Bidart & Ross Gets In the Mail

Investment consultants Bidart & Ross decided last year to stop making cold telemarketing calls to drum up leads for its advice about corporate 401(k) plans.

This way, reasons Mike Fleiner, partner in the Reno, NV firm, prospects could find out what Bidart had to offer while the company got an idea of the services prospects wanted.

So in October, Bidart sent an initial wave of promotional postcards to some 7,000 CEOs, CFOs and human resources managers. The cards went to names rented from specialized databases in the financial field.

Bidart's response rate was below 1% at deadline, but Fleiner expects it to pick up after the holidays. A second mailing is due early this year.

Despite the offerings' complex nature, cold calling had worked fairly well for Bidart in the past. “Most of the companies we called on were familiar with us,” he says, stressing that the campaign “is about creating relationships.”

The 6-inch by 9-1/2-inch cards, created by Ding Communications, directed recipients to two microsites (www.BuriedFees.com and www.Benefits4Whom.com).

The BuriedFees postcard, for example, was headlined “We know where they've buried your 401(k) fees. Below that was a pie chart with four sections — employee communications, compliance, administration and record keeping — and a fifth, the largest, which depicted a pile of dirt with a shovel in it.

On the reverse, the copy attempted to explain these fees and invited recipients to receive one of four white papers on 401(k) plans.

“We can track prospects through their responses to the Web sites and how many white papers they've downloaded,” Fleiner says.

Bidart closes sales of these services through consultants in its office. The cycle can take up to two years.

W

For the latest postal news, visit http://directmag.com/legal/postal/.