Update News for September 2016

Here is a quick run-down on what you will find in this bulletin:

• • Prepping www.term4sale.com For Changes

     

     

  • Why Would You Not Have Quotes On Your Own Website?

     

     

  • Understanding the Strategy At www.term4sale.com

     

     

  • Differences Between www.term4sale.com and www.termsampler.com

     

     

  • Selling The Consumer On The Compulife Subscriber

     

     

  • “More Info” becomes “Select and Continue”

     

     

  • The New Contact Page

     

     

These topics will be dealt with in more detail throughout this bulletin.

Prepping www.term4sale.com For ChangesJeremiah is making great progress on changes that we have coming to www.term4sale.com. We will be incorporating some of the “look and feel” changes that we introduced to our web quoting software, which you can see here:

www.termsampler.comThis is the web quoting version of Compulife which any Compulife subscriber can add to their website(s) for only $96 per year. If you have a website, and have not tried it before, you can request a 4 month free trial of it by emailing your request to:

service@compulife.comWhy Would You Not Have Quotes On Your Own Website?The pricing for the web quote option is ridiculously low because we have realistic expectations for how many sales the average agent’s website is capable of generating; NOT MANY. Why? Because you’re competing with thousands and thousands of other agents who are all trying to do the same thing, and they all want to be on page one of the search engines. The bad news: they won’t all fit on page one.

So what’s the point of an agent even having a website?

The reason is pretty simple, you look like a Neanderthal if you don’t have a website. And look at it this way, it’s a very inexpensive way for you to tell your prospects and clients more about who you are and what you do. And it’s hard to fit all that on a business card.

IMPORTANT:  Inexpensive means not paying thousands of dollars to build a website. We keep hearing these stories of the huge amounts of money agents spend for sites and we are simply amazed. There are less expensive ways to get it done. What really leads to enormous expense are those who “over think” their sites, and have their programmers making change after change after change. No one visiting a site analyzes it the way you think they do. They will decide, in a matter of seconds, whether they like it or hit the back button. Incidentally, that’s called a “bounce” and term4sale.com has a 20% bounce rate.

I remember the good old days, when I ran an agency (over 35 years ago before Compulife Software), that agents wanted me to produce brochures so that they could hand them out to prospects. They also wanted a place on the brochure where they could stamp their name on that brochure. Those brochures cost a lost of money per unit to produce. Now you can replace that brochure with a website and the costs of production are much, much lower (make sure you read the previous paragraph). Instead of trying to fit a resume on your business card, you just put the web site address on your business card. If your prospect wants more info, they go to your site.

So having a website is a no-brainer. But now the question is, for those consumers who visit your web site, “What is there on your website that will impress your site’s visitor?”. Offering live, instant, real-time life insurance quotes is something that packs a punch. And that punch only costs $96 per year. One sale ever 5 years pays for it, so you don’t need many sales to make it pay. And think about it, if over time visitors to your site like your site, and find it useful, maybe they’ll tell someone else about it.

I could go on, but I want to get back to term4sale. If you want to carry on the conversation about you website further, call Bob Barney at (888) 798-3488.

Understanding the Strategy At www.term4sale.comOver 19 years ago we recognized that it was going to be a huge challenge for any agent to have a serious presence on the internet. 19 years ago there were already players who were spending MILLIONS of dollars (yes, MILLIONS of dollars, I kid you not) on web sites offering term life insurance quotes and life insurance “direct” to the consumer. That got us thinking about what we could do to help our subscribers get over the hurdle of competing with those web based operations.

That’s when we put together the www.term4sale.com concept. The goal, give free UNBIASED, NO obligation quotes to consumers, and then make it easy to connect consumers to agents that use Compulife. That’s a WIN-WIN-WIN strategy:

• 1. Consumer wins – able to save money on their life insurance premiums.

 

• 2. Subscriber wins – generates a sale of life insurance they would not have generated otherwise

 

3. Compulife wins – you have to buy our software to participate.

In phone conversations with agents and consumers, I explain that www.term4sale.com is like a combination of a “Kelly Blue Book” for life insurance, where you can find out what insurance costs, and an “Angie’s List” for life insurance agents, where you can locate agents to buy life insurance from.

If you want to take time to read the testimonials from our subscribers, you will see it has been working as planned.

Testimonials from Compulife subscribersNOTE: When we receive a testimonial for a subscriber, we place the subscribers website address on their signature line. That’s called a “link” and you can’t have too many of those.

