How to follow up after a Medicare seminar

Medicare seminar follow-up is where a seminar earns its money. Confirm and remind every registrant, ask each one a question before the event, then call attendees and no-shows twice a day for 14 days with a separate script for each group. Count your agents' follow-up hours as part of the cost, so you know which seminars pay for themselves.

Say two agents run the same seminar in the same room. One calls each attendee once, leaves a voicemail, and moves on. The other keeps calling until each person books or says no. With the same invitations, venue and presentation, the second agent has written several policies a few weeks later and the first has written none.

An office lead at a Medicare agency we work with sees the first pattern often: agents try each registrant once or twice and give up. The room is the expensive, visible part of a seminar, but the calls in the two weeks after it decide whether that spend comes back.

Step 1: Choose a venue people already trust

Public libraries are a good first choice. They're free or cheap, people know where they are, and a library setting tells retirees this is an education event. Community centres, senior centres and the private room at a local restaurant work too.

When you need venues in several towns, don't leave it to one coordinator searching by hand. Kevin's approach is to treat local venues as an outreach list: choose the locations around each agent, pull the venues near them, and email them in a sequence the way you would any prospect. The coordinator gets back hours for calls.

If you send that outreach from a new email domain, warm the domain up first. Kevin's rule of thumb is 14 to 21 days before you send at any volume, and about two months before you reach 1,000 emails a day. Warm two or three domains at once so one bad week doesn't stop everything. Good email deliverability is what gets your invitation into an inbox at all.

Step 2: Write the invitation as education

Retirees get plenty of mail from people who want to sell them something. Your invitation has to say plainly that this event is different. This is the copy Kevin drafted for a library seminar on Social Security and Medicare:

"A few important things to know, no cost educational event, no obligation, no sales pitch. The goal is simple, help you make better, more confident decisions." — Kevin Beeftink, founder of Kevlex Digital

Keep that promise in the room. Under the CMS marketing guidelines, an event you advertise as educational can't include sales or plan-specific marketing. If you want to present plans, run it as a marketing event and follow those rules, including the TPMO disclaimer where it applies. Check the wording with your Medicare marketing compliance lead before anything goes out.

Send the invitation to two groups:

• Your current list for the area: clients, T65 prospects and recent leads. Our T65 campaign walkthrough covers how to build that list each month.
• Everyone who registered for an earlier seminar and never came, or came and never booked. They're the cheapest names you have.

A Medicare agent on a client team made that second point in one line:

"We've already spent the money to get their information why not send it to them?" — A Medicare agent on a client team

Before the real send, build a test list with your own number and email and those of one or two teammates. Send to the test list first, check every link, merge field and time, and then send to everyone.

Step 3: Confirm, ask a question, then remind

Your event messages are the first part of the follow-up. Kevin builds the same playbook into every event: an invitation, a confirmation and a reminder, each written for that campaign. A sequence for a Tuesday seminar might look like this:

The question text sets up your no-show call. A template, adapted from a text an agent sends after every registration:

Hi [First name], we're looking forward to seeing you at the Medicare and Social Security seminar on [day] at the [venue]. Is there a specific topic you'd like us to cover?

If they answer, you know what matters to them. If they then don't show, you have a personal reason to call: "You asked about Part D costs, and I've got that answer for you."

Two practical notes. Registrants who gave you their number for the event still need TCPA consent on file for marketing texts; the FCC's guide to unwanted calls and texts sets out the basics. And in your opt-out line, Kevin prefers "Reply STOP to opt out" over "unsubscribe", which reads more like spam.

Step 4: Split attendees and no-shows the next morning

The morning after the seminar, sort every registrant into one of two lists in your insurance CRM: attended and didn't attend. Both lists go into the same dialing system. Only the script changes.

For attendees, the call books a one-to-one review. Reference something they asked or reacted to in the room. For Medicare Advantage or Part D appointments, get a Scope of Appointment signed before you meet.

For no-shows, the call invites them to the next date. Kevin treats no-shows as a list to win back. A no-show who registered was interested enough to give you their details. Something on the day got in the way.

Step 5: Use a short no-show script

Keep it short. This call script is based on the one Kevin wrote for an agent team's no-show campaign:

1. "Hi [First name], it's [Agent] from [Agency]."
2. "I saw you signed up for our [topic] seminar on [date]. Unfortunately we didn't see you there."
3. "I'd love to invite you to our next one on [date and time] at [venue]. It's in person."
4. "Can I put your name down?"

