The Annuity Lead

Direct mail is a great way to get your message in front of targeted annuity prospects.  It gives you the chance to be creative with your message, is relatively inexpensive to implement and will help you separate the wheat from the chaff when it comes to identifying potential annuity clients.  In fact, many annuity agents say direct mail is their best source for qualified annuity leads.  But you need to spend your time talking to prospects, networking and closing the sale – you don’t have time to create and run a direct mail campaign!  Instead of trying to do everything at once, consider outsourcing the production of your direct mail pieces. 

The following are some tips for outsourcing your annuity marketing direct mail campaign.

• Determine your approach.

You can find companies that handle the campaign from beginning to end.  This includes the creation of the pieces, strategy and the mailing.  However, some of these companies can be expensive and may be out of your budget.  If you feel the expense is worth it, ask your fellow agents for referrals to companies they’ve worked with.  Check the company’s other references, not just by what they say but by calling each contact and talking to them yourself.

• You can outsource each step of the direct mail campaign.

If a full-scale media production house is out of your budget, you can outsource the separate steps in the process to save money.  Typically, you need to find a professional who can do great graphics, and one who can write good copy.  Some professionals will offer to do both, but it’s often better to find one person for each element of the piece.  Be sure to outsource the copy first so that you can forward the finished text to your graphic designer.

But where do you find these professionals?  You can check you local yellow pages for advertising agencies, or you can look online using services like www.guru.com or www.elance.com.  These websites feature freelance professionals who will bid on your job, often charging less than the professionals you can find offline.  And with the power of the Internet, you may be in Texas and work with someone in California!

• Once your direct mail piece is completed, you can either mail it yourself or outsource this step as well.

If you already have a list of annuity leads, you can save yourself money by mailing the direct mail piece yourself.  First, you’ll need to have it printed, and there are a number of different discount printers online who can do this for a few hundred dollars or less.  Once you’ve received your printed pieces, you can sit down and spend an afternoon labeling, stamping and mailing out your direct mail campaign.

If you don’t yet have an annuity lead list, you can contract with a company that will not only mail the piece for you, but will send it to a list of qualified leads.  You can get a list and the piece mailed for one price!  This is a great way to get leads and send out your direct mail piece quickly and efficiently.

In addition, there are two things you should remember when outsourcing any component of your annuity marketing direct mail campaign.

1. Make sure you have everything in writing.  Most freelancers sign contracts that state they are independent contractors. These contracts protect you and them, by laying out every detail of the project timeline and deliverables so that there’s no misunderstanding during the process.  You can find one online, but if you can’t, ask your attorney to draft one for you.

2. Give the company/freelancers clear instructions.  Nothing is as frustrating as requesting a job and not having it done right.  Be responsive to their questions and communicate as clearly as possible.  If you aren’t as clear as possible with your instructions, it’s likely that the job won’t be done right!

Bookmark It

People are so used to junk mail that they’re often disappointed when their mailbox is empty!  As much as they like to complain, everyone wants to have something in their mailbox when they get home at the end of the day.  As an annuity agent, you may have heard that direct mail campaigns are a great way to reach potential clients and good for annuity marketing.  Of course, as with any advertising medium, direct mail has its pros and cons.  However, many annuities agents have found that this annuity lead generating method offers some of the best return on investment for your money.  The following are some of the advantages of annuity direct mail campaigns:

1. You can target your advertising. Annuity agents get their leads from various sources – for example, you can target all new home buyers in your area with a direct mail piece that emphasizes annuities with guaranteed payments as a way to ensure they’ll always be able to make their mortgage payments, even if they’re unable to work. You can also target a certain income, age or area, depending on the type of annuity leads you desire.

2. Annuity direct mail campaigns are easy to measure.  Finding out how many people saw an ad in the newspaper or on television is nearly impossible to measure, but studies show that most people will look at a direct mail piece, even if they later throw it away.  Even this single look-through is enough to fix the image is in their minds.  In addition, you can measure response of the piece by including a coupon or an offer for a free gift if they make an appointment with you.  In general, the response rate for direct mail is about one percent – not bad for most forms of advertising and a staple of annuity marketing.

