Direct mail
$250–$750
per acquired policy
- Print, postage & list costs paid up front
- 2–4 weeks before you know anything
- Typical response under 1%
- No conversation — just a phone number, maybe
Compare
The same growth budget,
three ways.
Direct mail, shared lead vendors, or Homefield. Here's the honest math on all three — including where the other two are genuinely better, and when we'd tell you not to hire us.
The real math
What agencies actually pay to acquire one policy
Nobody quotes you a cost per acquisition — they quote you a cost per postcard, or per shared lead. Here's what the same acquired customer costs across the three ways agencies buy growth today.
Shared lead vendors
$180–$400
per acquired policy
- Same lead sold to 4–8 agents simultaneously
- You're racing the dial, not selling
- Form-fill intent, not a real reply
- Monthly minimums and platform fees
Homefield
$160–$200
per acquired policy
- $40 per lead at a 20–25% close rate
- Yours alone — locked by ZIP code
- They replied. In writing. Asking for a quote.
- Pay per lead. Nothing else.
Roughly a third of a direct mail campaign, for a lead that already answered you.
Direct mail and shared-lead ranges reflect commonly cited industry figures for P&C personal lines. Homefield's figure assumes $40/lead at the close rates our agencies report — your results depend on your follow-up.
Side by side
The same growth budget, three ways
| Metric | Direct mail | Shared lead vendors | Homefield |
|---|---|---|---|
| Cost per acquisition | $250–$750 | $180–$400 | $160–$200 |
| Time to first lead | 2–4 weeks | Same day | ~21 days, then continuous |
| Exclusivity | Anyone can mail the same street | Sold to 4–8 agents | Yours alone, ZIP-locked |
| What you receive | A response, if you're lucky | A form submission | A written reply asking for a quote |
| Whose brand is on it | Yours | Theirs | Yours |
| Targeting control | Geographic, broad | Whatever they route you | ZIP, value, renewal date, income |
| Commitment | Per-drop minimums | Monthly spend minimums | None after onboarding |
| Wasted spend | Every non-responder | Every lead the other 7 agents win | You pay per qualified reply only |
Deep dive
Against direct mail
The economics of mail are simple and brutal: you pay full price for every homeowner who throws the postcard away, and more than 99% of them do.
- You pay for every non-responder. Print, postage, and list costs are spent before the first mailbox opens — the 99% who ignore you fund the campaign.
- Response runs under 1%. A good drop is a fraction of a percent, and "response" often means a phone call you still have to convert.
- You're dark for 2–4 weeks. No signal, no iteration, no idea whether the creative or the list is the problem until the money is gone.
- There's no conversation. At best you get a phone number. A Homefield lead is a written reply you can respond to in their words.
Where mail still wins
Brand saturation. If your budget is effectively unlimited and the goal is every mailbox in the county seeing your name twelve times a year, mail does that and we don't. We put your name only in front of homeowners approaching renewal — narrower by design. If blanket awareness is the strategy, keep mailing.
Deep dive
Against shared lead vendors
EverQuote, QuoteWizard, MediaAlpha — the model is the same everywhere: one form fill, sold to 4–8 agencies at once, and the clock starts.
- The 4–8 buyer race. The lead isn't yours — it's a head start you share with up to seven competitors who bought the exact same record.
- Speed-to-dial is the whole game. Industry practice is to call within minutes or lose. You're not selling insurance; you're winning a reflex contest.
- Form-fill intent is thin. Someone clicked an ad and typed their ZIP to see a number. That's curiosity, not a request. A written reply asking what you'd charge is a request.
- Minimums and platform fees. You commit to monthly spend before you've seen a single lead's quality. We bill per qualified reply, nothing else.
Where vendors still win
Instant volume on demand. If you need leads this afternoon, they will sell you leads this afternoon — no warmup, no list build, dial the budget up or down at will. We take about 21 days to first lead. When speed matters more than exclusivity, they're genuinely the faster tap to open.
Deep dive
Against doing it yourself
Fair question, because every piece of this is buyable. Homeowner data, sending tools, warmup services — none of it is secret and none of it is exotic.
You could license homeowner records, stand up sending domains, subscribe to a warmup service, and write three emails. Plenty of agencies have tried. The parts that look hard — the data, the tooling — aren't the parts that break.
What breaks is the operations layer underneath:
- Deliverability management. Keeping dozens of inboxes and domains healthy is a daily job. One bad send pattern and your mail lands in spam for weeks — and nothing on the dashboard tells you why.
- Reply classification at volume. Every reply has to be read and graded — interest, auto-reply, bounce, opt-out, hostile — fast enough that real interest gets to a producer while it's warm. At a few hundred replies a month this becomes someone's actual job.
- The warmup runway. Fresh domains need 6–8 weeks of warmup before they can send at meaningful volume — one to two months of paying for tools and data with zero leads to show for it. (Our clients skip most of that runway: we maintain pre-warmed sending pools, which is how first leads arrive around day 21 instead of month two.)
When DIY is the right call
If you have an ops person who genuinely loves this work, consider it. The math can work — you'd keep our margin. What most agencies discover is that they don't have that person, and a producer doing deliverability triage between quotes is the most expensive version of "free." But if you do have them, we're not going to pretend the arithmetic says otherwise.
Fit
When we're not the right fit
We'd rather tell you on this page than bill you for three months first. If any of these describes your agency, don't book the call.
Not a fit
Territories under ~100 ZIPs of real population
The model runs on renewal volume. Below roughly 100 populated ZIP codes there simply aren't enough homeowners hitting a renewal window each month to produce steady leads — you'd pay onboarding for a trickle. Rural agencies with wide, thin ground usually do better elsewhere.
Not a fit
No capacity to quote within a day
Leads decay. A homeowner who wrote back this morning expects an answer today — quote them same-day and they close at the rates on this site; let the reply sit for three days and you're just another cold email. If nobody on your team can turn quotes around inside a day, the leads will be wasted on you.
Not a fit
Life- and health-only shops
We do homeowner P&C. That's the data, the timing model, and the copy — all of it is built around a home policy renewing. If your book is life or health and you can't write a homeowners policy, our leads are worth nothing to you, and we won't sell them to you.
No switching required
Run us alongside what you already do
You don't have to believe our table. Keep your current channel running for 60 days, put us next to it, and track cost per acquired policy on both — your numbers, your CRM, not our marketing page. Then decide. There's no contract, so if we lose on your math, walking away costs nothing.
Let's see if your ZIPs are open.
Fifteen minutes. We'll pull your territory live on the call, show you real replies from agencies your size, and tell you honestly if this beats what you're already running.