The check is in the mail

Do It Yourself
Josh Anderson, a partner with the Allen Investment Group of Raymond James & Associates Inc. in Newtown, Penn., took the DIY approach when he started mailing in the summer of 2005. Anderson and his partner were new in town and wanted to build name recognition with prospects. They acquired the equipment needed to produce the pieces in-house and bought a list of local residents from the local county office for a fraction of what they would have paid to a list broker.

The mailings' content varied. Some provided information about the Raymond James philosophy or discussed topics like developing an investment policy statement. Others offered invitations to dinners that focused on investment-related themes. Every envelope included a response card and an invitation to call the firm's offices. They ran the campaign for about 18 months and Anderson says it accomplished its goal of building awareness and attracting assets. "The number of prospects that wound up becoming clients was actually fairly small," says Anderson. "But our direct mail efforts resulted in a lot of assets through just three or four key relationships. Because we were mailing to the right community, one hit could be a huge win – it could be a home run. And in our case, we actually got that."

Use headquarter's resources
Outsourcing works for other advisors. Aaron Shelden, LUTCF, CLTC, a representative with New York Life in Westchester, N.Y., follows that route with his direct mailings. Shelden maintains a list of roughly 100 prospects and he uses New York Life's LTCI "print on demand" program to promote his long term care sales efforts. It's a small-scale effort but that's because he's skeptical about the value of mass mailings. "I don't believe that volume gets results," he says. "It's the quality of the list, and the highest quality consists of people with whom you already have a relationship or who recognize your name. It's also the quality of the company that is represented in the mailing, and it's the quality of the message."

It's a straightforward arrangement: Shelden provides the list and the home office handles compliance, production and mailing. Postcards have been particularly effective at getting his message across. "Postcards are an effective tool, because to a certain degree, a picture is worth a thousand words," he says. "People want to get information quickly today. If you send a postcard that has a little bit of information, it gets people to think about the subject, rather than long letters with a lot of verbiage that I think people don't bother reading."

Evaluate effectiveness
After the response period, it's time to evaluate the return on your expenditure. Deck says standard industry rules-of-thumb don't always apply. "We've seen campaigns where the offers were so valuable that a response rate of under 1 percent made all the sense in the world," he says. "We've seen other campaigns where if it was under 3 percent to 4 percent, it made no sense whatsoever. It's highly dependent on the value of the product or offer, the cost of the piece and taking both those variables into account."