Decide whether the goal is awareness or a conversation
A mailed piece can put your agency’s name in a household’s hands. An email can invite a written response that stays attached to a conversation. Neither delivery event, by itself, is a qualified lead or a written policy.
If broad awareness is the goal, assess reach and the role of repeated exposure. If quote conversations are the goal, track requests that progress through your agency’s workflow. Avoid treating a mailing response rate and an email close rate as though they measure the same stage.
List the costs each program actually includes
For direct mail, ask about data, creative work, printing, postage, tracking, and any minimum drop size. For a managed email program, ask about setup, sending, qualification, volume commitments, software access, and any recurring fees. Keep your agency’s follow-up labor visible in both comparisons.
Homefield bills home insurance campaigns per qualified reply. Its current rates are $35 per lead on Starter for 60–99 leads per month, $30 on Elite Growth for 100–199, and $25 on Scale for 200+. The minimum is 60 leads and $2,100 per month. These are Homefield prices, not estimates for the whole email market. See the full pricing details.
Understand the timing signal
A relevant reason to contact a homeowner matters regardless of the channel. Homefield models a potential home insurance renewal window from public closing-anniversary information and aims to send 30–45 days before it.
The model does not establish the actual expiration date of a policy. A carrier change or mid-term rewrite can move the date. Your approved message should invite a comparison when it is relevant rather than assert a fact the record does not confirm. Read the renewal model and its limits.
Compare what arrives with the response
Ask whether your team can identify the original message, the property, the homeowner’s request, and the next action. A written email reply can preserve that context, but the agency still needs to gather whatever information is required for a valid quote.
Homefield provides the full email conversation and property context in its dashboard and connected delivery tools. The agent stays copied on every email. Phone numbers, when provided, are supplemental; the agency must evaluate its own calling or texting obligations.
Define exclusivity precisely
Running a campaign in an area does not automatically prevent another company from marketing there. Ask what the agreement protects. With Homefield, one home insurance agency holds each assigned ZIP in its network while active and in good standing, and the qualified replies are not resold.
This does not stop a homeowner from independently contacting other agencies or prevent unrelated companies from advertising in the same neighborhood. Clear expectations make territory protection easier to evaluate.
Run a comparison with consistent measurement
Give each channel its own source label and response tracking. Use the same definitions for a qualified conversation, an issued quote, and a written policy. Compare groups with similar time to convert and note differences in audience, season, carrier appetite, and follow-up staffing.
Track total spend, response volume, quotes, policies, and agency time. A channel that creates more responses can still be less efficient if the requests do not fit your agency. A channel that creates fewer responses may still fail if acquisition cost exceeds the value of the business you write.
“For the money and staff time we put into this channel, how many appropriate quote opportunities and written policies did we gain?”
Use your agency’s measured result. Do not substitute a vendor’s broad cost claim for your own records.
Homefield’s first leads typically begin around day 21 after setup. Plan any channel comparison around its actual launch time rather than assuming immediate full volume. Calculate projected cost per policy or check whether your territory fits.