- The basics of insurance lead generation, including common types of insurance leads
- Why you should focus on the right, high-intent insurance leads
- The top lead generation challenges for insurance sales agents (and how to overcome them)
- Essential tools to manage insurance leads and boost contact rates
- How automation can help you improve insurance sales
Yesterday’s approach to sales and generating leads in insurance may not be enough to deliver the results you need to thrive. A solid sales foundation is more critical than ever for insurance providers grappling with fast-paced changes in loss ratios, market dynamics, and regulations.
We hope these fresh insurance lead generation ideas bring new life to your sales process—and new growth to your organization. Whether you’re trying to improve life, health, home, auto, or homeowner’s insurance lead generation campaigns—the same understanding and strategies for success apply across the marketplace. Read on to find out how you reach, convert, and retain more customers in your corner of the insurance industry.
What Is Insurance Lead Generation?
Insurance lead generation, for the uninitiated (or those in need of a refresh) is the process of attracting potential insurance customers. It’s a critical undertaking for any business in the industry. That’s because no matter what sector of insurance you’re in, you need a healthy sales pipeline to fuel the growth of your business. And an effective lead generation program is how you make sure that pipeline is chock-full of candidates ready to be converted into customers.
How to Generate Insurance Leads
Where and how do you get insurance leads? These days, insurance businesses will likely encounter and work with a variety lead types, including:
- Exclusive leads: A lead only sent to one buyer. Typically costlier and more highly sought-after than alternatives available for purchase.
- Shared leads: A lead that can be bought by multiple insurance agents. While competition for these leads is high, they come at a lower price.
- Live transfer leads: Prospects are transferred “live” from a call center to the specialized insurance sales agent.
- Real-time leads: Usually generated organically and online, real-time leads are warm leads who have just completed an online form or somehow expressed interest.
These leads can come from a variety of sources. Cultivating a diverse approach to generating leads helps ensure that your business can consistently generate insurance leads. For instance, leads may be generated through:
- Referrals by existing customers.
- Demand generation content like blogs, ebooks, whitepapers, and more.
- Paid search ads.
- Social media content.
Of course, while organically generated leads are great, they might not always lead to an adequate amount of leads. That’s why many insurance businesses also turn to third-party lead sources to help power their insurance sales engines with a consistent flow of data.
How to Get More Insurance Clients? Focus on Getting the Right Leads
So, you’re using a mix of the lead gen strategies above and you have a steady flow of leads into your sales pipeline. You’re all set, right? Not so fast.
In many industries, you show your sales prowess by turning just about any lead into a customer. But, according to Jacob Rodriguez, Director of Sales, Auto and Home Insurance at ActiveProspect, in the insurance world, you can’t just go after any and every possible candidate that’s in your pipeline.
“Too many bad customers making too many claims can really destroy your loss ratios,” says Rodriguez. So instead of a “come one, come all” approach to high intent insurance lead generation, Rodriguez says you need a better, more refined strategy.
To improve your business’s reach, he says, you’ll need to narrow your lead generation efforts to focus on customers who fit your company’s ideal profile.
Targeting Your Ideal Insurance Customer
By only going after consumers who fit your model persona, you’re more likely to end up acquiring customers that will uphold better loss ratios and do so over the long term. That is, insurance leads that fit your ideal profile are not only going to perform better, says Rodriguez. “They’re also going to retain a lot better on your books. And retention is a huge factor for growth within this vertical.”
Getting the best insurance leads doesn’t end there, though. You can make this lead generation strategy even better by just adding one more layer. “The best option today is to not only market to your ideal customer profile, but to your ideal customer that also raises their hand and says, ‘I’m giving you consent to call me now.’”
This approach, termed consent-based marketing, can make all the difference in driving insurance lead generation and sales efficiency. Why? Because this consent also reveals a stronger underlying intent – the customer that raises their hand has shown their willingness to convert. They have high intent.
Overcome the Top Lead Gen Challenges for Insurance Agents
Generating these high-intent insurance leads is not without its challenges, though. In fact, it’s something many in the industry outright struggle to do. During a webinar on insurance lead gen, polled participants showed that an overwhelming majority (87%) had experienced issues with inconsistent lead quality. In fact, they ranked this as the single biggest issue in finding an insurance lead vendor or partner.
“It’s unfortunate, but a lot of large [insurance] carriers and large businesses will settle for good and better [even] when the best option is available,” says Rodriguez. So, what’s behind this hesitation from insurance organizations? It’s certainly not ignorance.
