A Serious Question For Modern Agents: Why Buy Insurance Leads?
- Buying leads diversifies your lead sources
- It’s like having a personal marketing department
- Lead buying scales as you grow
- It allows you to fine-tune your strategy
- You can focus on selling
Why buy insurance leads?
Insurance agents of the 21st century are pioneers. We are the first generation of insurance professionals who have to think about buying internet leads.
But that raises an obvious question: if agents were able to build their businesses for decades without buying leads, why start now? The truth is that agents who buy leads, and particularly agents who buy the right kinds of leads for them, have a leg up over those who don’t.
Here’s why lead buying is essential for modern insurance agents.
1) Buying Leads Diversifies Your Lead Sources
The next time you see your financial manager, ask them for advice on building a stock portfolio that won’t be harmed by ups and downs in the market. If they’re worth the fees you pay them, they’ll probably have one main piece of advice: diversification. When you invest in one company (or even one industry), you expose yourself to unnecessary financial risk. But when you invest in several companies, you spread around and therefore minimize your risk.
The same principle applies to investing in insurance leads. Traditional methods of lead generation — such as referrals, marketing, or old-fashioned cold calling — can be effective, but they’re either feast or famine. Focus too heavily in one of those techniques and your growth rate will fluctuate wildly from month to month. Adding purchased leads to the mix can smooth out slow periods and give you a reliable influx of fresh leads.
2) It’s Like Having A Personal Marketing Department
Large, established companies have entire marketing departments dedicated to generating good leads. They’re staffed by people who are masters of demographic targeting, pay per click advertising, conversion rate optimization, and other lead gen skills.
But if you’re an independent agency, or if you’re an up-and-coming agency, you probably can’t afford to hire a team of experts to bring in leads for you. Fortunately, agencies that buy leads don’t have to. They can determine how small or big their budget is for leads, and then turn the flow of leads on or off like a faucet. It has many of the advantages of an in-house marketing department without any of the overhead.
3) Lead Buying Scales As You Grow
Lead buying can match your growth ambitions. If you’ve just launched your career and need leads in order to kickstart your book of clients, then purchased leads can give you numbers to call on day one. If you’re a seasoned veteran and want to invest in a way to reach the next level, purchased leads can give you a boost. And if you’re a large-scale agency, purchased leads can help you sustain your growth.
4) It Allows You To Fine-Tune Your Strategy
The volume of leads you can buy will change as you grow. But the kinds of leads you buy will change, too. There are three types of leads on the marketplace: live transfer, exclusive, and shared.
Live transfer leads are leads that are live on the phone and are ready to buy. They close at the highest rate, and therefore are the most valuable. All agents can benefit from live transfer leads, but because of their low volume, high cost per lead, and high success rate, they’re particularly valuable to independent agents and small agencies.
Exclusive leads are leads that are sold only once. These typically require more work to close, but they’re helpful for agencies of every size.
Shared leads are sold to multiple agents. They are low cost, but close at a smaller rate than exclusive or live transfer leads. They’re most appropriate for large agencies who have a high volume call center that makes a massive number of calls per day.
The lead mix that will give you the best ROI will depend on your size and sales strategy. But since you get to choose which kinds of leads to purchase, you can adjust your lead buying in order to get the most bang for your buck.
5) Focus On Selling, Not Lead Gen
Finally, there’s the issue of brute practicality. There are only so many hours in a day, and an hour you spend on lead gen is an hour can’t be spent selling new policies. Lead buying outsources the necessary grunt work of building your book of clients, and lets you focus on what you do best.
Stepping Into Modern Insurance
Agency growth is still fueled by relationship building and old-school pavement pounding. But today’s agents need another skill, too: strategic lead buying.
By supplementing your lead funnel with the right kind of purchased leads and selling them the right way, any agent can see sustained growth month after month. That’s the kind of predictability and reliability that previous generations of insurance agents could only dream of.