Kestler Financial Improves Its Two-Way Dialogue

People can be funny about money, investments and insurance. And as in nature, the early bird catches the worm when they’re waiting for a quote for any of those products. So if you’re a wholesaler of financial products to over 5,500 independent brokers the speed in which you gather information regarding quotes and respond to agent inquiries can make or break your bottom line.

That was the challenge facing Kestler Financial Group, Inc. (KFG), a company specializing in securities, annuities, life insurance and long-term care insurance.

The old procedure for KFG marketers was cumbersome, says Jason Kestler, vice president. Each field agent for KFG has his own dedicated internal marketer. Currently there are 27 internal marketers for the business that is up 42% in business over the last year.

KFG marketers would e-mail their brokers asking them to e-mail or call with data for quotes. These e-mails did not actually contain a way to gather data directly from the agent and response rates were minimal.

“ROI was low because we were spending a lot of man hours with our internal marketing team calling brokers,” says Kestler. “They were spending 90% of their time tracking down the agents or just leaving messages for the agents.”

So Kestler sought out a way to empower his marketing team when working with their agents. With ExactTarget, he instituted a bi-monthly interactive e-mail containing editorial, a “Request a Quote” form, links to sales resources, and tools.

“We used to send e-mails that were asking for information but didn’t give anything in return,” Kestler continues. “With ExactTarget’s ability to track e-mail, it made us take a look at how we could add incentives for our brokers. Our emails now include sales information, personal incentives, and selling tools.”

Click-thru rates for the e-mails can be as high as 24%, and open rates often settle around 50%.

The editorial portion of the e-mail could include information on new legislation affecting the industry. Personal incentives may include 20 free prospecting letters to send to clients or a promotion that distributes AMEX gift cards for applications submitted to the company. The selling tools could include financial calculators and time management tools.

In addition to the informational aspect of the e-mails, the new system allows marketers to gather information directly from each e-mail. It has enabled KFG brokers to request immediate quotes, making it easier for agents in different time zones or on tight schedules to contact KFG.

“What’s unique to our business is that it was difficult to get in front of our agents,” says Kestler. “We’re a national company and typically the most accessible agents are in the field working with their clients all day – during our business hours.”

But using e-mail to correspond with its agents has opened up Kestler Financial’s accessibility outside of its core business hours. Now, agents in the field can be meeting with clients and gathering information during the day, and at night they can return to their computer, fill out the information form and submit it to KFG.

The current procedure cuts down the time that a marketing rep would spend leaving messages for agents and has increased the time they spend productively speaking with agents. By using the e-mails to contact agents, Kestler’s outbound center turned into one receiving incoming calls.

“Our marketers who were typically dialing down a list now were calling people who actually requested info on-line, in their time frame,” says Kestler. “So they would get the Request a Quote in via e-mail, they’d respond to that and they were willing to take the call from our internal marketer.”

And it seems that an increasing number of agents are willing to take that call. The new procedure has increased monthly quotes by over $12M, $5.5M of which have converted to sales, says Kestler.

Kestler admits that there are much faster ways to get quotes. But he says, using e-mail has enabled the company to get reach some of their licensed agents who haven’t conducted business with them recently.

“Typically, our agents and producers are independent. They can and do conduct business with our competitors,” Kestler notes. “The Request a Quote is really putting our name on top of their desk first. We are reaching our agents who are out there saying, ‘I’ve been licensed with Kestler and haven’t done anything with them lately. Let me throw this down and see what they come back with.”