If they asked a topic question in step 3, add one line before the invitation: "You'd asked about [topic], and we'll cover it again." If they say yes, confirm the seat and send the confirmation text while you're still on the phone. If they say they can't make any date, offer a one-to-one call instead.

Kevin's edits to an agent's first draft were small. Confirm the address only if they don't remember it, and say clearly that the meeting is in person. When a script is working, leave it alone.

Step 6: Run the follow-up cadence for 14 days

Each agent gets two call lists a day in GoHighLevel, or whichever CRM you use: one for the morning and one for the afternoon.

"That means twice a day, he'll have a list to work through, one for the first half of the day, one for the second half of the day. This will reset every day until he's able to connect with the lead and set the appointment." — Kevin Beeftink, founder of Kevlex Digital

The rules that make it work:

• Each call ends with an outcome button (booked, call back, not interested, wrong number). The button moves the contact to the right pipeline stage and takes them off tomorrow's list once they're done.
• Stop after 14 days. Calling longer gets your number blocked and annoys people. Contacts who haven't answered go into a nurture sequence of emails and texts until the next invitation.
• Anyone who says no, or asks to be removed, comes off every list straight away and onto your Do Not Call list.
• Agents dial through the CRM, not their personal phones. That gives you call transcripts and team reporting, so you can see who's calling, how often, and what they say on the calls that book.
• When a registrant calls or texts back, someone responds within minutes. See speed to lead for insurance agencies for why that window is short.

Train agents on the system in a live session where they make their first dials. Kevin found that emailed instructions don't get followed.

How many registrants can one agent follow up?

Size the follow-up to the hours your agents have. Kevin's planning numbers:

• An agent makes about 50 dials an hour.
• Twice a day on working days is 10 attempts per lead per week.
• That's about 5 leads per agent-hour per week.

Say a seminar leaves you 40 people to follow up: attendees who haven't booked and no-shows together. At 10 attempts each, that's 400 dials a week, or 8 hours of dialing. One agent with 90 minutes a day can't cover it. Either give one person the job for two hours a day, or split the list before the seminar so nobody gets 40 names the morning after.

The cost-per-client math

Most agencies know what a seminar costs to market. Few know what a client from that seminar costs, because nobody adds up agent time or ties the clients back to the event. A Medicare agency office lead told us that knowing that figure is what gets agents to run more seminars:

"I think if more people saw, you know, exactly what they could buy a client for, and they understood that cost, and they understood the process and exactly what they need to do, more people would do it for sure." — An office lead at a Medicare agency we work with

Here is a worked example with made-up numbers. Use your own.

Say a seminar costs $2,000 to run: mailers, digital invitations, the room and refreshments. 30 people register and 10 attend. You value agent time at $30 an hour.

The full follow-up costs $330 more and, in this example, cuts the cost per client by more than half. Now compare each figure with what a new client pays you in the first year. If your average first-year commission per seminar client is $500, the light version loses money on every client and the full version pays for itself.

To get your real numbers:

1. Tag every registrant with the seminar name and date as the source, on the opportunity record and not only on the contact, so lead source tracking survives when a client books later.
2. Record each seminar's marketing, venue and food costs in one place.
3. Log follow-up hours per agent, or pull them from dial counts in the CRM.
4. After 60 days, divide total cost by new clients written from that seminar's tags.
5. Split the results by seminar type and by agent, then put next year's budget where the cost per client is lowest.

Expect the results by agent to vary more than the results by venue. Some agents turn a seminar into business and some don't, and the follow-up records will usually show you why.

What to do this week

1. Pull everyone who registered for a past seminar and didn't come, and load them into a list for your next invitation.
2. Add a topic question text to your registration confirmation.
3. Write a four-line no-show script and test it on your team.
4. Set up morning and afternoon call lists with outcome buttons and a 14-day stop.
5. Add up last seminar's spend and agent hours, and divide by the clients it produced.

Kevlex Digital sets up seminar invitations, reminder sequences and no-show call campaigns for independent brokerages, and takes that build off your plate. If you'd like your next seminar's follow-up ready before the room is booked, book a 15-minute call with Kevin. For the other half of the client-base strategy, see how to cross-sell your existing book of business.