3. You can be creative with direct mail.  You can incorporate colorful, eye-catching graphics into your piece, or send it in an envelope to stand out from the many direct mail postcards floating around out there.  You can put together an educational newsletter that offers prospects quality information in addition to your annuity sales message.  Best of all, you can incorporate different messages into each piece, and send them sequentially as part of a targeted drip marketing campaign.

4. While annuity direct mail may seem expensive up front, it’s relatively high return on investment means that the cost is actually low compared to other forms of advertising, like TV or radio ads.

When planning direct mail for your annuity marketing campaign, you should consider several factors:

• It’s always best to use a professional copywriter and/or graphic designer to create your direct mail pieces.  You want to put your best foot forward, so include their fees in your direct mail budget.

• Make sure your message is clear on your direct mail piece.  Many people don’t understand what annuities are, and because you’re licensed to sell insurance, they may think of an annuity as life insurance.  Be very specific about your product’s benefits.  A jazzy piece will do you no good if you’re getting calls from people who want something other than what you offer.

• Save money by using bulk mail. All you need to do to take advantage of these discounted rates is get a free permit from the post office that allows you to use bulk rates.

• Consider using a dip annuity marketing campaign, where you send targeted direct mail pieces during certain intervals.  For example, you might send out different pieces at an interval of one month each.  Each piece should look different and should focus on a different aspect of your sales message.  Because most consumers have to see a message seven to ten times before they actually make a decision, this will keep your name in front of potential customers until they’re ready to buy.

Bookmark It

Despite the growing number of people who are using the Internet for everything from information gathering to buying everyday items, most annuity agents tend to grumble and grown about how putting together and maintaining an annuity website is a waste of time and effort.  And to some degree, it’s true – if you put up a bare-bones annuity website with just your picture and contact information, you aren’t likely to see big returns.  However, there are a number of things you can do to turn your website into a powerful selling tool that will bring in new prospects with little effort on your part.

• Help the search engines find you

When a person goes to Yahoo.com or Google.com and types in “financial advisor + your area”, you want your website to be one of the first that comes up in the search engine results.  To determine which results to pull, the search engines scan web sites to see which words appear most frequently on the site.  They record this information so that when a user searches for a specific term like “financial advisor”, they know to display the sites that have the most relevant content.

To help the search engines recognize your annuity website and pull it up for relevant searches, include your name and business address several times on the site, as well as informative content about the annuity products you sell.  Also, be sure that this information is included in text on your site – if your site uses text that’s embedded in graphics or fancy flash introductions, the search engines won’t be able to read it.

• Utilize customer follow-up tools

When a customer comes to your annuity website, they have three options – they can leave without contacting you, bookmark your site to revisit later, or contact you immediately.  You can dramatically increase the number of people who contact you by collecting a customer’s name and email address (or more personal information if you prefer).  Typically, you’ll need to offer something free to persuade a customer to part with their information, like a free report on annuities or discounts on future services.

Most people who collect visitor’s email addresses use an email marketing program like Constant Contact.com or Aweber.com to create follow up messages.  These program are easy to use, and usually only involve adding a small snippet of code to your annuity web site.  Once a customer submits their email address, it is stored in the program, which you can then use to send out follow-up messages, promotions, or newsletters about your services.

• Pay for traffic to your site

If you aren’t getting enough traffic from the search engines to make your annuity website a valuable tool, consider pay-per-click advertising to boost your results.  All of the major search engines offer programs that allow you to pay to have your website appear in the sponsored link sections that appear when a person searches for a specific term.  The major benefits of pay-per-click advertising is that you’ll only pay when a user clicks on your ad, unlike traditional magazine and radio ads that charge regardless of who sees your ad.

Many annuity agents have grown their empires using the traffic that comes to their annuity websites.  But if this all sounds like too much work for you, consider outsourcing your annuity website creation and management to a freelancer.  You might be surprised at how little this costs – you can have a simple website created for a few hundred dollars and management fees can be as little as $20-30 a month.  So don’t dismiss the idea of having a website for your business as too time consuming or expensive – for a small investment, your annuity website can be a powerful tool in building your business.

