How Can Insurance Providers Leverage Direct Mail Marketing?

With almost every business in the world using digital marketing, it’s getting difficult for small business owners to get the amount of attention they demand. Plus, most people today opt for ad blocks on their devices so they can totally forbid marketers to show them ads of any kind.

With all of this going on, can you see your brand reaching new people and making any great connections with your prospects?

We don’t.

It’s hard to even connect with your audience in such conditions, let alone get them to invest in the insurances you’re selling.

Fortunately, there’s a way out. Direct mail marketing. And today we’ll uncover how exactly it can help you to increase your conversation rate and quality of leads.

Let’s dive right in.

Insurance mailing is a cost-effective advertising method with high response rates and ROI. It helps you acquire qualified leads and connect with your target audience. 

Direct mail generates a 29% ROI. You can get even better outcomes by combining print and digital marketing strategies. Luckily, PostGrid’s API integrations let you do that!

A result-driven insurance agency sends highly personalized, well-designed mailers to improve outreach and tap into maximum markets. It lets customers stay updated about the company’s new benefits and coverage conveniently while boosting sales.

Direct mailing is a competent and impressive marketing tool for an insurance provider. It is worth investing in to foster prospect conversions via high responses and increased visibility.

Interact with highly responsive prospective clients who need your insurance services using PostGrid’s direct mail services.

Insurance agents and firms must use effective direct mail strategies to maintain steady communications with current clients and acquire new leads. 

New customers help spread visibility and expand your service areas. But existing clients get you the most business. The best part is direct mail offers many solutions to suit all insurance offers. Hence, you can use it for both scenarios!

This tangible marketing lets you target specific leads based on your client demographics or cover entire neighborhoods with personalized insurance postcards. You can also use an insurance letter to reach and educate your audience.

PostGrid’s turnkey direct mail solutions allow you to manage everything from design to printing and distribution. It doesn’t matter whether you provide property, auto, or Medicare supplement insurance—we serve the entire insurance industry. 

Don’t let in-house mailings waste your time and money. Contact us to plan and launch your campaigns at affordable rates, facilitating client communication and sales for your company!

PostGrid’s direct mail automation solutions offer many advantages, like

• Guaranteed low costs: Benefit from fast turnaround times and discounted rates for insurance postage, print, and mail services. You can send your offline marketing materials at the lowest prices nationwide using PostGrid. We can pass down our savings to you since we work with many shippers and commercial printers.

Ship direct mail postcards, letters, flyers, and other printed items and get high-quality leads at unbelievable rates.

• HIPAA compliance: PostGrid complies with HIPAA, PIPEDA, and SOC-2, ensuring every mail piece your company sends preserves your clients’ data and privacy. You don’t need to worry about paying penalties or undergoing other legal actions by associating with a direct mail provider. Our solutions offer impeccable security, letting you print and ship your items hassle-free.
• Best printing and mailing fulfillment services: PostGrid eliminates the hassle of contacting a printing vendor, mailing list broker, direct mailing company, and designer to plan your insurance promotional campaigns. 

We can help you launch the entire program from start to finish. You can turn your ordinary mailings into extraordinary ones by incorporating variable data printing, customization, high-quality graphics, and more!

• Custom mailing lists: Our cost-effective insurance mailing lists help you identify and reach your ideal prospective clients. You can target entire ZIP codes and localities or reach specific households based on their life stages and needs. We offer custom lists, like mortgage, new homeowners, business, consumer, and health ailment lists. 

You can customize these records to connect with your client lookalikes. Also, you can compile lists based on the city, state, and radius or demographics, like annual income, age, and profession. 

Though some companies prefer Every Door Direct Mail (EDDM), you can only personalize your mailings and target the right people using custom mailing lists.

• No minimum mailing limits: We print and ship insurance mailers regardless of volume. Hence, you can send as little as one item. But bulk mailing allows you to get massive per-piece postage discounts. Depending on your campaign’s goals and budget, you can mail on-demand or at scale. 
• Mail whenever you want: When sending your mailers via PostGrid, you can decide when to launch your campaigns. Our 2-business day SLA allows you to prepare and print mailers online without worries quickly. Also, you can schedule your mailings beforehand.

