Mastering Insurance Lead Generation: Webinar Video & Recap

How to leverage consent, compliance, and contact rates to gain more insurance customers

Convoso hosted this insurance lead gen focused webinar with expert speakers from our industry partner ActiveProspect to discuss how insurance call centers can tackle issues around the 3C’s (Consent, Compliance, and Contact Rates).

Key Takeaways for Mastering Insurance Lead Gen: 

• Best practices in consent-based marketing to gain more customers
• Why your calls aren’t getting through and what you can do about it 
• The right strategies to improve contact rate and caller ID reputation

Watch the webinar video and/or read the recap below.

What Is Consent-based Marketing and Why Does Your Call Center Need It?

High intent leads are expensive. Before all the regulations came into play, the cheapest way for a lead gen insurance call center to find new customers was to dial away at those low cost, lower intent leads until they reached the right people. 

As Jacob Rodriguez of ActiveProspect states, even today a lot of companies still cast a wide net and are willing to market to any customer. “But in the insurance world, we know not every customer is a customer you want. In this world, too many bad customers making too many claims can really destroy your loss ratio, so there is a better option.” 

Enter consent-based marketing. 

Consent marketing describes marketing efforts in which you not only market to your ideal customer, but also to those who have “raised their hand” or given you consent to contact them. Those are the truly high intent leads. 

However, “when you say someone raised their hand, this is an expensive lead,” as Convoso CEO Nima Hakimi echoed. “You want someone who is interested… The challenge you find is that people go for the lower hanging or easier to get fruit, but that isn’t going to work much longer with everything happening in lead gen and consumers getting frustrated with spam.” 

Consent-based marketing will continue to be the way of the future but it isn’t as simple as getting consent and being done. 

You have to implement best practices with your lead vendor and your dialer to make sure they are pulling the best data into your CRM. Make sure both are staying TCPA compliant to keep the use of your leads legal, prevent fraud, and overall verify your brand is being represented properly. 

“When it comes to winning any type of analyst game. The person with the best data will have a much clearer path towards winning,” Yung Chung said. 

The Power Of Consent-based Marketing and Your Dialer Solution

Now that you have the right data, your dialer solution needs to be able to take these data insights and act on them. 

Pulling values such as lead age, domain name, or credit score can allow you to prioritize and personalize your outreach strategies based on the data you have available.  

“The power is in prioritizing who gets the call first based on the information you have on the lead.” Hakimi said.  He summarized how the power of data from an integration like ActiveProspect combines with a dialer platform like Convoso: 

“As long as you have data available, the power between integration is the fact you can make decisions based on any value/field, and you can make rules in your dialer that tell you based on the value of these fields to follow a specific cadence, set of events, route to a specific group of agents or personalize the script at the lead source level.” 

Why are my calls still flagged/blocked if I have high intent, compliant leads? 

Having consent significantly reduces the chance of your calls being flagged or blocked. However, it does still happen. The reason your calls may still be flagged/blocked, said Hakimi, may be due to different factors. For example: 

• Telephone Carriers are blocking calls before they can get through to the consumer and have a lack of transparency in telling you your calls are being blocked. 
• Consumers can choose to flag/block calls from their phones or use third party apps such as Nomorobo or Robokiller to do the job. 

As of July 31, 2021, STIR/SHAKEN regulations designed to combat robocalls will require all calls to be authenticated & given an attestation rating from the carrier verifying whether the caller has the right to use that caller ID. Based on this rating, carriers may have a higher chance of blocking/flagging your call.

What Are Possible Solutions To Prevent Call Flagging/Blocking?

Smarter Outreach Strategies 

“The simplest form [of dialing strategy] is a lead comes in and you call the lead right away,” Hakimi explains. “But these days you really need to set up customized outreach strategies with a cadence that involves calling, emailing, and texting, and being able to customize what that looks like for a lead based on the data you have.” 

By setting up the right outreach strategies with your high quality leads you will run a lower risk of your calls being flagged/blocked. 

Yung Chung from ActiveProspect reiterates, “Making sure to call them in different cadences and separating them is crucial.”  

Caller ID Management based on call volume and geography

Due to many bad actors in the telemarketing and lead gen industry, you should limit the number of calls made per caller ID to avoid the risk of being labeled as spam. Your dialer should have the ability to automatically figure out how many numbers you can use per geographic area to lower DID flagging risks. 

Other Ways to Verify Your Identity

Demonstrate legitimacy to the carriers. Verify your numbers with the analytics companies, utilize caller ID branding tools, and make sure you’re ready for STIR/SHAKEN. 

These solutions combine to help you actually reach those who are interested in your service. 

Next Steps To Improve Your Contact Rate And Caller ID Reputation

“It does you no good to have these amazing leads if you are not following the regulations and having the right dialer to be adaptable,” Jacob said. 

Understanding the 3C’s will help your insurance sales and lead gen team gain more customers with consent-based marketing, compliance, and improved contact rates [by avoiding call flagging/blocking]. To add more boost to your contact rates and improve your caller ID reputation, consider other strategies that maximize use of your dialer’s capabilities. 

Answering Machine Detection 

Accurate AMD is critical to increasing contact rates and driving agent efficiency. Agents who get too many voicemails lose momentum and increase the time they’re not productive. 

Real time reporting 

You need the ability to make real time decisions with active reporting that shows your contact rate and your revenue by agent, hour, and lead source. In an outbound call center, understanding the performance of your lists throughout the day allows you to change course quickly, which can prevent losing thousands of dollars. Good analytics reports can help call center managers boost productivity and profitability. 

State-based routing 

Your dialer should have the ability to automatically route calls based on the state licenses your agents hold. This capability is critical to driving efficiency for insurance call centers.