How often do you include buckslips in your policyholder communications? Probably pretty often if you’re like most insurers. Every communication with a policyholder is an opportunity for marketing. If you’re already sending a policy update, you can include a buckslip, a small slip of paper containing a focused marketing message, along with it. The rationale is sound, but how efficient are buckslips?

We’ve been looking into this and have figured out there’s a better way to include marketing messages in policyholder communications than relying on buckslips.

After some analysis, we came up with the idea to insert special marketing artwork that normally would appear on a buckslip inline within the text of your base policyholder communication.

There are several advantages to moving in this direction:

Inventory savings - eliminating buckslips means you no longer need inventory that’s preprinted, staged, and coded for dynamic pull. By the same token, you no longer have to worry about overruns or underruns impacting your business. You can turn on or turn off the inline printing at any time.
Disaster recovery efficiencies - If there’s a natural disaster and we need to suddenly shift your print to a backup facility, you no longer need to worry about ‘missing’ insert. Inline marketing messages can be transferred just as easily as your core policyholder communications. There’s no need to store pre-printed buckslips at your backup printing sites, which can be a difficult process to maintain.
Overall costs - a single buckslip insert runs 11 cents (adding in overhead for inventory management and storage). Contrast that with an additional printed page of the core policyholder communication, which is a more cost effective option.
More space for marketing messages - Buckslip inserts are 3.5”x8.5”. Using the cost analysis in the above bullet, you could effectively include two thirds more information for the price of one by paying for a single added page within your larger communication.
Flexibility - utilizing inline printing of marketing messages allows for immediate change. For example, when COVID started, certain states created new programs to help policyholders pay their bills or receive aid. Carriers had to quickly add text to their invoices. We were able to add new letters, not just inserts containing mostly promotional artwork, to the policies to inform policyholders of their COVID rights. We can very quickly pivot to remove or include new artwork, letters, etc. much faster than permanently changing a document from within your policy admin system.
Policyholder awareness - it’s easier for a policyholder to ignore an insert that’s clearly not part of the core communication they’re receiving than it is to ignore something that’s embedded as part of that communication.

With all of these benefits, the time to move away from buckslips is now. Join us in moving to a system that’s more efficient and effective.