You bought 5 $10 leads from a lead vendor. You called the first one. He hung up on you. The second, third and fourth were probably screening their calls and you got their voice mail. The fifth one seemed annoyed, but gave you 30 seconds of their time.

Did you just waste $50? Maybe you did. Maybe you didn’t. But you paid $10 for each of these leads. If you want to get anything out of them you will probably need to put a little more effort and a little more money into each one to get some return on your investment.

First, make sure that you leave a well thought out voice mail when you are sent to the voice mail box. Second, save all the maybes and contact them again. (The guy who hung up on you is a maybe. He just got calls from five other agents in the last hour. He’s a real prospect, but you may have to forget his rudeness and call him again after a week has gone by.)

The phone is the most important tool that you have for making sales, but you can enhance the effectiveness of your telemarketing efforts if you use other methods of contact as well. Snail mail and email are the main methods that we use to supplement our telemarketing.

Marketing effectiveness is enhanced by “recentcy,” frequency and intensity of your sales efforts. The more times that you can get your message to a client, the more likely you are to make a sale.

But… You can only make so many phone calls to any particular client without annoying him or her and eliminating any chance of making a sale. Snail mail is expensive. Email often winds up in the spam filter.

A marketing strategy that uses all three in the right proportions will get you more sales. Weekly phone calls for the first month, twice monthly emails and quarterly postcards can help turn those bad sales leads into clients.

I use Vertical Response for email marketing. I have used them a lot in the past and only stopped using them after writing a drip marketing email program for my site. I still use them from time to time because they can get email through more spam filters than I can.

For post card mailing Vista Print is excellent. (Vertical Response also does postcards, but VistaPrint is both cheaper and better). I use them frequently. You can upload your design or you can use one of their templates. Then you upload your mailing list and they do all the work for you! They print the postcards and then mail them to your list.

If you want to make more sales as an insurance agent, you need to stay in touch with your client by any cost effective means necessary. Staying in touch with your prospects and clients via a well thought out strategy that includes phone, email and snail mail makes it much easier to make sales.