Episode 124: Winning Back Your Lost Souls

Welcome to the Unstoppable Profit podcast. Wherever you are today, if you're starting with nothing or are well on your way to the success you desire, with the right people, processes and promotions in place, you will be unstoppable. And now I'd like to introduce your host, Mike Stromso.

Greetings friends, and welcome to the next episode of the Unstoppable Profit Podcast. This is Mike Tromso coming to you live from the Living Agency Laboratory. And. And today I want to talk to you about your business. Just kidding. Absolutely. It's all about your business. But what I want to talk to you about within your business is the opportunity.

Opportunity continues to knock for you. And we pay close attention to our numbers because numbers don't lie. And over the last five years running, and this has been consistent in my entire journey since I learned that I need to continue to pay attention to the numbers because they don't lie. The source, the source of new business. In our insurance agency business, the top five has included what we affectionately call lost souls. The other word that continues to come into play from many of our coaching members in today's agency society is win backs. Win backs, lost souls, same thing. These are people that thought the grass was greener on the other side or they were told by a salesperson who wanted to get money out of their pocket that the grass was green on the other side. The people left and they found out that the grass was not green on the other side. They weren't getting the care that they were promised. They found out that things changed. Oh, an underwriting memo changed things in the first 60 days. All of a sudden their rate is higher than they were paying with our agency. And beyond. And beyond. Now the thing I need to let you know, emotionally, emotionally is that people feel really bad that they have left you, number one. Number two, they're embarrassed in many situations to let you know.

That they left for a reason. And they're embarrassed to pick up the phone and, and call you back. How do I know this? It has happened to me. I will never forget. There was a time I was sitting in the kitchen area of my house. It was about 5:30 in the afternoon, sitting there, getting some work done. All of a sudden I got an email and the gal's name was Angela. And Angela sent me an email, said, hey Mike, can I talk to you for just a minute? And I saw the email and I went into the system and I recognized that it was. Somebody had left us about 11 months before. So I called her, I said, hey, Angela, what's going on? Because she was a referral from a friend who referred somebody else. We had actually wrote their business a very large commercial account, et cetera, et cetera, that we still had. We had just lost our personal insurance. So I called her and I said, hey, Angela, how's it going? She goes, good, but it was really hard for me to make this call. I said, why? She goes, because I'm embarrassed. I said, about what? She said, I don't know if you know this, we left you about 11 months ago and really I'm calling to ask if you'll take me back. I said, of course we'll take you back. Why do you feel embarrassed or why is it difficult to make the call? She goes, well, I'm just embarrassed. I'm embarrassed. The fact that we went somewhere else. We were told one thing, we were told another thing, and none of it happened. And our experience with you and your agency over almost 10 years was awesome. And we just want to come back. I said, angela, we're here with open arms. Whenever you're ready, we'll be happy to start the relationship again. So at the end of the day, that was the one phone call because I remember Angela. She was great. She was easy to get along with, easy to talk to, very compliant, et cetera, et cetera. Plus we got the large commercial account. So I remember her and I remember that phone call. And that told me everything that I needed to know about dealing with lost souls or win backs. So we had already been executing a lost souls program over a period of time. Nowadays, we have designed a roadmap to begin to pursue lost souls at day zero. And it is working very well. I will suggest that that in combination with our scorecard and the awesome leadership team, has resulted in a very strong 95 to 96% plus retention rate consistently, month after month because of the way we do things. But for those who leave, we always endeavor to get them back. Because once they make that decision, if we don't get them back within the first 30 days, they go right into our buy or die machine. Yes, I did say buy or die machine. Because if somebody decides to leave us, they're going to go right back into the funnel and they're either going to buy again or their day is going to come and they die. So that's what we believe. Our funnel is always full of prospects consistently, and we have a specialized program to endeavor to to get them back if they made a decision to leave us. So years ago, we started with a handwritten Letter. I've actually got that letter in front of me and I want you to pay close attention to the wording. Okay? And if I rewrote this letter in today's environment, I might do a little thing, a couple of things different. Because you've heard about me talking about the five trigger words, right? The five trigger words in marketing that when you pepper them into your written copy, etc. They change everything. Here they are. You may want to write them down, you may want to use them effectively. You guarantee free new sex. You guarantee free new sex. Those are the five trigger words that have been proven to trigger the human mind in responding. Okay, so not I, me or we. Not I, me or we. So if you get a lot of I, me or we in your copy, whether it be written or your spoken word as well, make sure you correct it. I mean, I was working on some copy the other day and I went back and watched some things that I've done and I identified. I said I want to talk to you today about. Now one thing that I've learned is I've intentionally tried to shift that to say I'd like to talk with you today. Not to you, with you. See, it's a subliminal covert mindset. Okay, let's get back to the Lost Souls program. Ok, so years ago this letter was created and we put it on yellow paper and snail mailed it out and it was worked. In fact, one of the old marketing jokes is working so well we quit using it. Yes, we still use it. Okay, so it's written with a date on it and a time. This time is 6:13am from the city and state that our agency is in and it says hi and you put the first name of the person you're writing to. So hi Mike, as an example. Now I know I just said you guarantee free new sex, but at the end of the day, this starts with I've been meaning. And I'm not sure how I could shift that. So I'm going to go with this. I've been meaning to drop you a note for a while and when I woke up this morning, it was the first thing I thought of. It hit me like a ton of bricks. Things change.

