All About Insurance Lead Generation

Insurance Lead Generation

With the Great Recession making money tighter than it has been since the Great Depression, many people are understandably on edge about their insurance coverage.

Insurance plans for anything from auto insurance to home insurance to health insurance that have premiums that are too high for customers to make the payments will be discarded out of hand, yet policies that lack proper coverage if they are needed will likewise be discarded by customers who could not cover the costs of a disaster on their own as well.

Striking the balance is difficult for any customer, and most of them have a hard time figuring out where to even begin with finding the insurance coverage they need to function in modern society.

Anything that strikes a good middle ground is preferable to nothing, particularly in light of the Affordable Care Act and older laws requiring all cars on the road have auto insurance, but finding the right policy can seem impossible, even with modern tools for seeking out policies on the internet both directly from insurers and from sites that offer quotes from multiple insurers at once.

Insurance agents find themselves in a similar bind, as a skittish customer base is seldom good for any business, even insurance. Finding customers to contact about offers of insurance is difficult enough, but finding customers who are likely to buy the policies is an even more monumental task for even the best agents and salespeople.

One way of helping the odds of selling a policy is an insurance lead. An insurance lead is an industry term, essentially being the contact information of a customer seeking a specific type of insurance that an insurance agent can sell. Much like a lead in any other sales industry, a lead is not a surefire sale, but it beats calling every number in the phone book and hoping that the people behind the numbers are in the market for an insurance policy.

By combining proper sales techniques with a customer who is receptive to being sold a policy, a sale can ensue very quickly. However, finding leads is somewhat more difficult than simply allowing customers to get automatically generated quotes for their potential policies online. It can take some effort to get good insurance lead generation, and yet as any experienced insurance agent will tell you, finding a good source for insurance sale leads can be vital. Luckily, help is available.

There a number of online insurance lead services available. The vast majority of these leads come from online insurance quote companies that make their money by allowing visitors to their site to input vital information about themselves and in no time at all, get a reasonable quote for their potential insurance policies as well as a means by which to contact the insurance company in order to purchase the insurance policies they want, whatever they may be.

Even if a customer does not immediately buy a policy, many online insurance quote companies retain the information and sell it to insurance companies as leads. This makes it very likely that the customers are looking for the specific type of insurance the agent is offering, particularly since most insurance lead generation sites keep track of who buys a policy and who remains on the fence about buying insurance.

The leads also information on the customer that might affect the cost of their policy, such as the age of their car, previous health conditions or the area their home is built in, which insurance agents can use to filter through clients they feel they can not offer a reasonably priced insurance policy to, which can make quite a bit of difference between reaching out to the customer to make a sale and wasting your time trying to make that sale.

Many insurance lead generation companies also include information about the policies that will best suit specific clients based on the information those clients input into the system trying to get a policy quote from their sites, oftentimes tailored to your insurance company’s specific practices and plans for sale.

Different lead companies offer different plans. Some allow you to buy leads one name and phone number at a time, while others allow for insurance agents to buy entire listings of names of people in the market for a type of policy they sell. Some lead generation companies even allow insurance agents to subscribe to get a new list of names at defined intervals, from a week to a year, depending on the specific lead generation company.

The level of detail will vary from company to company, but most lead generators include copious amounts of information about the leads as they need that information to give those customers a quote, oftentimes selling that information as well as names and contact information to insurance agencies looking to make a sale.

Different lead generator services offer different extras. Some are more experienced and some have wider online networks where they give quotes (and thus gather information can can be turned into leads) than other companies.

Some lead generators also offer different levels of tailoring themselves to their customers’ needs, no matter what kind of insurance they’re selling. If high risk policies are not your company’s specialty, some particularly dedicated lead generators will send you fewer high risk prospects. This allows insurance agents to be more focused on their specific clients rather than trying a rather futile one size fits all effort in an industry where that mentality by and large does not apply.

Exactly how you receive these leads can also be dependent on the lead generation company you choose. Most all such companies offer email messages filled with the leads your agency purchased as a standard service.

Some companies even have specialized applications that allow them to send insurance leads to mobile devices, be they tablet computers or smart phones. However you get these leads, it will pay to be certain to pick the most reputable lead generation service you can find, as there are some shady outfits in the industry.