Verticals
A newsletter service for insurance agencies, built around the renewal calendar.
Your book renews whether you talk to it or not, and the year you go quiet is the year it shops. We write, design and mail the piece that keeps you in the house between renewals.
In this business, retention is the whole economics
An agency makes its money on the renewal, not the sale. You paid to acquire the household once — the acquisition cost is already sunk, and every year that household stays is close to pure margin. So the number that decides whether your book compounds or leaks is the share of policies that quietly renew.
The problem is that a policy renews by mail, from the carrier, with a premium on it. If the last thing a client heard from your agency was the declarations page, the premium increase is the entire relationship. That is the moment somebody shops. A monthly piece with your name on it changes what that envelope means when it lands.
Cross-sell is the cheapest growth you have and the easiest to forget
Most independent agencies write a lot of monoline auto. The same household needs home or renters, an umbrella, a boat, a rental property, sometimes a small commercial policy for the side business. You already have the name, the address, the driver history and the trust. Nobody has to be persuaded that you exist.
What stops it is that nobody calls. Producers work new business, service handles inbound, and the account rounding conversation is always next month. A newsletter is a standing reminder that runs without anyone deciding to run it.
- An auto-only household reads a plain piece on why an umbrella sits on top of both policies
- A renter who just bought reads the homeowners article the month they close
- A client with a teenager driving reads about the discount you already offer
- A small-business owner sees you write commercial and stops assuming you only do personal lines
The calendar writes half your issues for you
Insurance has a real seasonality, which is a gift for content. We build a twelve-month plan against it in the first week so you are never staring at a blank page.
For a Florida P&C agency, hurricane season starts June 1 and the inventory-and-photos article belongs in May, not September. The Medicare Annual Enrollment Period runs October 15 to December 7, so the September issue sets it up and the October issue is built around it. January is deductible resets. Tax season is when people notice the HSA. Storm-anniversary months are when claims stories actually get read.
Medicare books are the strongest case for paper
We say this on every page: print is not automatically better. For most industries the digital-only edition is the honest starting point. A Medicare book is the exception.
A 72-year-old beneficiary reads their mail, keeps a folder of it, and shows things to their spouse and their daughter. They are not fighting a 200-message inbox. If your book is weighted to Medicare Advantage and Supplement, the printed edition is doing something the email cannot, and the flipbook link then carries the adult children who found you online.
A P&C book skewing younger is a different call. There, digital-only plus a printed issue once or twice a year around renewal season is often the smarter spend — and we will say so.
Compliance: Medicare marketing gets reviewed, and we plan for that
Anything that markets Medicare Advantage or Part D plans is marketing material, which means your carriers and FMO have a review process and their own rules about what a piece may say, what it must disclose, and how plan benefits can be described. Some material needs to go through carrier review before it goes out.
We are a marketing shop, not your compliance department. What we do is build the schedule so review is a step and not a surprise: content is drafted early enough for you to send it up the chain, and we keep the plan-specific claims out of the general-interest pages so most of the issue is not waiting on anyone. Your compliance officer or FMO has the final word on every line, always.
What an issue actually contains
Four pages. It is not a brochure, and a client who feels sold to stops opening it.
- A short column from the principal in their own voice — we ghostwrite it from a twenty-minute call
- One useful article: how a deductible works, what an umbrella covers, what to do in the first hour after a wreck
- Agency news that makes you a real place — a new CSR, a licensing exam passed, the office moving
- One coverage gap named plainly, with an invitation to check rather than a pitch
- Something worth keeping: a claims checklist, a storm-prep list, a card with your after-hours number
Your time in this is about twenty minutes a month
You get a call, we write, you approve. We do the interview, the writing, the design, the print and mail run, the flipbook and the email version. Print and postage are billed to you at cost, with no markup — that is a pass-through, and on a large book it can be the bigger number of the two, so we size it with you before anything runs.
If you carry a Medicare book, the one thing we need from you is a realistic turnaround on carrier review. Everything else is ours.
When we are the wrong call
If you are a captive agent, your carrier almost certainly supplies approved marketing material and restricts what else you can send. Check that before you talk to anyone, including us.
If your book is under a few hundred households, the printed edition is hard to justify. Start digital-only, or start with the email list, and add print when the book is big enough that the postage is a rounding error against a single retained policy.
Questions
The things people ask before they hire us.
Sparingly, and only where you tell us to. Carrier and plan-specific claims are the part that needs review and the part that dates fastest. Most of the issue is coverage education and agency personality, which is both safer and more read.
Yes, and it should be. The Medicare Annual Enrollment Period runs October 15 to December 7. We plan the September issue to set expectations and the October issue to land in the first week of the window, which means drafting in August so carrier review has room.
It works better. One printed piece per address gets read by everyone in the house, which is exactly the audience you want for account rounding. We de-duplicate the mailing list by address so you are not paying twice to reach one kitchen table.
No, and it is not trying to. Carrier material sells a product. This sells your agency being the one that picks up the phone. Agencies that use both are using them for different jobs.
Yes. Digital-only is a real option at a lower price — the same ghostwritten issue as a flipbook link and an email, with no print or postage bill. For a younger P&C book that is often where we would start you.
Keep reading
Related pages
Send us your book mix and we will tell you what to mail.
Roughly how many households, how much of it is Medicare, and what renews when. We will come back with a twelve-month plan and a real number — including if digital-only is the better buy.
No pitch deck, no discovery-call gauntlet. One conversation, one straight answer.