Bookmark It

Best Time for Annuity Seminars

Retirees generally rise early in the morning and schedule golf, tennis, shopping, doctor appointments, dentist appointments, and meetings with the accountant or attorney on weekday mornings.  Therefore, never hold a seminar on a weekday morning because you would be competing with a lot of other activities in your prospect’s schedule.  Schedule your annuity seminar either for Saturday mornings (when retirees put their weekday activities on hold) or weekday afternoons at 2:30 p.m.  By a weekday afternoon, retirees have completed their morning schedule and your only competition is Oprah.

Try and avoid scheduling evening seminars because some retirees tell me that they are reluctant to drive at night as they notice their night vision is not as good.  Additionally, single females have a safety concern, making them reluctant to venture out at night.  If you were having seminars for younger people, all of these guidelines would be different as you would seek to fit their schedule and lifestyle.

Choose the right message

Retirees are concerned with security and are afraid of making irreversible financial mistakes.  This means that they are far less concerned with performance statistics, and favor capital preservation.  (Unlike a younger attendee that wants performance as they look to future financial security).

Thus your annuity seminar title should address their concerns and their fears rather than a product.   The seminar should star you – the problem solver and trustworthy advisor, not a money manager or wholesaler.  Seniors buy trust in a person.  If they trust you, they’ll hand over the money and tell you, “If you think this is good, then let’s do it.”  While younger investors spend more time analyzing details of products and doing comparison shopping, the retired investor is far more attuned to analyzing you.

The topics you choose should focus on you as a problem solver for emotionally compelling problems relevant to seniors.   Some examples of emotionally compelling topics for the senior market include:
a. Mistakes Retirees Make With Their Finances and How to Avoid Them
b. Six Ways Retirees Can Cut Income Taxes and Save More Money

Never have the word “annuity” on your seminar invitation or it will look like a sales pitch for annuities and people will not attend.  Additionally, don’t make your seminar a sales pitch about annuities but rather the benefits of annuities.

Doing it right

Keep in mind that eyesight fails with age.  For this reason, you may wish to avoid really large rooms for your annuity seminar and choose a setup that gives all clear view of you and your screen if you use slides.   Here are a few additional rules for your presentation:

a. Make slides high contrast—dark print on a light background or vice versa.
b. Keep words on each slide to a minimum.  Avoid small text (24 point minimum in PowerPoint)
c. Drop all jargon.  Use simple, easy to understand terminology.  For example, never use the phrase “fixed annuity,” but ask “do you have the type of annuity where the principal is guaranteed but the interest rate has been falling over the last 10 years?”
d. Never speak for more than 75 minutes—people get bored
e. Have a system for closing appointments right at the annuity seminar—do not wait until the next day
Follow Up

Confirm your appointments at 8 am the next business morning.  Retirees rise early and leave the house.  It’s best if you confirm in person.  Do not delegate this to an assistant or you will lose appointments.  This is an important additional contact in building the bridge between you and your soon-to-be new client.

Bookmark It

Annuity seminars are the most effective ways to tap into the lucrative retiree market.  Many other marketing methods that work well with younger investors, such as cold-calling are considerably less effective because mature investors are skeptical.  They want to get to know you first before meeting with your one-on-one trusting you with funds.  And what better way to “check you out” than by sitting in your annuity seminar and listening to you.

The reason that retirees are perfect for annuity seminar prospecting is that they meet the three criteria for the perfect seminar attendee:

1. They have money in their control.  Unlike younger people, their assets are not locked up in an employer 401k plan or in stock options.
2. They have the time to attend.  Unlike successful working people and business owners, they have the luxury of determining their own schedule and can attend your annuity seminar
3. They are the most motivated audience.  Living with the constant insecurity of no paycheck, retirees are motivated to alleviate the financial fear that haunts them.  They have interest in learning everything possible to avoid making an irreversible financial mistake.

