google referrals. You guys have a really cool tracking mechanism and I hope you can walk us through that. Yeah, so we have a program called everywhere small business and it integrates direct mail with online marketing and what we do is we actually tie in Google and Facebook marketing with the program. So we create online ads that look just like the postcard mailing and when somebody goes to your website, let's say they get your postcard in the mail and they say, Oh, great. Go to this website. They go to the website because they want to check you out when they leave that website. Let's say they don't take any action. They're interested, but they're like, I'll do a quote later while they leave and then all of a sudden these ads start following them around the Internet. So now when they're searching on, you know, CNN and you know, I don't know go and shop or whatever. There's all sorts of different areas on the side and everything that promote that same postcard design. So the intention is trying to get them to see that ad click on it, go back to the website to actually finish doing that quote. So then you're actually taking action and generating a lead and we do something similar on Facebook too, where we can start showing ads to the exact same people that we're mailing the postcards to. We do. It's called social matching. So we're able to take that data and find those profiles and then promote those ads to those individuals. Crazy, crazy, crazy. Like that is super powerful because let's say someone never sell the postcard for whatever reason. They're going to see the Facebook ad or they might pick up a postcard and they considered calling in but then they lost it. Yeah, they got too busy and then during their lunch break they go to Facebook and they see your ad. They can call in straight from the ad. So now they have multiple touches of the same message. That's super powerful. Now, when someone calls in, you guys have a trackable phone number that you provide that not only records the call but gives the agency owner a dashboard that tells you how many calls you receive and the actual recording, right? Talk to me about that. Yeah, definitely. So that's part of the program as well. And the great thing is, you know, if you have multiple agents under you, you know, let's say that you want to double check and make sure they're handling the calls properly or you really just want to make sure that you're getting enough calls and that every single call is tracked and logged. So then that way you know to invest more into direct mail than the whole point is that if you can listen to those calls to it's just a great training purpose and then also you're able to tell great on this mailing. We got X number of calls and we can actually tell if things are increasing, decreasing if we need to change something or if it's working perfectly. So yeah, super cool. A lot of agents, if they just go back and listen to the calls that the team members make, they'll learn so much about why they're making sales or they're not making sales. A lot of times it's not the marketing that's ineffective. It's the sales conversation that kills the deal. So this will give the agents an opportunity to know which what is the problem or what barriers to overcome or things to work on. It's I mean, we do training all the time and I know it's super important and we listen to calls and it's different when you're listening to a real call you had versus training and drilling a fake scenario. So I do think that it is important to listen to those to be able to do a better job. Yeah, for sure. Well, cool. If I want to reach out to you and speak to someone in your team, Samantha, and get set up with postcards, say an agent watching this video wants to do that. How do they go about doing that? I know we'll include a link below the video, but what happens afterwards once they opt in? So basically once a lead comes through, you're going to work with one of my marketing consultants that are on my team and that's either going to be Allison or Kristen. So they are actually going to do a consultation with you, so they're going to go over everything about your business, find out what kind of growth you're looking for, you know, what are the best services for you, whether you need less services or not. They're going to do all the pricing, figure out what makes sense for you and then we can actually start the process. So it's pretty simple, but we do have even just opting in. We do have some free stuff that we're going to send out. We're going to send out a marketing article that basically has a bunch of our case studies and results and different card examples. We do also have this free marketing kit. So this is a little envelope and it has a bunch of samples on the inside of it, some basic costs and estimates. So we'll do all of this when you opt in online. Wow, you guys really have it dialed in. So anybody who opts in and set up a campaign, you made a special offer where you could give away a thousand free postcards. If they, in their first order, is that right? Can you talk to me about that? So we can do a thousand free postcards for every 5,000 cards ordered or we could even do 5% off the entire order. So whichever makes more sense, whichever is going to give you a bigger discount, we're going to make sure that we apply that. So we do have it set up so that we can tell whether you're coming from insurance sales lab. So we'll know to make sure that we give you that special offer. Yeah. So if you watch this video and you opt in from the link that we will include below this video, it'll be easy for everybody to track. But if you do call in just by visiting the postcard media website, make sure you mention the insurance sales lab so you get that 5% discount or the the thousand free postcards. So I guess my last question would be is turn around time for the whole process. Let's say I call in today to get the ball rolling. We get the design set up. How long will it take to get the postcards sent out? It's pretty quick. I mean, generally we say two to three weeks because we want to have time to actually be able to design everything, get the list figured out, set up the online marketing. If we're going to go that route, but we have some some timelines that we can speed it up. If you need something out within a week, then we can still make that happen. Super cool. Okay. So I'm hoping the next time we connect through a call like this, Samantha, we'll have maybe one or two agents hop on the call and share some of the results that they have gotten from sending out these postcards. So we'll give it a couple of months and then revisit this conversation and have agents share some of the results that they have gotten. So I'm excited to do that. Any last final thoughts or things that you want insurance agents to know about postcard media? Um, I mean, we've been here for 22 years. We have over 90,000 customers that we've worked with and insurance is one of our top industries that we work with. So the experience that we have, I mean, it's just like you wouldn't get it anywhere else. If you're going to another company and they're just printing postcards, they probably don't catalog the results and really see what's working. And that is one thing that makes us different is that we have a whole results department. So anytime that we see something's working well, we're educating everybody in our team to make sure that we're doing the right actions to make sure that your campaign is successful. Yeah, I think that's the bottom line is if what you did wasn't successful and it didn't work, people wouldn't come back. That's just how business works. And I can tell you from personal experience with talking to a lot of agents that the one marketing source that agents are always deadly afraid of turning off is direct mail. If they're okay with turning Facebook off YouTube ads, they're okay with stopping buying internet leads. But when it comes to direct mail agents don't ever once they start using it and they see results from it. They hardly ever turn that off just because why wouldn't you turn something off that is producing good results and it's tracked and measured. And one thing I do want to mention is because a lot of insurance agents that will be watching this video, they do have other businesses. They might be a real estate agent, loan officer, they might be a house flipper, they might have a tax or accounting firm that you could help with that as well, right? Yeah, we've worked with over 300 different industries. So insurance isn't definitely the only one. So if you're looking for any other type of marketing, really any business can qualify and we can work with them. Yeah, awesome. Cool. Thanks so much for helping this call Samantha and for everyone who's watching this video. If you have additional questions that you would like to ask about this entire process or anything that we've covered, make sure you follow the link right below this video and you'll go to Postcard Mania's website. You can reach out to them, talk to one of the consultants and they do a really good job with making the whole process very seamless and easy for you to get started. So again, thanks so much, Samantha. We'll talk again soon.