Why Should Insurance Brokers Consider Handwritten Notes?

• Agents of the insurance industry are on a mission to find new ways for brokers and agents to capture buyer attention. In light of declining response rates from traditional channels like email, cold calling and organic social media, these insurers have been forced into uncharted territory in their hunt for potential customers.
• Handwritten notes are important insurance selling strategies and the perfect way to stay in touch with your contacts. With a near-100% open rate and 5x response of traditional direct mail, handwritten messages provide higher contact rates, quote rates and overall leads.
• Handwritten notes are a unique way to show your appreciation. Not only do they send the message that you care, but handwritten messages form personal bonds with each recipient and create loyal customers for life.
• It’s not exactly easy to write notes by hand. Especially in large quantities, it can be tedious and hard on the hands.
• Handwritten notes are a great way to express your gratitude and appreciation. There is an endless supply of companies that offer this service, but finding the right one can be difficult. The quality of handwriting styles will vary from company to company, so keep this factor in mind when you’re looking for someone with whom you want to establish a long-lasting relationship or just have their help on occasion!
• All-in-one marketing solutions for insurance selling strategies are the newest trend in lead generation. Combining handwritten notes with other promotional material, such as business cards and corporate swag, is a great way to improve your conversion rates while staying on brand!
• You want a company that will maximize your lead generation and digital marketing efforts with touches like email and LinkedIn.
• Handwritten notes of appreciation can breathe new life into employees and colleagues, according to Jordan Insurance Brokers.

Insurance Selling Strategies: Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow

The insurance industry has a rich history of marketing. It all started in the early 20th century after the industrial revolution when companies realized that they needed to sell their products through word-of-mouth and direct sales if they wanted to be successful.

Insurance selling strategies used to be direct, but the digital era has changed with internet usage and the accessibility boom. As response rates for email declined, according to Marketing Charts, and trying to rank on Google became harder than ever, brokers started looking for new ways to advertise.

Social media posts are less effective because people want personal attention from marketers. Again, cold calling or directly reaching out on social networks just isn’t enough anymore! You have to get personal and that’s where handwritten notes excel.

Why is building a relationship so important for insurance marketing?

Relationships are the key to everything because, without them, people don’t buy. Insurance is a chance for customers to plan for what happens when things go wrong in life, as life seldom works out as planned.

With their worries taken care of by someone who cares deeply about their family’s well-being, they’ll feel more comfortable in other parts of their lives too and get back to living again without fear, surrounded by people who love them like part of their own family.

It takes time and patience, but if you’re not just focused on insurance selling strategies when you’re talking with potential customers, chances are they’ll know it right away.

Emotional connections are the backbone of great advertising. The advertisers who connect with their prospects and customers on an emotional level will ultimately win out in this industry as it becomes more competitive than ever before.

Today’s top companies understand that excellent customer service is just as important, if not more so than meeting a quota for sales or providing quality products at reasonable prices.

They know how much of a difference those little touches can make when trying to lure new business into your company’s sphere of influence while also maintaining loyal clientele once you have them hooked after months or years worth of interaction!

The Strength of Handwritten Mail

Handwritten notes are powerful because in a world of automated marketing, the “personal touch” is invaluable.

Automatic emails are predictable and robotic. You get the same message no matter what time you open your inbox or how many people read it before you do. Handwritten notes as insurance selling strategies stand out against the hundreds if not thousands of machine messages flooding into our inboxes each day when it comes to personalized messages.

It’s the thought that counts. Don’t send 100 emails or 28 postcards to your customers! Give them handwritten notes because you’ll get near-100% read rates and 5x more responses than normal direct mail, which means a handful of pieces is all it takes per year to capture their attention and form meaningful bonds with buyers.

Handwritten notes complement your other insurance selling strategies. All of these communications should be integrated and omnichannel to create a cohesive experience for the customer. Handwritten direct mail is one more way that you can reach out to customers with an eye-catching, personalized touch. It’s simply another method for driving response!