Some time ago you had insurance with us. Maybe you got a better deal elsewhere. Maybe one of our companies raised their rates. Question mark. Maybe we did something service wise that upset you. Parentheses if we did, I'm truly sorry about that. Parentheses. In any case, I wanted to write and tell you that we've added many more new insurance companies and they have really good rates. Bob and Carol just switched their home and car insurance to our agency. They saved $462 a year. Local business switched to our agency and saved 37%. Wow. All caps, exclamation, exclamation. These savings are huge. And then it says call me okay in red letters with exclamation as well. Second page. Please pick up the phone and call today to find out how much you can save. You can save as underlined. Okay. Toll free phone. Nowadays we don't need the toll free. Just put your phone, number, phone and I would put. If I were redoing this again today, I put phone, email, text, maybe even website. Give them all of the ways to reach you and thanks, Mike Stromso. P.S. our team would love and adore the opportunity to provide you a free protection review. PPS there's power in the postscripts. There's power in multiple postscripts. Our total protection team is ready and waiting for your call. PPPs if it's not convenient to call during regular business hours again, here's our email address. Or visit our website. And then in again in different color in different font that says there's no risk and no risk is underlined. Every policy compare carries or exclusive triple satisfaction guarantee. So at the end of the day, it's chocked full of direct response marketing strategies to cause people to respond. That was step one of the Lost Souls program. Okay. At the end of the day, after a period of time, if they did not respond, we sent out what we call the boomerang letter. And at the top of the boomet boomerang letter, it says, we really want you back. Our records indicate it's been too long since we've heard from you.

You came to our insurance office in the past and we helped you with your insurance needs, but you didn't come back. Whatever the reason, I like incentive to choose Stromso Insurance Agency again. Right now, not only do we want to earn your business back, but we want to give you a $25 gift card to quote your insurance program again. Yes, we're offering them an incentive just to provide a free quote. You know the thing that comes to my mind as well, and you may or may not be thinking this, you're giving them that much of an incentive just to provide them a quote? I am. Because if people have done business with you in the past, they are four times more likely to eight times more likely to do business with you again if they've already given you money. And 20 trusted you in the past and I'm going to invest in that. I mean how much is a good lead worth? Do you know the lifetime value of a customer? Aha. Case in point. You got to know the lifetime value of a customer. I mean if somebody said to me, Mike, hey, I'm going to guarantee you leads. These are exclusive leads of your ideal client type and you can have as many as you want. The cost of the lead is $221. I would say I'll take 100 to start. Why? Because of the fact that I know the lifetime value of a customer will easily earn that amount of money.