You don’t always have to remember dates and place your orders accordingly. Moreover, our triggered mail feature lets you ship insurance mailers at the correct time—when your prospective customer is active, they sign up or inquire about your services.

PostGrid’s direct mail solutions for the insurance industry open endless opportunities for you! 

You can conduct a referral campaign for your current customers, promote new services, or cross-sell your insurance product. Your goals + our legwork = great results!

Here’s what one of our clients shared:

“We always have a positive experience working with PostGrid. Its API is amazing. We can send documents, letters, and marketing collateral to anyone anywhere as it simplifies the process for our team.”

Flyers

Flyers are an excellent direct mail format for recipients to pick up their phones and call you. They work well when you want to send timely offers to your prospective customers or discuss something about your brand. 

You can add limited-time, unique, or exclusive offers to grab your audience’s attention and motivate them to respond. Please pair them with an upfront CTA, guiding recipients on the next steps. You can ask them to visit your website, download an ebook, book a consultation, or follow your social media pages. 

The offers and CTAs you include in your mailers should depend on the marketing funnel your prospective clients are in. For example, people at the top of the funnel need more details about your brand since they don’t know much. They need more time and resources to trust you. But prospects at the bottom require personalized offers and timely follow-ups to close the deal.  

Business Reply Mailers

Attaching a postage-paid mailer to your insurance letter or envelope enables the recipient to respond. All they have to do is insert their response into the envelope and drop it in a mailbox. 

They don’t need to pay for the shipping or write your address on the envelope. Since you already complete these tasks beforehand, it motivates the recipient to reply. 

• Direct mailing is more budget-friendly than you think! You can customize your campaigns to spend as much or as little as you need. Yet, it can produce faster results than other advertising methods. Use PostGrid’s direct mail services to send mail to people likely interested in your services instead of taking a blanket approach. It helps you get an ROI and more qualified leads, justifying your pay. 
• Sending direct mail allows you to show clients you care about them. You can make them feel special and establish long-term connections, helping retain them. These features make direct mail one of the best-performing marketing channels. It focuses on quick results and allows you to create something positive for a long time.
• You can use laser-focused personalization to connect your audience with everything they need. Are they looking for mortgage protection? Add it to your letters or flyers. Do they need better customer service? Highlight this benefit in your upcoming campaign. Our API integrations help you pull data from your CRM and use it to personalize your mailers better. 
• Direct mail is one of the most trustworthy marketing tools for insurance providers. They can leverage its tangibility to showcase their brand as authentic and reliable. You can offer clients something they can touch, see, and interact with, like a folded self-mailer.  

Utilize Customer Testimonials to Gain Your Audience’s Trust: Many trust brands that produce client reviews and real-life use cases. They relate to the stories that push them to take action. Most choose recommended brands from their close ones instead of using the services of companies they don’t know about!

Adding client testimonials to your insurance direct mail becomes a deciding factor for your prospects. Seeing other people be loyal customers of your brand for years makes them confident in your services. It gives them the little nudge they need to contact you. 

Prove Your Work’s Worth With Numbers: People always attribute religious and emotional significance to numbers, making them an essential factor in promotional campaigns.

Combining numbers with words in your mail headlines is more catchy and appealing. Also, the human mind registers them more quickly, boosting your response rates. 

You can mention

• How much money do recipients save by associating with your brand?
• What are your premium rates?
• What are your starting monthly premium prices?

Be creative and educate your potential customers about your services with numbers. It ensures you get better engagement rates and drive more revenue. 

Offer Lucrative Discounts: People might try out new products or services at low prices. They want to pay less and accept low risk than bear the total costs. Thus, you can induce sales by offering custom discounts to new and current customers to get maximum responses.

Also, differentiate these leads to provide unique discounts to each:

• Appointment leads.
• Information request leads.
• Seminar leads.
• Medicare leads.
• Annuity leads.
• Mortgage protection leads.
• Funeral home or pre-need leads.

Curate Action-Oriented and Concise Copy: A well-thought copy lets you communicate your organization’s value proposition and appeals to your audience’s senses. 