When you are consistently useful, it gives buyers the security they need to trust your product. This is what leads them down a path of buying from you and not another company. Consistency builds trust and trust breeds cash.

Handwritten Notes at Scale are Impossible to Do By Hand

To build a successful marketing plan, you need to be able to send hundreds or even thousands of handwritten notes per month. Suppose you try doing it yourself or outsource this task to an individual or team.

In that case, many problems will occur: sloppy penmanship and employee retention being the two most obvious. Handwriting these notes can become repetitive and quite physically painful for your employees, which is why they may jump ship quickly.

You cannot track ROI. Segment your mailing list to run multi-note campaigns with different text templates or combine notes with gifts when the campaign is done on your own. You also can’t extract data like personal information from an email address or LinkedIn profile when running a handwritten note campaign.

Let’s Talk About Handwriting Robots

How are robotic handwritten notes produced?

• Specialized equipment called a pen plotter combined with handwriting software and the appropriate machine interfaces for human input can replicate handwritten content as you would see it.
• These robots are a great way to take the hassle out of writing thank you cards and other correspondence. The only problem is that they can be found at varying levels of quality, which means some look more human than others (and no one wants their mail pretending to be handwritten).
• Building software for the pen plotter is a challenging task that requires significant custom programming. Although this level of work sounds daunting, it pays off with authentic-looking notes and drawings!

Inkjet and LaserJet printers often do not print handwriting in a way that looks authentic. Four reasons why this is so are because:

• The handwriting itself does not look real.
• It leaves no telltale sign of ink being pressed on paper when written with an actual pen.
• Suspicion among some recipients who feel like they might be fake leads to them wetting their finger and pressing it against the inked area—the “smudge” test.

All it takes is for a few of those people to share their opinion about you online or through review sites to ruin your reputation.

Handwritten direct mail is a hot ticket item for insurance selling strategies to make an impact. The key, however, isn’t that it’s freshly written by hand, but rather how you use the space available to your advantage when writing out each letter.

Services have sprung up in recent years that create notes which not only look human but have a near-100% open rate and generate 5x the responses of traditional direct mail.

How to Grow Your Insurance Business With Handwritten Notes

There are so many different ways you can use handwritten notes to communicate with prospects and customers. There’s no better way to show someone just how much you care than by sending them a handwritten card in the mail as part of your comprehensive insurance selling strategies.

Handwritten notes help grow your business by helping you:

• Breakthrough to cold prospects (lead generation).
• Turn prospects into booked meetings.
• Drive conversions.
• Form a meaningful bond with prospects and customers.
• Convert proposals into signed deals.
• Drive positive online reviews.
• Increase customer retention. 
• Reward high-value customers. 
• Reactivate dormant customers. 
• Celebrate milestones. 
• Warm-up leads before trade shows. 
• Follow-up after trade shows.
• Give thanks for referrals.
• Appreciate channel and other partners.
• Commend, console and thank employees.
• Ease the aftermath of a tough meeting.
• Drive upsells and cross-sells.
• Share promo codes.
• Recover abandoned carts.
• Invite to events and webinars.
• Trigger drip sequences from sales reps.
• Bundle the note with a gift card, brochure, market report, flyer, gift, or company swag. 
• Send holiday greetings and birthday wishes.

What Are You Looking For in a Handwritten Notes Service?

What types of notes should be part of insurance selling strategies?

Writing that looks human. Robots that hold real pens and write with the precise pressure, slant and flow of a human being can be programmed to produce handwritten documents indistinguishable from those penned by humans. Forgeries are essentially impossible unless they have been digitally altered!

Premium, pigment-based ink pens, preferably with bold blue ink, should deliver smooth lines under realistic light conditions (with archival quality pigments) while also maintaining slight variations in each character so no single letter or number will look exactly like any other one.

