Hey everybody. Andy Stickel here. I am taking a look at this flier here, which, I believe, is actually mailed through the post office to potential clients trying to get them to attend a free seminar where you are teaching about living trust and long-term care and all that type of stuff.

Overall, I think that the content in here is actually really good. There are a couple of things that I would probably do just to make this pop a little bit more and probably have a little bit more of an impact. And I think a big part of what’s going to actually increase the effectiveness of this flier. I’m not saying this flier is ineffective. It might be effective., but one thing you can do, especially if you are mailing it to people, the one thing that you have to do is actually create some sort of curiosity. Because whenever you mail something, the biggest obstacle is always getting people to actually open the thing that you’re sending out, and the way you do that is by inserting some sort of lumpy object into the flier. Here is a perfect example. A criminal defense attorney could do something like put one of those green army men inside the envelope, where you can go on Amazon and buy a bag of probably 500 for $20, maybe even more than that, and you can put a green army man inside of the letter. And then people get it and see this lumpy package and they’re like, “What is inside of here?” And then you can tie it together saying, “We’ll go to war against these criminal charges” or something like that. You could do a pen. There are all kinds of stuff that you could put in there. But that’s one way that you can actually increase the open rate of these just to get more people to see them. Now, once people do actually see them… For me, initially, the biggest problem that I have with this is that it’s like a giant block of text. And I think the content in here is actually good. But most people don’t want to read a giant block of text. You guys have obviously done your homework on this. “Learn why a will is not enough.” I’m guessing that a lot of people that you talk to probably think that a will is enough and they have a will. “Don’t lose what you’ve worked for to long-term care, the probate courts, and the IRS. Attend our free seminar on living trust and long-term care to learn the benefits for you and your family. No planning equals big problems. You may have heard about living trust. You may have been told that they are only for the wealthy. That’s not true.” That’s actually a really good objection. So what I would do is I would probably set this up more like an infographic rather than a just big flier like this. I would definitely add some more color to it and I would add a lot more bullet points that allow people to categorize things.

MythBusters – break it all down

“You may have heard about living trust before and you may have been told that they are only for the wealthy. Not true. If you own a home or more than $80,000 in assets or if you’re 40 years old or if you have kids…” Do you know what I mean? You could have a section that says, “Who needs a living trust?” or “Who is at risk of losing tens of thousands of dollars if they don’t have a living trust?” and then have some bullet points with checkmarks–homeowners, small business owners, parents, anyone with more than $80,000 in assets, anyone over 40 years old. You can do that type of stuff. Now, another thing you might want to really focus on is to think about all the things that they could lose. Fear of loss is a very powerful motivator. “Learn the truth about Medicaid and how to protect your assets. You will also learn about how the Medicare and Medicaid systems work and how a properly written plan can help avoid losing all of your assets if you need long-term care in a nursing home stay.” What I might do is I would probably tie this more to a number. I would say, “How to lose your assets? Did you know that the average nursing home costs $650 per day? And the average person has $250,000 in savings, which basically means that they have two and a half years in a nursing home and then they’re out of money. And then they’re going to have to go into Medicaid and they’re going to have to lose their assets.” Do you know what I mean? I would do something like that. A perfect example is – this isn’t in estate planning – we had a client who does nursing license defense. So he actually defends who are in danger of having their licenses revoked by the state nursing board. What we did is we created a presentation for him that basically showed… Now, remember, fear of loss is extremely powerful. It’s an extremely powerful motivator. The average that he defended was around 40 years old. The average nurse works until they’re maybe 65. We were able to figure out that, on average, if you lose your nursing license, it’s going to cost you about $400,000 over the course of your career. And that’s what we really led with. That was our big marketing message. It was basically, “Look. Yes, it costs you $4000 for me to defend your nursing license. However, that $4000 pales in comparison to the $400,000 that you’re going to lose if you lose your nursing license.” You can do that same type of thing with this. And you don’t even necessarily have to talk about the cost of your services right now. Really, this is just about, “Here’s how the average person loses x amount when… They lose 35% of their assets when trust has to go into probate or when a will has to go into probate.” That’s one of the things that I would do. I would probably make this a lot more visual. I would break it up with bullet points. “You may think that it’s only for the wealthy…” That’s actually a great point. For estate planning clients, we’ve always had somewhere in there, “Most people think estate planning is for old, rich people. Well, that’s not true. Because if you have kids, if you have a small business, if you have $80,000 or more in assets, if you’re over 40, you want to make sure that you have this in place.” I think it’s good. I would just make it a little easier to digest the information with bullet points. Let me just read a little bit more here. I’m having a hard time going through this whole thing just because of the fact that there’s so much text. I really like the chart that you did. “With living estate planning, your estate can transfer quickly to your family upon your death without the expense and delay of probate. You can preserve your IRA and retirement accounts and reduce income tax to beneficiaries. You’ll avoid guardianship if you become ill or incapacitated. Your estate will run as you direct it. You can avoid spending down all of your assets.” The other thing that I would do absolutely is I would take this into an app called the Hemingway. Let me pull this over here. And here’s what you have to remember: most people read at a 3rd-grade level, believe it or not. And you also have to remember that a confused mind always says no. You go to the Hemingway app. Let’s take even just these bullet points right here. Let me copy this and paste that in here. What Hemingway app allows you to do is it allows you to simplify your writing. It’s hemingwayapp.com. It’s free. You can see this actually written at a 10th-grade level. You can see right here – it’s highlighted in yellow – one of the sentences is hard to read. What you want to do is you want to take this stuff in here and you want to de-lawyer-fy it. Basically, what I mean by that is stop writing like a lawyer and start writing like a real person. You don’t want people to have to work to think about what you’re trying to say. “Your estate can transfer quickly to your family upon your death without the expense and delay of probate.” Let’s see if we can get rid of that quickly. “Your estate can transfer quickly to your family upon your death without the expense and delay of probate.” That’s pretty good. Then I would go to this next one here. Actually, some of the stuff here… Let’s see. “You can preserve your IRA.” That’s not highlighting. I’m copying from a PDF. This is actually pretty good. I’m just taking some examples here. Let’s see if we can do this one. “Without a proper plan, the government can decide if you live or die.” I would say, “Without a written plan…” “Decide if you live or die…” That’s good. “The court system will decide what happens to you and your money if you become incapacitated.” You could see this is a long sentence. I always say, “the courts.” Or you can even say, “a judge.” “A judge will decide what happens to you and your money if you become incapacitated.” “The courts will decide what happens to your assets and your family when you die.” You can play around with this. Like you can see, it’s still a Grade 5 level right here. You can play around with that. And it actually is pretty decent now that I’m looking at it. But that’s the whole thing. You want to make sure that this entire thing runs through the Hemingway app and there’s no color anywhere. You want to aim for a 3rd-grade level. 5th grade is okay. But you always want to aim for 3rd grade. Because you gotta always remember a confused mind says no. Let’s see. Another thing that you could do also is you could add a frequently asked questions section. The frequently asked questions section would be really helpful. What you can do is take every objection that people would have for coming to the seminar and answer them infrequently asked questions. “Is there going to be a sales pitch?” “Are you going to feed us?” A lot of times people do these things at Ruth’s Chris Steak House and everything. These actually might not be objections. Let me think about this. Whatever the objections are. “How long is it going to be?” I don’t know. I’m drawing a blank right now. But anything you can think of that would be an objection, which would be a reason why somebody would not come to this. I would create a frequently asked questions section for that. To summarize, basically, I think you’ve got a lot of really good stuff here. What I would really do is I’d really focus on probably making it more visual, breaking it up with bullet points rather than just big paragraphs. Everything that you have written here, I would also run through the Hemingway app. And if you can get a graphic designer… But I think that you can go to Pinterest, for example, and you can see examples of infographics. Let me just show you. These are infographics. You can have stuff that looks like this. It just looks really nice. And you can get a graphic designer. You can basically put all this information in there and you can have a graphic designer create a flier that looks really good like this with all that information. You can go to Upwork. Actually, one that I really like is graphically.io. This is a company that we’ve been using lately where, basically, it’s like all you can eat graphic design and it’s $299 or something. I’m not affiliated with them. This is just who we use. It’s really cool. How much is it? $149 a month and it’s unlimited graphic design. It’s really good. That’s what I would do. I would probably do that. And then I would also add a frequently asked questions section with questions and answers basically addressing every single objection that somebody has as a reason that they wouldn’t actually come to this event. Another thing you can do is if you have people that have RSVPed for this… I don’t see any instructions. Oh. “Seating is limited. Call to reserve your seats now.” Here’s the other thing I would do. I would go back through the last several of these that you did where you sent out this flier and you had people that RSVPed and then didn’t show up. I would call them and ask them why they didn’t show up. Because what will happen is you’ll start finding objections that you didn’t know existed. That’s something that I would definitely do.