Please ensure your opening messages resonate with readers and hook them from the start. Try explaining why they should give your brand a chance and encourage them to take action.

Pinpoint Your Targeted Audience: It is best to narrow down your intended audience and customize all messages instead of being inclusive with your copy. Try to avoid over-generalizing your mail by using the one-size-fits-all approach.

Have an upfront picture of what your ideal customer looks like. Are they between the ages of 25 and 45? Do they prefer low premium rates and high customer service? What type of insurance products do they want to learn about?

Jot down the answers to these questions and frame your copy accordingly to send to your ideal buyers.

Combine Your Marketing Channels: You can conduct omnichannel print and email campaigns to reach more people and improve visibility. Also, USPS lets you combine your marketing mailers with Informed Delivery. 

Hence, Informed Delivery users can view your brand’s name, CTA, offer, and contact information on their devices while your mail is on its way to them.

So digital marketing is not is the only obstacle in your way. Being an insurance company, you’re only offering life insurance, business insurance, property and casualty, long-term care, auto insurance, health insurance, and much more.

Considering this reason, your target audience is comparatively less than others. Hence, you need to stand out from the crowd and direct mail service is a great way to do just that.

Here are a few more challenges that you might face being in the insurance industry.

Competition

With rapid growth, the industry is attracting competition at a considerable rate. Every country currently has thousands of insurance industries. The market is loaded and the competition is tough. Hence, you must try methods that can keep you ahead of the competition. A few things that you can do are improve your inbound approach, understand your audience’s needs the better way, spend on solving your prospect’s problems through content, build trust, and build a reputation for your brand.

Shifting demographics

To send direct mails precisely to the right audience, you need to understand their demographic details the best way. However, these details keep on changing, for instance, their age, financial status, family status, etc.

Hence, your database should always be updated so you can target the right person at the right time. For instance, there should be a system in place to send an automatic message about your life insurance policy to someone you targeted years ago, and who has now turned 40.

Cost-conscious customers

Before you start investing a good amount in your personalized marketing, you need to weed out the cost-conscious customers. But before you do that you need to understand, whether they’re really cost-conscious or they have limited knowledge about your industry.

You can send them educational mailers in this case.

Customer experience

You also need to improve the customer experience to make sure you keep getting repeat business. Or probably just to keep most of the customers hooked with your services.

You can also send your prospects or existing customers postcards on various occasions to keep on reminding them about your brand.

Proper communication

One of the most important parts of successful marketing is proper communication. And most companies send generic marketing messages to their audience just for sake of getting more leads. With improper communication and bond-building, it’s hard to attract quality leads.

Also Read: Insurance Document Automation

Direct Mail Marketing for Insurance Agents: Best Practices

Insurance direct mail marketing can be very effective when executed carefully and correctly. Also, this type of marketing comes with some specific considerations that require you to evaluate and follow at the same time.

Direct mail is crucial for insurance companies because they assist and provide you with an outline of the essentials to get the desired response from your customers. Here are a few tips that you must follow when launching a direct mail campaign for your insurance company:

Right, Messaging is the Key: Insurance direct mail marketing needs to be centered on a clear message while focusing on what your customers will gain through it. A higher level of customer satisfaction may come from potential savings on a new or current policy, a higher quality of service, or smooth and faster claims procedures.

Cross Channel Marketing Opportunities: A cross-channel marketing opportunity is an effective and innovative way to create direct mail for insurance companies. You can also include a QR code or Personalized URL on your direct mail item. It will take your customers directly to your website through your mail piece in a few seconds.

Provides you with Flexibility: Observe what your competitors are doing in the market and how they approach the customers. By doing so, you can avail benefit from a bulk mail size offered by PostGrid in this regard. Additionally, it also lets you control your direct mail volume and produce mail pieces at your convenience.

 Also Read: Insurance Marketing Letters for Insurance Agents

Direct Mail Marketing in Insurance Sector

Insurance agencies run on trust. If your prospects won’t trust you, they’re highly unlikely to buy from you.