It’s not just about the typeface or even the typographer. It takes many hours of coding to teach a robot to create a note with imperfections, like an uneven margin on every page or varying spacing between letters in one sentence. But these flaws are what make handwritten notes so beautiful—they give them their character!

There should be a variety of fonts to choose from that corresponds with your preferences and company branding.

Stationery should be high-quality, with a thickness of at least 14 points (270 gsm) for cardstock and invitation-grade paper for envelopes.

The thickness of the paper you use can significantly impact how well your mailing is received. Not only are people more likely to keep and display a note if it has thick, high-quality stock, but being creative with what’s inside will also increase their willingness to open up!

Finally, make it a point to use real postage stamps with your handwritten marketing campaign if you want the work in developing them to look authentic.

It’s not enough just to put all this effort into designing and executing an awesome program, then skimp by using generic-looking printed postage from machines at the end of it.

Handwritten Notes Provide an All-in-One Insurance Selling Strategy

Notes should be a decent length—around 500 characters, or three to five sentences, according to exp Realty. This is the perfect length to tell your story while evoking a feeling of reciprocity among the recipient, who thinks it’s just common courtesy to get back to you!

With customizable notes, you can create one specific to your needs. You have the option of choosing from a wide selection of templates and are also able to design something completely new for yourself with unlimited custom fields and the ability to edit each template.

The service prints your professional-quality artwork or photos when you submit your order, then write your note, stamp, seal and send all in one business day. You can even personalize the colors or add a unique doodle for an added touch of creativity!

To make your marketing campaign worth it, ROI tracking is essential. With the service’s easy forms of tracking, you can measure lift for audience segments receiving notes against a control group and include a unique tracking URL and phone number in each note to figure out which type of content works well with these groups most often.

The most creative and innovative way to market is by adding a QR code sticker or custom doodle to your marketing materials. This increases the response rate impressively without the need for any work on your end!

A handwritten notes service can help you make the perfect impression with a personal touch. Whether it’s 500 or 5000, they should offer flexible options to fit your needs and offer reliable services for when you need them scaled up or down.

Uploading contact information makes it easy to start a campaign. Plus, there are templates ready to go so that no matter what you’re saying, it’ll be done right!

The Price Is Right With Handwritten Notes

Handwritten notes are a powerful insurance selling strategy. They can be costly, but their return on investment is more than worth it! Notes have an average response rate of 5x and ROI comes in over many months because recipients keep the note for as long as they want to display them.

Note services are typically around $2.50 to $6.00 per note, with the average right around $3.00. This may sound expensive, but here’s an example of how handwritten notes pay off. 

Mr. Realtor pays $3.00 a note for 100 notes – a total of $300. If just one person responds and decides to list their home for sale with the agent, upon sale the agent then earns a total commission of $3000 on the sale. Was the $300 cost worth it?

Remember, insurance companies, agents and brokers can use these powerful notes in every possible industry, including:

• Life Insurance
• Personal Insurance
• Car Insurance
• Business Insurance

Why can’t you just hire someone to write notes all day?

You’ll need $3 to get started. That includes the stamp at 55 cents that you can’t negotiate and a notecard and envelope worth an additional dollar or more with professionally printed artwork on the front of your note.

So $0.55 for the stamp and $1.00 for the stationary leaves a total of $1.50 that goes to those hardworking human beings who handwrite notes. Assuming they have perfect penmanship and never take breaks, it takes them 10 minutes to write a single 500-character note with an envelope in tow.

A human can produce just six notes and envelopes per hour. At a rate of $1.50 per note, this equals about $9.00 an hour! This assumes that the person never takes any breaks or collapses from the writer’s cramp due to their intense hand movements over such long periods—not something many would be willing to put up with eight hours a day or more.

Companies Should Offer More Than Just Notes

Handwriting one-of-a-kind notes is a great way to make your recipients feel valued and important. But what if you want to send something with the note? A business card, flyer, or brochure can be perfect for this!