The ultimate success of www.term4sale.com depends on four things:

• 1. Get a consumer to go to the website

 

• 2. Get the consumer to run a quote

 

• 3. Get the consumer to get the list of agents

 

4. Get the consumer to complete the email form

We think we are doing pretty good with number 1 and 2, but the new style that Jeremiah is coming up with, together with a fully responsive and updated quote page, should increase use of the website, particularly by those with phones and tablets. That will help both 1 and 2.

Differences Between www.term4sale.com
and www.termsampler.comIn regard to the quotes themselves, there will be two key differences between the www.term4sale.com and the web quote option found at www.termsampler.com.

First, there will be no life insurance company logos shown in www.term4sale.com quotes. Logos are trademarks (most registered) of the life insurance companies that they belong to. We don’t want to get into any legal skirmishes with life insurance companies regarding the use of their logos. We could take the time and trouble to ask for permission but most would simply not agree.

For example, in the case of life insurance company forms, where we are again dealing with material that has the copyright protection for the life insurance companies, most companies will not agree to allow us to include their forms in our forms engine. Even though there is NO CHARGE to the companies, and even though our form service is free for them and their agents, when we asked companies for permission to use their application forms in our software, only about 25% of the companies have agreed.

We do provide the logos in the agent web quote option because we believe that agents only quote those products for the companies that they are appointed to sell. In a very real sense, those quotes are produced by the agent’s site, and the agent controls which carriers are displayed in those quote. We reason that if you have been appointed as an agent for a company, there should be no problem with you using the company’s logo in quotes. If they have a problem, they need to take that up with you.

Second, there is a new feature in agent quotes where the website user can modify the face amount and/or type of insurance in the quote, from within the quote itself. Many subscribers like and wanted that feature in their webquote option, particularly those who have other agents using their site for quotes.

In the case of www.term4sale.com, while we don’t mind agents using the site there is a limit to what we want to provide to agents who are too cheap to pay for Compulife.

Incidentally, agents who use www.term4sale.com probably account for the majority of traffic; we estimate from 1/2 to 2/3. While the agents using www.term4sale.com are getting a free-roll, their traffic counts to the site traffic and that keeps us doing well in the search engines. That means those agents are helping YOU because search engines account for a significant number of first time consumer visitors. To sum it up, the agents too cheap to buy our software are helping subscribers to sell more insurance as a result of consumer contacts from www.term4sale.com. While we don’t want to seem ungrateful to the free-rollers, there is a limit to how attractive or easy the site is for use by agents. Also, we want to keep the site as simple and basic as possible so that it is NOT confusing for the consumer who visits the site.

Selling The Consumer On The Compulife SubscriberThis brings us to the question, “How do we improve number 3 and 4?”:

• 1. Get a consumer to go to the website

 

• 2. Get the consumer to run a quote

 

• 3. Get the consumer to get the list of agents

 

4. Get the consumer to complete the email form

That’s what I want to focus on here

NOTE:  If reading the following summary of what’s coming gives you any thoughts or ideas, we are anxious to hear from you. You can email your thoughts to service@compulife.com or give Bob Barney a call at (888) 798-3488. Assuming that you participate and have listings at www.term4sale.com, we have a shared interest in the success of the site.

Currently, when the quote results are displayed at www.term4sale.com, there are two ways for a consumer to get a list of agents:

andEach button appears to do the same thing, but they actually have different functions. The “Find an Agent” button appears very near the top of the quote page, and it is the first “action button” that a consumer can use. When a consumer clicks on that button, a list of 3 agents is displayed just as happen with the “More Info” button; but there is ONE very key difference. Next to each individual agent in the “Find An Agent” list is a “Contact” button. The “Contact” button does NOT display in the “More Info” function. If the consumer clicks on the “Contact” button, then an email can be sent to that agent, and ONLY to that agent.

As it turns out, the greatest user of the “Contact” button was David Rutstein. Some may recall the email that David Rutstein may have sent to you last year through the www.term4sale.com website. He identified himself under his false name “David Gordon“. One of our subscribers was upset about it and filed a complaint with a website called the ripoffreport. Here is the complaint:

NAAIP Nathaniel Goldwasser, President, NAAIP.org
Stole some of my identifying information NationwideFollowing that complaint, I posted comments clarifying facts related to the incident. You can scroll down the complaint to read those.

Anyway, Mr. Rutstein (aka Gordon) never obtained Compulife subscriber email addresses from our system. What he did was use the “Contact” button to email individual agents who he had pre-listed by systematically going through term4sale using different zip codes, to display lists of agents. From those lists he made his own list of individual agents connecting each one to a particular zip code.