But everything goes step by step. To build trust with your audience, you need to make good connections with them. And no generic ad is going to do that for you. You’ll need to send personalize your interactions with them.

At this point, you must be thinking it’s next to impossible to go and interact with each of your prospects in person. Well, don’t worry. That’s not what it is. Just personalize the message interacting with your customers on your behalf, and do it in the form of tangible direct mails.

The major reason behind it is that direct mails have a great open rate. And no matter, how personalized your message is, if your readers won’t read it, it’s futile.

So get them to read your message with direct mails and personalize each of your communication with it.

Additionally, most businesses just opt for digital marketing as it’s easier to carry out and cheaper than direct mail marketing. However, it can give you an advantage over the competition. With direct mails, you can interact with the audience better than the competitive insurance firms.

So communications will get better. Bonds will strengthen between you and your clients. You can even outperform the competition with direct mails.

But here’s the catch, to get it right, you’ll need to do it right.

Insurance Direct Mailer Leads

You must have had heard a lot about targetting the right leads, doing your research on the audience, and then keeping on filtering it. Well, when you’re in the insurance industry, they all work, but you should also know about the types of leads available in the market. How you should target them. And why should you or shouldn’t you avoid some of them.

So here it goes,

Best Quality leads

The best type of leads available to you is the ones genuinely interested in your offer. And to weed out the freeloaders or the bad quality of lead, you must specify exactly what they should expect or what are they getting into.

For instance, you clearly mention the word, “life insurance” in your direct mail copy. It’ll surely reduce the number of responses you’ll get, but the quality of responses will increase tremendously.

Only the people actually looking for life insurance will write back to you.

Generic Leads

The next type of leads to target are the generic leads. The quality of this one is not as top-notch as the previous one, but it has its own benefits.

This is the one where you don’t specify life insurance in your copy. Instead, you use some generic text to convey your message, show them the benefit of life insurance, and get them to your website.

Sometimes, you may get responses from people who may not want to invest in life insurance at first. But gradually, if your follow-up game is good, you can read what they want to say without them actually saying it, aka psychological understanding. And your sales team is just perfect at converting.

Then, you may not know but you can drive a crazy amount of customers from this type of list.

The Bribe Leads

These are the least liked ones among all. As the name suggests, it may attract freeloaders. But most insurance marketing companies have gained great value out of it.

You can also try offering something in return for some useful client details. And depending on your method and copy, you may succeed.

Direct Mail Lead Vendor

Yes, there are direct mail vendors selling your leads. To get an idea, you can expect to invest $30-$35 per lead if you opt to go for this way of getting leads.

Also Read: Insurance Agent Marketing

Reasons to Opt for Direct Mail Options For Insurance Agents

Below are a few reasons why you should consider using direct mail when marketing your insurance-related services or products:

It helps You to Personalize Your Marketing:

Yes, that’s true! Personalizing direct mail for insurance agents is the easiest task you can go for. Also, as per our experts at PostGrid, personalization is not just about using the same template while changing the recipient’s name. Such minimal personalization is the least you can do.

You can connect an automated direct mail system to your CRM to accomplish this. However, for more effective personalization, you should consider pitching unique types of insurance based on your target audience.

With the right developer and an advanced direct mail automation tool like PostGrid, you can send personalized offers to your target audience.

Direct Mail Let You Target Specific Types Of Leads:

Every insurance direct mail marketing campaign has its own unique goals. The individual goals you set for your insurance direct mail campaign will help you target your mailers to collect specific types of leads.

So, when opting for direct mail marketing, you have to analyze each of these leads and decide on the one you want for your campaign. Focusing on a specific lead type enables you to create a more appealing mailer for your target audience.

As a result, you get higher response and conversion rates for your direct mail marketing campaigns.

Serves as a Factor In Branding:

The purpose of insurance direct mail marketing is not always about selling new insurance policies, but it also helps target the right audience. You can use your insurance direct mailers as a part of your branding strategy, even if that is not your mailer’s primary goal.

With a proper branding strategy, you can boost brand awareness. Suppose your target audience is not thinking about taking an insurance policy at the moment. In that case, your insurance brand will be the first that comes to the target audience’s mind.