You don’t always have time before heading out on deliveries. Your handwritten notes service should offer unlimited warehouse space to store any collateral or inserts you’d like included with your notes.

Dedicated account managers. Too often, a company will have a great product but fail to provide the customer with any meaningful guidance on how to use that product effectively.

A dedicated account manager can work closely with you and ensure your handwritten notes service is used as efficiently as possible!

Don’t let your budget be constrained by outlying fees. Choose an all-inclusive pricing structure that includes supplies, printing and postage in one set price. This way, you can establish a marketing plan without worrying about extra hidden charges!

It’s important to get your notes mailed out as quickly as possible. If it takes more than one business day, the service you chose isn’t an enterprise-scale solution and will limit your results over time.

Now, let’s talk about YOU—the insurance broker.

How to Use Handwritten Notes for Insurance Brokers

Mail campaigns as insurance selling strategies, done right, is an affordable way to reach many people with persuasive messages that can lead them to call for quotes or buy insurance policies without any intermediaries.

Think about it like this: A well-designed handwritten letter that goes in the mailbox gets 5x the responses of traditional direct marketing. It helps you reach out to prospective customers not currently on your client list.

If just one of those new households fills out the application and becomes a customer, then you’ve just gotten who knows how much money back from what was once considered marketing trash even as late as ten years ago! The only issue? These notes have to be really well designed.

They should use direct mail to generate a two-way conversation with the customer through a positive and personalized written exchange.

Rather than sending out one-sided advertisements, insurance agents should take the time to send something personal to their customers. The message sent is typically created using data collected about potential customers from other channels and depends on what type of insurance you’re selling.

It can be as in-depth or as short as necessary, but ideally, it will sound natural because anything else might turn away your audience.

In any business, you need to build a relationship with your customers and prospects. The best way to do this is through direct mail marketing. Direct mail marketing will allow you to use current lists of prospects, which are constantly updated based on consumer buying patterns and life events.

The key is consistency. A couple of new customers won’t make much difference if it’s one every few months or seasons.

You need to create a regular dialogue with your insurance selling strategies by sending them information that could motivate them to make purchases according to the desired schedule (special discounts on insurance quotes, research studies, polls that may relate, or maybe just to send a letter to say thank you).

Sample Handwritten Notes for Insurance Brokers

When working with handwritten mail service, the company will hand address and send handwritten notes – but what are you going to say?

Sample #1

Hi [First_Name],

Do you have enough insurance coverage to protect your family? Have you thought about how much it would cost if something happened and you did not have the proper coverage in place?

As an experienced insurance broker, I know that there are several ways for you to find the perfect rate for your specific needs and limit risk management. I can help by making this process as easy for you as possible. For a no-obligation meeting, contact me so we can discuss your situation. Thank you!

Sincerely,

Sample #2

Hey [First_Name],

I’m an experienced insurance broker who can help you find the perfect plan to protect your family. I’ll work with you to make sure that each of you is financially safe in case something happens.

In today’s world, it’s never been more important to ensure we have a financial safety net ready for our future needs. You owe it to yourself and your loved ones to look into what type of coverage is right for all of you. Contact me anytime so that, together, we can make this process as easy as possible!

Sincerely,

Sample #3

Hi [First_Name],

I’m an experienced business insurance broker and have been in the business for over ten years. I specialize in helping businesses find the right type of insurance coverage to protect themselves and their employees.

Do you have enough insurance coverage right now? If not, I can help you with that! Contact me today so that, together, we can make this process as easy as possible.

Sincerely,

The Bottom Line on Handwritten Notes for Insurance Brokers

It’s difficult to get noticed in this environment, but it’s not impossible. Handwritten notes are a great way of standing out from the crowd and showing your clients that you care about them as people rather than just potential customers. These may seem old-fashioned compared to social media or email marketing campaigns, but they can also be extremely effective when used wisely.