Annuity Leads

An annuity marketing firm will help in selling annuities to investors. There are innumerable firms across the country who help insurance companies and their agents to sell annuities. These wholesalers or distributors are referred to as independent marketing organizations or field marketing organizations or master general agents. Let us find out what are the annuity marketing tools and methodologies that are used.

The first step in annuity marketing is to target the database that lies with the company or acquire a database of potential annuity buyers. Insurance companies and their agents use software applications that segregate this database based upon various parameters. Some of these parameters can be the age of the person, sex, annual income and whether the individual already has an annuity with the company. After the first filtering down of data, the sales agents of the company start speaking to the prospects explaining the various products that may suit their financial requirements.
 
The annuity agents spend more time with prospects who show a first level interest in any product offered by the company. Once the first level of telephonic conversations is done, the agents go and visit the prospects in person. In this meeting they make a powerful pitch of the various annuity products offered and suggest a few which may actually benefit the customer’s financial planning goals.  Once the prospect is convinced that a particular annuity product suits their requirement they may choose to buy the product. In a no-sale scenario, the sales agent will drip on the prospect with an annuity newsletter, thereby keeping the relationship warm and connect back with the prospect after few months to a year. As we know the financial requirement of an individual changes over time. So a product which may not be relevant today can have relevance for the individual after a year. But if the agent does not keep in touch, if their annuity marketing does not include dripping, they have foolishly lost the value of the initial contact.

Marketing and sales are two different processes. In marketing annuity sellers try to attract the client’s to buy their products while in the sales process the annuity seller will typically try to hard sell a product to a prospect. For marketing annuity products companies adopt different mechanisms such as media, print and Internet advertising and offer seminar support to agents.  Few other approaches are publishing letters and press releases.

Flyers and inserts in newspapers are another good mechanism to publicize an annuity product or seminar. We may have seen college students distributing flyers at busy malls announcing the launch of an annuity product from any of the leading insurers. Information booklets also serve as a great tool to disseminate information about annuity products to prospects. These annuity marketing offers can be offered via newspaper ads (local senior publications are quite cost effective), direct mail or an internet based annuity lead system. These annuity booklets can contain valuable information on how to plan ones financial future or how to secure your financial requirements after retirement. There is no one marketing tool which can be perfect. Companies and agents use one tool or a combination of marketing tools which they feel will be the most effective to achieve their business goals.

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The generation of leads in the search to sell annuities is a vital tool in the overall sales technique, as the more leads that are generated and the higher the quality, the more possibilities of closing that lead and creating a sale.

The problem for many annuity agents is that they look too deeply at the apparent ‘miracle sales techniques’ and ‘guaranteed leads’ that are often offered on Internet advertisements, and find in time that these are not what they seem; there is no miracle answer to generating annuity leads, just the overall ability of the individual selling the annuities to do the job.

Think of the business of selling annuities as hitting many singles.  Don’t worry about the home runs.  If you are always at bat, you will get your share of home runs.  The key is to always be at bat, contact annuity prospects every day.

There are a number of proven and popular methods of helping to generate leads that are used by sellers in the market, and these take into account the individuality of each separate potential client – let’s take a look at a few of the more successful aids to annuity lead generation.

Looking for annuity lead generation providers

The Internet is a booming business tool, and even in the field of generating annuity leads there are a number of organizations in the net that specialise in this area. Be aware that most form that generate leads are field marketing organizations (FMO) that require you to write your annuity business with them.  They offer you free leads.  But is the lead free?  If you sell a $100,000 annuity and the FMO that gave you free leads also paid you 1% less in commission than you could have received from another FMO, you may be paying plenty of their annuity leads.  Then there are lead providers that don’t distribute any product.  They are simply experts at generating leads for sale.

Try web search, and look in particular at telemarketing outfits that offer a dedicated lead generation service. These people are professionals and know what they are doing – they don’t offer a miracle but a tried and tested method of attracting leads, of reaching the potential client that you need to find. Using easy to use message retrieving systems, these companies have a proven record in the field – read the testimonials, and look for names that are well known in the market.

For example, one firm uses an auto dialer to all consumers and play a message.  If the consumer had interest in the message, the consumer presses ’1″ and is connected to your phone. While at first this may seem like a dream come true, consider that calls are only placed to people that have not placed themselves on the “do not call” list.  These may be lower quality investors with less money. So make sure you understand the nature of how the leads are generated and how that impacts the quality of the annuity lead.

Consider a direct mail campaign

Direct mail has come a long way from the ‘junk mail’ days of old, and with today’s sophisticated direct mail techniques it is worth considering a direct mail campaign to help generate annuity leads.

Direct mail works by making sure the mail shot goes to potentially interested parties, and not just to addresses at random, and thus enhances the success rate of any campaign. For example, if you mail an offer to people age 60+, that own homes with a household income over $50,000, you are targeting the sweet spot of fixed annuity buyers.With companies out there that focus on direct mail, you can find a supplier who will take on an entire project, designing and writing the mail shot and sending it out to a select list of clients of whom some are almost certain to respond. Each response is a lead, and each lead a potential sale.

If you don’t want to go the full route as above, you can by lists of potential clients from companies that generate and supply such things, and devise and operate your own direct mail campaign. In general, the professionals are adept at the technique, and can provide a cost effective and potentially lucrative annuity lead generation service.

These are just a couple of the many options for marketing yourself, and for generating leads a result. There are no hard and fast rules here, no right or wrong, and trial and error, along with a well planned campaign on the lines of the above, can prove a very good method of generating annuity leads.

Post provided by Javelin Marketing

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Selling of annuity products is done either by the direct representatives of insurance companies or by agents who sell annuities on behalf of the insurance companies. Generating leads is the most important aspect of annuities. So let us now find how annuity lead generation is done. There are various ways of how it is done.

Annuity lead generation is done by cross selling and up-selling annuity products to existing clients. If an insurance company has a client of life insurance products, an agent would definitely call up the customer for selling an annuity product. Now, the lead generation or prospecting of a customer is done after considering many different factors. These may be the age of the person, sex and other factors such as investment appetite. Once the customers are segmented various products which are created for specific groups are pitched to them. Once a customer shows interest in any product, sales agent visit the customer and explains the various features of the product.

Another method of lead generation is making calls from a random database. These databases are created from various resources such as telephone directories and yellow pages. However many insurance companies prefer not to use this method because customers may sue companies if they make unsolicited sales calls to customers. In many telecom company’s database’s customers who do not want to be called have registered their names in the “do not call” registry. Calling up these customers can be legally challenged. There are many other innovative methods that are used by insurance companies to generate leads.

When we receive our credit card statements many a times we see flyers which advertise annuity products. This is one of the potent methods of advertising which can create the pull for an annuity product. Customers who are interested in a particular product call up the company’s toll-free number or drops an e-mail which is responded by a customer service executive of the company. These leads are stored in a database and followed up by the sales agents. Other ways of generating leads is by conducting events.  During such events, there are many prospects who show interest in a product and these leads are captured by the company. After the event ends, the sales agents start calling up the customers with sales calls.

No one technique of lead generation can be perfect. An insurance company will adopt a multi pronged strategy in their marketing and sales effort. A multi pronged strategy will help the company to get better results. It needs to be understood that not all leads can be converted to actual sales. Therefore insurance companies stress on maximizing the lead generation process which will help them to get a broader clientele.
Competition in the annuity market is driving companies to adopt newer strategies which will help to increase their revenues.  And agents are getting more aggressive resulting in the SEC wanting to take over control of regulating EIA sales.  But a sound annuity lead generation effort eliminates the need to be overly aggressive or bend ethics to make sales.

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