You can Get Creative With Your Direct Mail Campaigns

Using direct mail as your communication channel effectively ensures that your marketing effort gets noticed. However, to get the best results for your direct mail campaigns, you need to put on your thinking hat and develop new creative ideas.

Creative ideas for your insurance direct mail marketing campaigns are not just limited to a catchy title or attention-grabbing images. An easy way to make your insurance direct mailers is to use portrait-aligned postcards or 3-D popup mailers. However, these are merely examples of creative postal mail ideas.

You can develop unique direct mail strategies that are entirely different from the ones we discussed here.

You Get an Automated Direct Mail Response:

Another aspect of direct mail for insurance agencies is that it helps you get automated direct mail responses. In addition to this, the best thing about automated responses is that you don’t have to do any work. You can use PostGrid to generate a personalized response and mail it to the customer.

One of the best scenarios to set up an automated direct mail response is sending personalized thank you notes. Every time a target audience buys a policy from your insurance business, you can send a thank you note or a postcard to them.

Such gestures create a positive impression on the customers and show them that you value them. Similarly, you can also send birthday cards or event invitations through advanced systems like PostGrid.

Ensures High-Quality Mailing Lists:

Your insurance direct mail marketing is only as good as the quality of your mailing list. It does not matter how many mailers you send out if it does not reach the right audience. Direct Mail helps you with two aspects to ensuring the quality of your mailing list.

The first aspect ensures that the people you are sending the insurance mailers are genuinely interested in the services you offer. However, it has more to do with targeting than the quality of the mailing list. The second aspect involves maintaining the target audience’s accurate and up-to-date contact information.

The best way to ensure a high-quality mailing list is to use an advanced address verification tool like PostGrid. Access to the official address database enables you to send accurate direct mail communications.

Direct Mail Tips For Insurance Agencies

As a direct mail automation provider, PostGrid understands the formula of an efficient direct mailing program. So, when you automate development and mail delivery routines using the tool, the creative and strategic aspects are still your thing to go for. Keeping this in mind, below are a few practical tips on automated direct mail marketing for insurance agents:

Follow & Track the Current Trends: Consider the current trends and statistics before creating direct mail for insurance companies. Two years ago, direct-mail advertising or marketing insurers sent more than 7 billion pieces of mail. Here, instead of relying on a single piece of mail to make an impact, you can use the current trends to determine the best marketing methods.

Add Relevant CTAs: As an Insurance company, you must add CTA to grab your customer’s attention. Wouldn’t it be great if you attached one of your business cards along with instant access quotes and your contact information? It will enable you to stand out from a full mailbox, and you will have a better response rate and return on investment.

Use Unique Themes: It is a good idea to go for when running a direct mail campaign. A beautiful or well-designed direct mail marketing theme can motivate your customers to take a specific action. You can provide discounts, QR codes, and a lot more to make your direct mail campaign more effective and authentic.

As a result of the theme, you get better recognition for all the products in your company. If you send out several mailings, recipients will know that it is from you. In addition to providing a consistent look and feel across the series, themes can also boost the response rate exponentially after each mailing.

Add Value Than Mere Words: To optimize direct mail campaigns, you will need to ensure that you deliver value instead of fluffy words. Remember, your customers receive a lot of mail pieces each day, so you will need to stand out. The benefits that your products and services providers must be listed as deliverables. Also, adding all the discounts, freebies, and offers will make it more appealing. To make your product stand out from the competition and deliver real value, you need to provide your customers with something unique.

Real-time Tracking: Direct marketing campaigns must be evaluated and tracked if you hope to succeed. Monitoring digital campaigns is easier than analyzing direct ones because they are automated. However, it will be a game-changer for your business if you track customer response and evaluate relevant metrics. You can add various aspects to track the customer response in real time. As mentioned above, customers can access your website using QR codes in the mail. From there, you can send promotions and other relevant messages to them.

Creating & Refining Your Mailing List: The ability of direct mail marketing to generate quality leads separates it from the other marketing tools. To generate quality leads, make sure your mailing list is unique, refined, and well-curated. Target your messages only to prospective customers.

