Direct Mail Response Rates increased by simply using Hand Addressed Envelopes, and handwritten notes

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
(Free-Press-Release.com) October 14, 2010 -- If you have asked the question, Does real handwriting work? The answer is "yes, it does".

I am the owner of LifeAgentLeads.com, established in 2003 as a direct marketing company that provides mortgage protection insurance leads to Independent Life Agents. By 2006 we were involved with mailing nearly 100,000 pieces of mail per week. At the time, our response rates were excellent, averaging 4%. When the economy took a downturn, so did our response rates. The mortgage market is what drove this business. When the housing bubble burst, so did our lead flow. The components of our mail campaign had to be evaluated so that we could recover.

In direct mail, I've always said that one of the most important ingredients to a successful mail campaign is the mailing list. A targeted specialty list may cost more, but it allows you to mail only to your specific target. LifeAgentLeads was already compiling our own mailing list for our customers - The best possible list that we could get. Obviously, the mail piece itself is critical. Up to this point, the mortgage protection lead letter that we were using was the same standard mail reply letter that everyone else in the industry was using - This is still the standard today for almost all mortgage protection mailings. We did edit our letter by adding spot color, cleaning it up to make it easier to read and re-aligning our approach to this mail piece. This gained us a slight improvement in that we were receiving positive feedback from the customers who receive it. They would often comment that they had received "other" letters too, but responsed to ours because it stood out from the crowd.Postage: This is a major change that we made prior to the housing bubble bursting. We had already switched to First class postage which increased our response rates by about 1%. The mailers were time sensitive, so the postage was very important. The most important change that we made , and the one that resulted in the highest increase in response rates was that we simply started using hand addressed envelopes instead of window envelopes. Response rates immediately doubled, and then over the long term we saw an average increase of nearly 300%. Some areas increased by much more than that. Again, the envelope itself is addressed by hand in blue ink. The letter does contain personal data, there is no chance of mismatch since we have human eyes handle each mail piece. The address comes right from the letter. No chance of mix up. Our writers insert as they address.Cost Increase: Our hand writers are paid for production on top of addressing, so they are doing the work that an inserter/sealer used to do. The production costs remain the same. We will not pay a machine to do what a person can do if it's not saving us any money. The additional cost to hand-address a letter? Nominal. We handle our own printing and production, but if I were to contract a letter shop to do what we do, it would actually cost the same to have the letter shop handle the mailer , print, insert, bulk mail as it does for us to print, insert, and mail first class in a hand addressed envelope. Real Numbers, costs to customer (this is our real pricing for this particular program): If we mail 1,000 pieces through a standard letter shop and our cost for the entire campaign is 59 cents per mail piece.

We can expect to receive a 1 1/2% Response rate. That means 15 leads. An agent will be able to sell about 10 of these leads resulting in approximately $8000 in revenue for that agent. (average earned per sale is reported to be $800) If we mail 1,000 pieces using our New Mortgage Protection Lead Program , at a cost to the Agent of 79 cents per mail piece , the only difference being the Real Handwriting on the outside of the envelope, the average response rate will increase to at least 3%. We will use the low end increase as our model. 3% means 30 leads which means 20 sales for that agent. The agent is now bringing in $16,000 in revenue. It cost him an additional $200.00 to increase his profit by $8000.00 Not a bad increase. As a result of the tests that we have done with real handwriting in conjunction with direct mail and bulk mail, we have opened a new direct mail division that offers handwriting services to industries outside of the insurance arena.
The increase in response rates by using hand addressed envelopes is true for all businesses that test it. The added benefits to contracting a handwriting service to handle your direct mail is that you are also fueling the American economy by creating jobs, rather than outsourcing them.

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