In order to achieve good results from annuity seminars with retirees, understand how they think and make buying decisions, and design your annuity seminar to address their special needs.   The formula for successful annuity seminars includes these considerations:

Location, location, location

Just like in real estate, your choice of location can make or break the success of your annuity seminar.  Keep in mind that most retirees living in a metropolitan area will not drive more than 20 minutes from home.  In addition, you should select a seminar location that is well known, convenient and in neutral territory.  Some annuity agents attempt to hold seminars in their office buildings.  Bad idea.  This is not neutral territory and some prospective attendees will not come for fear of being trapped in a high-pressure sales situation.  Think about buying a car.  Are you comfortable when you’re on the salesman’s turf?

Therefore, never use your office as a seminar location.  Rather, use a local restaurant that has existed for 20+ years — a place which everyone in town knows and likes.  It’s familiar, neutral and well located.  .  Many restaurants are happy to rent an extra room or even open for your annuity seminar at a time when they are normally closed.

You do not need to feed your audience just because you use a restaurant for your location. There is nothing wrong with feeding attendees, but it increases your cost and is unnecessary.  In fact, in my experience, serving food lowers the percentage of serious buyers you will have in the audience.  When you feed attendees, half of your audience will be “eaters”—people that came for the food.  Expect to get appointments with 30% of attendees. When you do not use a meal as bait, those investors who are serious about hearing what you have to say will come with or without a meal. You will get appointments with 50% to 80% of these serious attendees. (The exception to this rule is Florida, where the meal is necessary to attract attendance).

What about hotels?  Some prospects perceive hotels as a place for transients and may associate you with the salesman who is here today, gone tomorrow.  Additionally, some hotels place their conference rooms in a location requiring your prospect to negotiate a maze of hallways.  Do you want your prospect to enter your annuity seminar frustrated?  Only use hotels when a restaurant is absolutely not available.

Bookmark It

If you’ve developed the opinion that annuity seminars don’t work for marketing annuities, you’re wrong.

Annuity seminars don’t work when they are done incorrectly. But make a few changes, and you can have 50 people, every time, attend to hear your presentation.

The first issue is matching your message to the market. It’s a simple idea that many annuity agents skip, assuming they know their audience. For example, let’s assume you want to market your annuity seminar to people age 60 and over. To develop a winning seminar invitation, you need to know how these 60+ investors think. You cannot assume that your 60+ market thinks like you do. If you’re 45 years old, you probably want to know about opportunities to make money grow. But people over 60 (in most cases) are not focused to make more money. They care about preserving their capital. Their biggest concern is fear of losing principal. So is it any wonder that your opportunity-oriented seminar titled, “How to Earn More with Annuities,” doesn’t get much of a response?

You could triple your attendance with the right title, such as “Six Ways To Cut Taxes and Protect Your Nest Egg.” This title appeals directly to their fear (i.e. not having enough) and will pull in the attendance from a 60+ audience. Whichever target market you choose, you really need to know their most significant emotional concern and with pre-retirees and retirees the concerns are about preservation and having enough. If you can title a seminar addressing the major concern(s) of your target audience, you have half of the battle won. If you’re not sure, then do some interviews and find out what’s really on the mind of your target prospects.

And please, don’t have the word “annuity” or “annuities” on your invitation.  Annuity prospectsdon’t want a sales pitch. If your annuity seminar looks like a sales pitch for annuities, no qualified annuity prospect will attend. Prospects want benefits.  So make sure your title conveys the benefits they will learn about: preserving capital, keeping money safe, having enough for a life time, saving taxes and having more to spend, reduced financial worry and peace of mind.

Bookmark It

Let’s do some math on annuity sales.  As far as I can tell, most equity indexed annuities pay the agent 8% commission.  So to earn $100,000 in a year, you need to sell $1.25 million of annuities.  Since I know agents that have sold that in ONE CONTRACT, it’s unacceptable that over an entire year, you don’t sell several millions of annuities. Simply unacceptable. 

$1.25 million is $100,000 per month.  There are 20 workdays in a month.  You can easily sell one contract for $100,000.  It might even take you a whole day if you need to drive to meet your prospect, make a presentation, take them to lunch and socialize. So what the heck are you doing the other 19 days of the month?