As we know, direct mail is different from sending an Email. Also, emails can be sent for free. However, the cost of reaching your target audience through insurance direct mail marketing is high. You should therefore prioritize your list of prospects accordingly. Try to communicate only with your most promising prospects or existing customers. It is essential to envision your ideal buyer in your mind as this will enable you to build quality leads.

Running Successful Insurance Direct Mail Marketing Campaigns

You can send direct mail through the postal service to encourage people to contact you if they are interested in insurance. The process of creating a campaign may seem simple, but there is more to it. For example, you must write the copy, create the design, assemble and segment a mailing list, print the mailer, and mail it.

Thanks to automation tools like PostGrid, you can handle and manage the entire process from start to finish. With this tool, you can run a campaign at an affordable price while tracking the progress in just a few clicks. From saving time to saving money, PostGrid is the one-stop shop for running successful direct mail marketing campaigns for insurance sectors without compromising on quality.

Benefits of Using Direct Mail Marketing for Insurance Agents

Now that you know all about running a successful direct mail campaign for your insurance company. Let us now talk about a few of its benefits, they are:

• Direct mail assets are more personalized than ads or website content because they are addressed to specific individuals.
• You can directly support your online marketing efforts by including the address of your website or social media information. Using demographic information, you can target consumers who are most likely to buy your product or insurance-related services.
• As we keep saying that your customers receive hundreds of emails every day. Therefore, sending a physical promotional item makes your message more memorable and makes your customers feel special.

Some Basic Considerations For Insurance Direct Mail Marketing

• Many customers might consider mailers as spam. So, it can be hard to keep interested and prevent it from ending up in the bin.
• There is limited space for adding information in mailers.
• In direct mail, tracking and optimizing the customer experience is a more difficult task than online lead generation.
• The cost of running a direct mail campaign is high, and lead vendors often report response rates of 1 to 2% in terms of insurance direct mail marketing. According to a study, the cost per response for direct mail prospects is a little higher than a generic email, online ads, and more.

Why Direct Mail Automation for Insurance Industry?

In addition to your everyday insurance business activities, managing multiple direct mail campaigns can be challenging if you do not know where to start. Direct mail campaigns are generally run by automation tools like PostGrid. But, you will be responsible for managing the leads once they arrive.

As soon as you receive a response, enter it into a CRM. Send automated direct mail pieces to your leads with product information or set up a recurring reminder to call your leads. In the same way, collect the results of your online lead magnets into your CRM. using tools like PostGrid.

Follow up with your direct mail marketing respondents by calling, emailing, and following up with them to begin to build that all-important relationship. PostGrid helps you simplify the process by providing everything in one place. You can use the pre-designed template, customize your mailing list, and run the campaign according to your business-related requirements.

Many people like physical mail because they enjoy the experience. They like receiving mail in their mailboxes or picking it up from their porches. It makes them feel nostalgic, helping the sender create personal connections with them.

Thus, direct mail is still ahead of the game compared to digital marketing.

However, noting the insurance direct mailing cost is essential before planning a campaign. Try creating a budget before diving into the creative processes, like choosing the format and drafting a copy.

Direct mailers can cost you $0.30 to $10 per person. Also, consider how much time and effort your staff must put in to create and run your campaign in-house.

The cost per piece depends on many factors, like

• Mail format (like postcard, flyer, or letter).
• Campaign size.
• Design and color choice.
• Copywriting.
• Paper stock (standard or cardstock).
• Postage.

Please avoid sending the blandest and cheapest mailers to save money because it can negatively impact recipients. Instead, switch to automated direct mailing solutions to send high-quality mail to impress your audience at the most affordable rates. 

PostGrid’s direct mail automation solutions can help insurance providers cope with various marketing challenges and advertise effectively. They can use our platform or API to automate their direct mail campaigns and reduce the overall time, effort, and resources needed to plan a direct mail marketing campaign.

PostGrid provides all the direct mail solutions mentioned above and assists insurers in every step of their marketing efforts. Insurance companies can benefit from our smart automation solutions that can help them customize and personalize their direct mails, include compelling offers, print them, mail them, and track the results easily—together on one unified platform.