Is Buying Leads in Insurance a Better Way to Generate Leads?

TLTR: Buying leads in insurance is a generally easy way to find new clients and one of the best ways to grow your business. This article explains how to buy leads and discusses the various types.

In the business world, leads are individuals who show interest in a service or product you provide. They have the potential to become your customers. In the insurance industry specifically, leads are prospects who have asked for quotes for insurance products or services.

For an insurance agent, finding good leads is like striking gold. According to HubSpot, 61% of marketers consider generating leads and website traffic to be their biggest challenge.

In order to convert potential customers into promising leads, you must have information about them such as their name, contact information, and their reason for reaching out.

There are two types of leads: warm leads and cold leads, and the difference between them is their intent.

A warm lead has expressed some level of interest in your insurance services. Where as the cold lead is more or less random and may not have a confirmed level of interest. For agents, acquiring warm leads is preferable as they seem more likely to become a client.

How To Get Leads in Insurance Sales?

Insurance lead generation is a crucial topic among agents and insurance companies. How can you snag leads when there’s such stiff competition?
Insurance agents may have to be more creative than a normal business person or entrepreneur to find potential buyers.

Aside from simply asking for referrals from satisfied customers—a basic technique that’s always worth pursuing—there are several effective approaches you can take. Before focusing on buying leads, let’s take a quick look at some other methods.

Utilize Existing Client Base

Your clients’ co-workers constitute a large pool of potential insurance sales. How to reach them? Make a list of all your clients and find out where they work. (Using LinkedIn can come in handy here). Look through these companies’ websites to see if they offer insurance services or financial products, including life insurance or annuities. You may also want to contact the employers directly and inquire about this information.

Get the names of the company’s employees—managers, directors, business development officers, etc. This can be achieved by attending networking events, seminars, or webinars. You can even check your list of clients and get their co-workers’ work numbers. Then, call them up one by one until you find someone who’s interested in hearing about the insurance products you offer. Once you’ve spoken with them on the phone, arrange a meeting for lunch or coffee.

Bigger companies with more employees will be more advantageous to you. They tend to provide more benefits for their clients than smaller companies with fewer employees. This increases your chances of upselling and cross selling on top of the policies you may already offer them.

Use the Internet for Prospecting

Insurance agents should utilize social media every chance they get. Sites such as Facebook, Twitter or LinkedIn can connect you with potential prospects because businesses advertise there so frequently. According to Oktopost, LinkedIn brought in around 80% of B2B (business to business) leads for businesses that were active on the platform.

You can also visit public forums, message boards, and online communities that are related to companies you’ve targeted. Being a member on these platforms is always an advantage because it gives you opportunities to promote yourself or even comment on topics which can lead people to interact with you.

Take note that with forum marketing you must be polite and not too aggressive when posting or engaging with your prospects. You should also answer posts about their problems, difficulties and issues with respect and empathy without trying to give them the hard-sell.

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Cold Calling For Leads In Insurance

If you want to get leads from cold calling, promote yourself through giving speeches in public forums that are related to business or finance. It will help if you have an agency or company name. That can build trust towards your credibility even when you’re just starting out. As per Finances Online, cold calling delivers 18% high quality leads, and the likelihood of converting prospects to leads is 45% after seven or more calls.

After succeeding in obtaining some clients in this manner, you can return to them later to explore any other insurance needs or changes to their policies that might benefit them.

Now let’s take a look at the more complicated option of buying leads…

How to Buy Leads in Insurance?

The great thing about buying leads is that it saves you the time and effort of building up a list by yourself. When you buy insurance leads, it’s important to purchase them from a top provider in the industry, especially when you’re just starting out and trying to build your business. Some examples of insurance lead providers are Quote Wizard, ZipQuote, NextGen Leads, and Datalot.

These companies provide you with names of potential prospects from different industries so that you can give them a call or send them an email to promote your services. As per SaleCycle, 59% of respondents said that marketing emails affect their purchasing decision. So, make sure to write those emails well. Be friendly and helpful without pushing too hard.

It’s best if you can get insurance leads provided in Excel or CSV formats. Then you can import the files into your database management system and easily use them for marketing purposes, such as sending emails and making phone calls.