I’ll tell you what’s crazy.  I see annuity agents write a $100,000 policy and then they take the next day off as a reward.  NO!!!  Keep up the momentum and kick into high gear.  It’s by chaining winning days together—several days of $100,000 sales that you have a $500,000 month. If you want to take a day off, take it AFTER you hit $500,000 for the month. 

Here are the reasons that annuity agents fail to earn at least $100,000 a year and how to correct these errors:

1. You’re lazy and you don’t prospect.  Do you expect the phone to ring because you are a nice person? If you don’t have at least 3 prospecting campaigns going, get out of the business and get a government job.  Just quit now.  Or, select any three of these prospecting methods and get going:
Mailers
Seminars
ACTIVE referral system (don’t wait for referrals)
Subscribe to an annuity lead program
Cross referrals with a long term care agent or P&C agent
Email program

If you are depressed then do to the shrink and get some anti-depressants.  There are NO excuses except the ones that come out of your mouth.

2.  You don’t know how to sell.  Overconfident agents tell me all the time, “I’ve been selling insurance for 30 years, I can sell.”  It doesn’t matter how long you’ve been doing something, most people cannot sell. They’ve never had a minute of training and they don’t even know what they don’t know.  Immediately get trained.  Enroll yourself in one of these classes:  Dale Carnegie, Sandler Institute, SPIN Selling.

3. You ignore a basic rule of the universe—ACTIVITY GENERATES RESULTS. Stop sitting on our butt.  Do something, anything!  The more active you are working in and on your business, the more results you get. 

4. Hang out with successful annuity agents and copy what they do.  Why try and figure out how to be successful when you can just copy what successful people do?

Bookmark It

There are potentially millions of people who may want to purchase annuities, from the recently retired to the fortunately wealthy, and with such a lucrative market it is important to remember that nothing is set in stone; there are a number of different proven ways of selling annuities and many that should be considered. Let’s look at some of the more popular, and how they work.

Lead generation

There are numerous telemarketing companies that can help in finding you potential customers by providing a professional lead generating service. They look at the service you are providing, deduce the clients most likely to be interested in your product, and send them a message offering the service that you provide – in this case annuities.

This is a simple and effective method of generating annuity leads, and leads are essentially potential sales waiting to happen. Look on the web for telemarketing organizations, and you will find a cost effective and simple method of marketing your product.

Direct Mail

Direct mail works by targeting potentially interested parties, and not just to addresses at random, by using lists generated by direct mail specialists.

These lists contain only people or organizations that will be interested in particular products or services – in this case, annuities.  Your best demographic is females, age 60+.

Selling annuities in this way is a proven method of generating leads, and with companies out there that focus on direct mail campaigns, you can be sure to find a campaign supplied by a company that will not only mail your offer to the chosen clients, but design and process the entire project.

Direct mail is a long way from the ‘junk mail’ that it once was considered as, and is now a technologically advanced method of selecting the right potential client for the right service. However, if you don’t want to do it that way, you can buy lists of potential clients from companies that generate and supply them, run your own direct mail campaign.

Drip marketing  - the repetitive sending of direct mail Or email) to the same prospects, making sure your mail drop is high quality, and targeting the same addresses over and over again – is an effective way of hammering the message home.

Each time they receive the message – and for the best effects it must be five or more – it will subliminally be taken on board, even if the card is simply thrown away or email deleted. The repetition element is important in cementing the image, and once the mail drop has been done it is important to remember to follow up your campaign; a quick telephone call to each of those on the mail drop list, making sure they received the card and asking if they are interested will elicit a response in some cases that may not have been forthcoming otherwise.  The same can be accomplished dripping with an insurance newsletter.

The above are just some of the methods of selling annuities, and with time and experience you will be sure to develop many more of your own using these guidelines and ideas.

Bookmark It

Annuity selling is not an easy job, but with a sound marketing plan in place you can earn much more than you ever thought possible. Like all other jobs, selling annuities requires not just hard work, but being innovative, talent and an effort at out of the box thinking. Having a sound marketing plan in place is the first thing that you need to do if you want to distinguish yourself from the run of the mill annuity agent.