After he compiled his list (remember, he didn’t have your email address) he set out at midnight EST, on a Friday night, to systematically use www.term4sale.com to run a quote, click the “Find an Agent” button, locate the agent that he wanted to email, then clicked on the “Contact” button. He then copied and pasted into the email form a pre-drafted message. The same message was then sent individually to each of the 100’s of agent he contacted. I know this because we get a copy of each and every email contact that goes through term4sale.

IMPORRTANT:  We NEVER provide term4sale email requests or consumer information to third parties. The email copies are our current method of auditing and monitoring requests that are made through the site.

Apart from Mr. Rutstein, we have found that over the past few years that VERY FEW consumers actually contact individual agents using that “Contact” button from the “Find An Agent” listings. The VAST MAJORITY of consumers use the “More Info” button because they want to find out more about a product that they think they might want to buy. That brings up the list of agents, with the email form that sends an email to ALL THREE agents on the list. For the VAST MAJORITY of consumers, that is the process they use, NOT the individual agent contact.

Therefore, we have decided to abandon the “Find An Agent” listing function, with the contact button for individual agents. We will still have a “Find An Agent” button but it will be used more sparingly in the quote explanation than before and will simply go to the “More Info” page.

“More Info” becomes “Select and Continue”In the coming www.term4sale.com improvements and changes, when a quote result is displayed, the “More Info” button will be replaced by a new “Select and Continue” button. The new button will be MUCH MORE PROMINENT next to each product, and we hope will be a better call to action.

One of the suggestions we can anticipate hearing from subscribers is to use an even stronger and simpler button such as “Buy Now”. The problem is that we stress over and over again that www.term4sale.com does NOT SELL life insurance. We are not agents, and we are not licensed to do that. So while “Buy Now” might be stronger and simpler, it is NOT what we do. After much discussion and debate we came up with “Select and Continue”. It conveys the idea that the consumer is choosing a product and continuing in the process. We just aren’t saying what that process is.

If you have a better suggestion than “Select and Continue”, we’d love to hear it. If you are the first in with it, and we choose to use it, you will get a 6 FREE months subscription added to the current annual subscription to our PC software. If you are buying other options, we will average the corresponding value of that, and add that to your entire subscription.

The New Contact PageThe current contact page, which actually displays the three agent names, is titled: “Contact Request”

We will be abandoning that title with this new headline:

An independent agent can be a consumer’s greatest asset when buying life insurance.following by this new paragraph:

• Many agents sell for only one life insurance company. Finding an agent that actively and routinely sells life insurance for more than one life insurance company can be a challenge but it is key to getting competitive products and good advice. The agents on this list have purchased the Compulife Quotation System, a more complex “agent version” of the software that was used to produce the quotes on this website. We strongly encourage you to give the following agents an opportunity to compete for your business.

That is followed by this important disclaimer:

• NOTE: Not all agents sell for all companies, which is why we suggest contacting all three that you see listed here

which is then followed by the list of agents.

Once again, if you have any suggestions, to tighten up or improve these messages, we would love to hear from you. There is no reward on this one, other than you might get more contacts from www.term4sale.com as a result of a stronger call to action.

the email forms is then preceded by:

• Once you have completed the information in the following form, and click the “Submit Contact Form” button, each of the agents listed above (and ONLY those agents – see privacy statement below) will be sent an email and advised that you would like them to contact you.

and followed by:

• • IMPORTANT: Neither Term4Sale, Inc. or it’s parent company Compulife Software, Inc. sell life insurance. Compulife provides life insurance comparison software to thousands of life insurance agents throughout the United States and Canada.

 

• By submitting the above “Contact Request” you agree to the privacy policy of Term4Sale, Inc.; Term4Sale or any of the 3 agents listed on the Contact Request page may contact you at the phone number(s) that you enter on this webpage, and at any numbers that you may provide later; a call to you may include the use of automatic dialing systems employed by the agents listed in order to market their products and services and/or for any purpose, including to keep in touch with you should you become a customer of one of the agents listed; if unable to reach you when you are called, you agree that Term4Sale, Inc. or the agents listed may leave you a pre-recorded message so that you will know that we called and so that you have a way to call back. This electronically signed consent is not required to obtain a quote from Term4Sale, Inc. or to buy anything from any of the agents that we have listed here. Alternatively, you may reach Term4Sale, Inc. at (888) 798-3488 or call any of the agents at the phone numbers listed above.

In summary, we think this new process and message should lead to more consumers reaching out to Compulife subscribers through www.term4sale.com. The question is, what do you think? Let us know by emailing us at:

service@compulife.com