Address your objectives!

Once you know those, then you can actually go through and you can address those objects. Because this entire thing is about objections. One objection is, “I don’t want to read this thing.” “Okay. I’m going to create an infographic and I’m going to break it up using bullet points.” The other thing you could do – and this might be really beneficial also – is to do an ask campaign. I want to show you exactly what that is. I did a presentation recently. Let me see if I can find this. I did a presentation recently where I did a webinar and it was all about Reviews software. Let me see if I can find this on my Google Drive here. Basically, I was creating a webinar where I was going to teach lawyers how to get more reviews for their law firm. And at the end of it, I was going to sell a brand new software that I’m currently developing. It’s a software called Review Judge. I did a big pitch at the end of it and ended up making about $50,000 on the webinar. But what I did prior to the webinar is I sent this survey out to a lot of people. I sent it out to like a thousand people and I got probably like a hundred responses. But these responses are what I based the entire software stack on. Everything on the webinar was based on these answers. Because once I knew what the problems were and what the concerns were, then I could tailor my message to those exact things. If you take a look at this… “Do you want to get more client reviews for your law firm?” The reason I ask this question is that if the answer is no, then I know to ignore the rest of their response. You could see I got 89 responses. “What do you think are the biggest benefits of having reviews for your law firm?” “What’s holding you back from getting/having more reviews?” “Is there anything outside of your control that is stopping you and what?” “What have you tried before that hasn’t worked?” “What’s the number one thing you want to learn?” “Have you ever spent money on a review software?” “What’s the number one fear that you want to avoid at all costs?” “Name three more things you want to learn.” “If you’d like to participate in the webinar, leave your email here.” And we got a ton of responses. And based on these responses, we were able to see recurring themes. And based on those recurring themes, I was then able to craft my presentation and address all the issues and concerns and desires and fears that people had. And the result is we ran an hour-long presentation and made about $50,000. That’s really the best way to do presentations. And that’s how I would do yours. Not even just getting people there. But I would also do a survey like this. That way, you can use that information and put together a better presentation because you already know what people are thinking. There’s a lot more if we could get into this. Sorry. I was a little bit scatterbrained. It’s the end of the day for me. But hopefully, you got some value out of this. If you have any questions, just let me know. Thanks.