One very important thing to remember here is that no marketing plan should feature only a single marketing strategy. There are a number of annuity selling agents who either resort to cold calling or direct mailing to follow up with their leads. But having a single strategy greatly increases your risks of failure whereas a multi pronged strategy not only manages to reach out to your prospects at different levels, but also increases your chances of getting higher sales. So what are the marketing methods that are most effective for selling annuity? Some of the best methods for approaching your annuity leads that will yield good results are:

1. Advertising: I know you will be shocked that I said advertising! After all, that is what you do all the time and you already know what the results are. However, we are not talking about advertising what your company is providing, or the run of the mill annuity ad. Like in all things, you will have to distinguish your ads from others advertising similar products. For this, you will not only need to rework and redesign your ads, you will also have to post them at the right time. The main focus of your ad should not be just what the company is offering, but rather the benefits that buyers of that particular annuity will get. On the other hand, most people shift their investments or plan them around the beginning or end of the financial year, so advertising around this time would be more fruitful as compared to advertising during the holidays when people focus more on vacations and shopping.

2. Seminars: Seminars are one of the best ways of cashing upon and creating high quality annuity leads. Offering a free seminar in localities where your target customer resides can get you an extremely high rate of sales compared to other marketing methods.  This is because only people who have a serious interest in financial planning will attend a seminar that is focused on personal financial management, retirement planning and buying financial instruments. Covering a number of topics at your seminars, instead of just focusing on equities, will help you get a larger audience. You can tie up with other agents dealing with other products to host a full fledged informational seminar for seniors. Just make sure that you provide valuable information instead of delivering your sales presentations during your seminar. This would establish you as an expert and you will notice people coming to you to buy annuities instead of the other way round.

3. Direct Mailing: Direct mailing can be an extremely powerful marketing tool provided you know how to make your mail stand out and grab your prospects’ attention. To know more about how to do this, check out our post on creating powerful direct mailing messages.

Annuity lead generation in your local area – prospects seeking assistance now!

Bookmark It

The market for selling annuities is massive and, potentially, extremely lucrative. Consider the millions of people who retire each year, and have surplus funds that they want to invest, or those that become wealthy early and want to make sure their funds are used to grow, not decline in value.

But the methods of selling annuities is not set in stone, there are a number of different proven ways of selling annuities and many that should be considered. Let’s look at some of the more popular, and how they work.

Direct Mail

Direct mail works by targeting potentially interested parties, and not just to addresses at random, by using lists generated by direct mail specialists.

These lists contain only people or organisations that will be interested in particular products or services – in this case, annuities.

Selling annuities in this way is a proven method of generating leads, and with companies out there that focus on direct mail campaigns, you can be sure to find a campaign supplied by a company that will not only mail your offer to the chosen clients, but design and process the entire project.

Direct mail is a long way from the ‘junk mail’ days of old, with modern technology allowing the most sophisticated selection techniques, but if you don’t want to do it that way, you can buy lists of potential clients from companies that generate and supply them, run your own direct mail campaign.

Drip marketing

Increasing the intensity of the direct mail marketing method can also increase the success, and this becomes known as ‘drip marketing’. Drip marketing is a the repetitive sending of direct mail to the same clients; make sure your mail drop is high quality, and target the same addresses over and over again with a series of cards. Each time they receive the message – and it must be done at least three times – it will subliminally be taken on board, and even if the card is simply thrown away, the repetition element is important in cementing the image.  A great tool is a monthly insurance newsletter with annuity articles.

Once the mail drop has been done it is important to remember to follow up your campaign; a quick telephone call to each of those on the mail drop list, making sure they received the card and asking if they are interested will elicit a response in some cases that may not have been forthcoming otherwise.

Lead generation

In the field of generating leads there are a number of organisations on the net that specialise in this area, and a web search will give you a list of the more popular of these, and most likely one that can offer potential annuity clients.

Telemarketing professionals know what they are doing, and they don’t offer a miracle but a proven method of attracting leads, and of reaching the potential client that you need to find.

The method is simple to use, and picking up your potential leads is as simple as retrieving a message on the cell phone. It’s also an efficient method, too, as the leads generated are sure to be interested in what you have to sell.

Bookmark It