Problem:
Long Term Care Associates (LTCA), a national marketing organization for extended-care insurance providers, learned the benefits of fusing traditional tactics with modern technology when it implemented a new solution to make its direct mail lead-distribution process more efficient.
About 10 years ago LTCA shifted a lot of its marketing efforts online and began targeting prospects via email and pay-per-click ads. The company invested in technology, including Web-to-lead forms and Salesforce’s CRM platform, and created a more integrated lead-distribution system.
But over time, Gary Forman, SVP and cofounder of the organization, realized that the digital space was becoming more crowded, and he decided to revisit direct mail and wanted to find a way to bring the efficiency of online marketing to the offline world. After all, LTCA can receive tens to hundreds of direct mail response cards a day, Forman notes, and he didn’t want to have to hire more people to manually enter this data into its systems.
“As we saw things opening back up in direct mail, all of a sudden the light went on,” Forman says, “We need to marry these two.”
So, LTCA implemented cloud data management platform Vidado to transform handwritten information into digital data and speed up the lead-distribution process.
Solution:
Today, LTCA generates about 25% of its leads through direct mail, and the company has reduced the amount of time it spends on manual data entry for its direct mail program by 80%. Forman believes that the speed at which the company processes this information has helped it earn a return on its investment.
“Anything that shortens that time frame for us is gold,” he says. “It just gives the client less time to go somewhere else to get the information or inform themselves and become unsold or just become uninterested.”
Still, he knows that one channel cannot do it all and continues to rely on a combination of direct mail, email, and pay-per-click marketing to drive ROI.
“For us, it’s always been a balance of trying to operate at the sweetest spot in each of those markets and keep the ROI good in all of them,” he says. “You can’t just really shift to only one market because, at some point, you lose the sweet spot and it becomes a little less receptive.”