You don’t really need to purchase hundreds or thousands of names. There’s no point in flooding yourself with more data than you can initially use. But if you know the prices and differences among packages of leads, then you can get an idea of what kind of budget you’ll be working with when getting started.

Take note that when buying leads, some companies offer different types, such as business, group insurance, leads for property, and casualty insurance, to name a few. This way you can choose the leads for insurance that would best suit your line of business.

Types of Leads in Insurance You Can Buy

The leads you purchase can differ according to who you’re buying them from. Generally speaking, these are the types of leads that are available to purchase from insurance lead companies:

Aged Leads

These are usually 30, 60, or 90 days old (sometimes you’ll get a few that are as many as months or even years old). Moreover, aged leads are interested prospects who filled out an information form and responded to a marketing campaign—just not very recently. These are great options for new agents since they are inexpensive. At the same time, the downside of aged leads is that they may have changed their contact information, and they’ve likely been approached by other agents.

Shared Leads

A few lead companies also offer you the option of purchasing shared leads. These are sold to other agents at the same time, and of course you’ll end up competing with those agents. The upside is that shared leads have lower cost per head and give you a high volume of leads to work with.

Unless you are absolutely confident in your selling skills and love the challenge, shared leads can be dead ends.

NOTE: Shared leads are also known as non-exclusive leads.

Exclusive Leads

When you buy exclusive leads, they belong to you and you alone. As you might expect, they’re more expensive than shared leads.

The quality of exclusive leads is better than shared leads, because exclusive leads have expressed a high level of interest. Low-quality prospects and prospects that are a definite dead end have been filtered out.

Live Transfers

Live transfers are ongoing calls that insurance leads companies to provide to you. The company gets in touch with promising prospects once the prospects have provided their information. Here, if they find the prospects to be genuine, the lead provider will contact you and transfer them to you.

That means you’re put in touch with the prospect in real-time when they’re interested in either getting information or are ready to purchase insurance. Because you’re speaking to the person at that moment, your chances of converting them to becoming a client are excellent.

Is Buying Leads in Insurance Beneficial?

One of the easiest ways of getting leads is when you have contact with or work at a company that provides you with leads. Insurance agencies apply this tactic to attract agents to work for them. As an agent you’re able to experience working with leads and developing your sales skills.
While this method of getting leads and improving your skills is valid, you will eventually have to evolve beyond that. There will come a time where you or your company will become more experienced and skilled. When that happens, you can’t afford wasting your time searching for leads from the ground up. So, buying insurance leads can be a viable alternative.

According to Statista, digital advertisement spending is expected to reach over $200 billion by 2023. As advertising for lead generation increases, agents will have access to even more leads in the insurance lines they work in. Also, buying leads from third party companies is quite beneficial as the lead provider will not take any of your commission. Since you’ve already bought the leads from them, you won’t have to pay them extra for the leads that you convert.

Ideally, while working on purchased leads, if you have a good enough closing rate, the amount you paid for the leads becomes a fraction of the money you make from them. And don’t forget the added advantage you have with the ability to be specific about the type of leads you want. You can select a particular niche, location, age, group, or income, and play to your strengths.

Overall, buying leads in insurance can be very advantageous. It allows you to pinpoint a very specific list of potential clients for you to work with, all on your own terms. It also allows you to increase your insurance agency valuation in the long run.

What Lead Generation Process Is Good for You?

There’s no universal lead generation method that will fit all insurance agencies.

If you want to find out which lead generation process works best for you, follow these simple guidelines:

• Evaluate your business
• Understand your target market
• Aim for your agency’s growth

Once you have a clear understanding of these, you should be able to find the lead generation method that will best work for you.

In Conclusion,

The need for insurance leads will always be paramount for keeping your agency running. Many people find the prospect of constantly following up with different clients to sell insurance to be tiring. Buying insurance leads solves this problem since it doesn’t require you to do the initial grunt work. That way, you can put more focus on how to convert those leads into long term clients.

So, make sure to assess the way your business works and decide whether buying insurance leads can help you progress further in the industry or not.