So at the end of the day it's about the lifetime value. That's the way smart marketing, entrepreneurial minded people think. They think about the lifetime value, not just the initial investment, it's an investment in a long term relationship. So we send out a boomerang with that particular letter. If they don't hit us again, we go to the compass letter and the headline says are you lost? Should we send out a search party? And again it's got the incentive built in there. It's got a little storyline message and it's got a compass enclosed. It's all lumpy mail driven direct response marketing. Okay, again these are the things that we've done in the past. It may or may not be the right strategy for you now, but I want to fill your mind with ideas of things to do. Okay, so they didn't, they didn't call us back. So this is the last time I'm going to bug you so you can get these little fake bugs. And we put a fake bug in the letter and it says start. The copy of the letter says hi, remember me? And again it's got the incentive in there, it's got some social proof that we've already sold out of some of the incentive items because we've got so many people responding, don't miss out type thing. It makes, it's that social proof, scarcity mentality, scarcity, social proof, big contributors in the promotional and marketing realm. You've got to understand that super, super important. So we ran those programs for years. We still fold them in and integrate them into everything that we're doing in our lost souls efforts. But we've upped our game since then. So nowadays the roadmap that we're on right now is our team identifies that a policy cancels, period, whether it be for non payment, whether it be for, you know, they made a bad decision and left for another company, whatever that might Be if it cancels. And we identify it through our data systems being up to date, which we invest a ton of time to make sure that our data is as clean and fresh as possible. Okay, we identify on day zero to day one that the policy cancels because we've got team members that are running that all the time. We immediately send them a letter. Okay, now we send them a letter via snail mail with the business reply envelope, which costs us no money to get it back unless they actually send it back. And immediately, at the same time, we send them a digital letter along with a survey. We send the survey with the snail mail letter and simultaneously the digital effort via email with the survey. Okay, so what does it say? Well, the day zero strategy says, hi, first name. Just wanted to say how sorry to hear that we lost your business. We're human, believe me, and we know that we could have missed something important to you. Whether it's due to our service, our communications, or even price, please know that it was not done intentionally. We'd be grateful if you'd hit reply to this email or click the Customer Satisfaction survey below to answer two quick questions and let us know how we can do better next time. Even if there's no way to earn your business back, we'd really hate to repeat the same mistake. Then click Customer Satisfaction survey. It goes right to a jot form and there it is. And ultimately, at the end of the day, that goes out. That's part of our strategy. And then it simply goes in. And if we don't. And by the way, that saves a ton. All right, so at the end of the day, if they don't respond to that or other things don't occur, they go right back into the funnel. They're entered into a Lost Souls campaign strategy that runs today 121 to day 305. And if they do respond, then it goes into a separate funnel and it goes from day 30 to day 31 to day 121 to day 305. And then we also always include them in our ongoing nurturing throughout the year. So they're automatically included in that funnel, which is our newsletters, our nurturing emails, our voice broadcast messages, and everything else that goes on our birthday programs. We endeavor to touch people 27 times a year to make sure that they feel the love, that they know that they're loved within our agency. And they stay in those funnels and we get business back because of just those funnels in addition to the communications that they get. So we've got this all built out. We've got the roadmap built out to help people in our programs design their lost souls campaigns to be a sweet mix of online and offline strategies to continue to reach the majority of the marketplace with that message, to continue to attract the kind of business that is the right kind of business to be able to convert. So remember, the grass is not always greener on the other side according to the marketplace. That's the feedback we've gotten over years. Again, it's in the top five sources of new business in our insurance agency business consistently, year after year. My great encouragement is make sure that you make it part of yours as well. You got this, you can do this and we can't wait to teach you to help you understand how to implement this effectively in your insurance agency business. I hope this has helped you today. Again, this is Mike Stromso. I am widely recognized as the leading author, speaker and coach for the independent insurance agency industry. You can find me@unstoppableprofitproducer.com if you're interested in attending a virtual or live event to learn how to grow your business, create wealth and have more freedom to live life on your own terms, please visit. The virtual event site is upfaststart.com that's upfaststart.com or if you're interested in attending our live event, Be Unstoppable bootcamp.com that's Be Unstoppable boot camp.com both events are designed to share with you some of the best money making strategies proven and developed over 35 years of research and in your industry to help you grow your business, create wealth so you can have more freedom to live life on your own terms. My great encouragement is my friends, it only takes two things, a decision and action to lead to your next win or your next lesson. We are here to help you minimize the lessons to create more wins for you. Thanks for joining us on the podcast. And please if you enjoy things that you learn on this podcast, please share with anybody and everybody out there. And if you're not subscribed, make sure that you also go to the top of unstoppable profit podcast.com that's unstoppable profitpodcast.com and hit the subscribe button to make sure that you don't miss any episodes that might be coming up. And we're out there on all the channels. Whether it be Google Play, Stitcher and the rest of the podcast channels. We're out there to continually bring you the strategies again to help you grow your business, create wealth so you too can have more freedom to live life on your own terms. Till next time my friends. Get out there. Make a difference, be unstoppable and leave no regrets. See you next time.

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