Insurance Lead Generation

Insurance lead generation is key for successful agents and agencies. Insurance leads are a great way for even the most experienced agent to increase their production. There are many different ways to generate insurance leads:

There are the “Old School” leads such as leads received from direct mail marketing (post cards, seminar invitations, and full envelope mailers, etc.), “Traditional” leads such as the leads from yellow page listings, newspaper advertisements, magazine articles, etc.) and there are the “New School” leads such as leads received from online marketing campaigns (pay-per-click campaigns [PPC], search engine optimization [SEO], instant leads from online lead providers, etc.).

All of these different types of insurance lead generation techniques could have a place in a successful insurance agent’s practice.

“Old School” Insurance Leads

Direct Mail Marketing – This method works better in other areas than others. If you can find a list building service that can provide you with very specific filtering criteria for an affordable price then you are ahead of the game if you decide to go this route. Be forewarned that a direct mail response rate of greater than 1% or 2% for a topic (health insurance, life insurance, auto insurance) that the average consumer deems boring is actually quite good. This method is quite quickly becoming obsolete simply because of the cost of postage and the opportunity cost of some of the other newer more efficient methods of lead generation.

Traditional Insurance Leads

Yellow Page Listings – This is not really useful at all for generating a large quantity of health leads. However, it should be noted that this does enhance the image of your business if you have a nice physical storefront and can give you the “local” advantage over another agent if a prospect decides to look you up.

Newspaper Advertisements – This method has some potential if your practice offers a wide array of financial services. Generally, this method is not a very reliable method of bringing in new life leads unless you have a dynamite copywriter developing your newspaper ads. Your geographic locale and the cost of advertising in your local newspaper will help you make this decision.

“New School” Insurance Leads

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) – This area of Internet marketing has a tremendous potential for growth in the coming years. However, in order to be truly successful you must commit to either a very large investment of time or money or both in order to get your website to where it needs to be to build some strong traffic from Google, Yahoo, MSN and other search engines.

Pay Per Click (PPC) – This is much like SEO in that you have to have some degree of expertise – or at the very least commit yourself to learning what is needed to become proficient.

Buying Leads from Online Lead Providers – This method works very well for many agents because it allows the company that the agent buys the leads from to do what they do best (marketing) and it allows the agent to do what they do best (selling insurance [hopefully!]).