Instead, it’s generally driven by intersecting challenges of compliance and costs.
Verifying Consent of Insurance Leads
The challenge for many insurance businesses is not only getting consistent, quality leads, but assuring that the data is compliant – which costs more. But the added expense of generating compliant insurance leads tends to pay off – not only in more efficient use of agent time and higher conversions, but in sparing your company legal fines over regulatory non-compliance.
While a recent Supreme Court ruling may have alleviated some concerns over verifying express written consent and TCPA compliance at the federal level, insurance is a state-regulated industry, meaning that there are still a number of hurdles for sales teams to clear if they’re to avoid legal consequences. (Not to mention states like Florida are enacting their own so-called “Mini-TCPA” laws.)
To avoid the high costs and reputation damage that can accompany compliance violations, insurance sales teams must take necessary steps to verify and document the consent of their leads.
High-volume vs. High-intent Insurance Leads
However, when challenged with regulatory red tape and the costs of buying or generating high-intent insurance leads, many organizations instead opt for what seems like the path of least resistance: high-volume, lower-cost leads.
It’s easy to understand the conundrum faced by so many in the insurance industry. Perhaps you’ve found yourself in this position: You want to find people who are interested, who have the intent to learn about or invest in insurance. But that doesn’t mean those prospects are available when you want them—so you need to try to make up for the gap.
Convoso CEO Nima Hakimi explains that with the scarcity of high-intent insurance leads, many insurers instead try reaching out to a high volume of leads as a sales strategy. “The challenge you find is that people go for something that’s easier to get in volume to try to make up for [the lack of high intent leads].”
But, Hakimi says, the reality is that with increased regulation and increased frustrations around telemarketing calls, this high-volume approach is likely to increase problems for insurance agents and hinder growth.
Instead, to overcome the top challenges facing insurance agents, you should continue to focus your efforts on high-intent insurance leads. You just need smart outreach strategies and dynamic tools that help you efficiently manage insurance leads and drive a greater call center ROI.
How to Manage Insurance Leads—and Contact More of Them
When you focus on high-intent, compliant leads, you need to make the most of them. That requires effective lead management tools and an outreach strategy that boosts contact rates. The goal is to get more of your insurance agents in conversations with those leads—so they can convert them from high-intent leads to high-retention customers.
Use Automation to Improve Your Speed to Lead
Insurance lead generation is often like a competition and—especially when it comes to approaching these scarce high-intent leads—agility is what wins the race. So, to manage insurance leads effectively, you need to put speed to lead at the heart of your approach. Ask yourself: How fast can your agents respond to incoming leads?
Too slow? Then you may have just lost a potential sale. When you generate a high-intent lead, they’re ready for you, no matter the source. When they enter your sales pipeline, that’s your cue to seize the moment—while your business is still on their mind, before their interest has cooled and, yes, before your competition may have a chance to reach them first.
Increase your speed to lead, and you’ll increase your contact and conversion rates—and you’ll leave your competition in the dust.
How do you increase your speed to lead?
Call center automation is key: When a warm lead enters your sales pipeline, your insurance dialer should automatically enter it into a custom workflow according to the priority you’ve set. Hopefully it’s supported by omnichannel outreach and pre-defined cadences that your team has fine-tuned over time.
That’s not the only way to improve your speed to lead, of course. You may want to hire more agents, automate email replies, and power up your one-call close. Speed to lead is one of the best ways to harvest the crop of consent-based leads you cultivate.
Reduce Call Blocking and Flagging
Low-quality lead sources are not the only reasons some insurance organizations are seeing declines in contact rates. Call blocking and flagging are on the rise.
As more outreach regulations come into play, such as STIR/SHAKEN, and telecom carriers and consumers become more empowered to label calls as a spam risk, those low contact rates will continue to interfere with the ability of legitimate businesses to engage in conversations.
Without the right caller ID reputation management tools and strategies in place, both blocking and flagging can become a runaway problem for lead gen teams—even those who are zeroed in on high-intent leads.
While some savvy teams may already be utilizing a high number of caller IDs, this is only half the battle. Hakimi says, “Even if you’re calling on consent-based leads, you have to manage the volume of numbers that the DIDs use based on geography. It’s not just [a matter of], ‘Hey, let’s use as many numbers as possible.’ You need to figure out where you are calling and associate the right number of IDs that are local to that area based on your call volume. And so your dialer should have the ability to figure out what those numbers need to be.”
