Success and failure as a life insurance agent can be forecasted based on your capacity to generate life insurance leads. Those who can acquire new life insurance leads regularly will succeed in this industry.
However, competition is fierce in this industry, and life insurance agents must gain strong marketing knowledge to stay competitive.
In this article, I want to focus on providing proven marketing strategies, so that you don’t have to waste your money and your time on something that is set to failure.
I’ll segment this article into two parts:
- What life insurance leads do you want?
- The best life insurance lead sources
What life insurance leads do you want?
Before jumping into marketing strategies, you need to pinpoint precisely what kind of leads you want.
Chances that you specialize in one niche of the life insurance industry are high. So you only want to generate the leads from that particular niche. That will save you time, and money, and will increase your conversion rate as a result, because your offer will be more adapted to the leads you generate.
Here is a checklist that will help you narrow down your scope when it comes to life insurance leads.
What types of life insurance leads?
You need to be clear about the offers that you want to sell. Rather than starting by selling all kinds of life insurance, narrow down to one or two life insurance and be extremely good at selling them:
- Final expense leads
- Mortgage protection leads
- Annuity leads
- Term leads
- etc.
If you focus your efforts on one type of life insurance leads, you will be perceived as an expert in this segment, and it will be harder for other agents to compete with you (aka. ability to sell, service level, customer lifetime value, etc.).
Who is your ICP?
Now that you know what type of life insurance you want to focus on, the second step is to define precisely who your ICP (Ideal Customer Profile) is.
For example, if you focus on final expense life insurance, your ICP could look like this:
- Age group: 50-85 years old as the older demographics are the main focus
- Income level: Moderate to lower-income individuals who may not have significant savings or assets to cover funeral and burial expenses.
- Health status: Those who have been declined for traditional life insurance due to health issues.
You can see, based on these few pointers, that we can already understand who our ICP are, and start thinking about marketing strategies to reach out to them.
What sales process?
Would you rather conduct your sales meetings on a video call or in person? This choice is made based on who your customers are. For example, if your customers are retired individuals, you may want to opt for in-person meetings.
Secondly, at what stage of the sales process do you want to receive your leads? Some agencies can live transfer calls to your line directly, and all you have to do is develop your sales pitch.
Or, you prefer to target aged life insurance leads. These leads can be 3 months old (or more) and have been contacted by several life insurance agents already.
You also need to consider whether you prefer exclusive leads (meaning you are the only agent who has access to these leads) as opposed to shared leads (who are shared with many different life insurance agents).
Finally, be mindful of the filters that are applied to your leads. The more filters applied, the higher the closing rate. For example, were the leads asked about their income level, age, and occupation? If you are selling final expense life insurance, you may not want to speak with a 30-year-old² lead.
What is your geographical reach?
Now that you have a better idea of what types of leads you want, you need to apply a perimeter. Do you want to be a local or a national player? Both options are valid, as long as you have the right marketing strategy.
Usually, local leads are easier to close since they know that they can meet with you in person. But national leads can be a good strategy if you focus on a very specific niche, with a targeted marketing approach.
Best lead sources for life insurance leads
Now that we know what exact type of life insurance leads we want to generate, let’s list the different lead sources so that we can choose the one that fits best with our niche.
I advise focusing on one lead source at a time and hammering it until you dominate it. Then and only then, you can consider opening a second acquisition channel for your life insurance leads.
1. Google Business
Creating your Google Business Profile is by far the most efficient way to generate the best life insurance leads. Let me explain.
Your Google Business Profile is the profile of your company listed in Google’s local pack. When someone near you searches for your services on Google (E.G. “Life insurance agent Austin”), you appear in the search result, on the local pack. People can view your Google Business Profile and get in touch with you: call, message, or visit your website.
These life insurance leads have the advantage of being:
- Inbound: meaning that they came to you – as opposed to outbound leads
- Exclusive: These leads are yours and aren’t shared with anyone else
- Local: Your Google Business Profile appears for local searches only
- Organic: You don’t pay Google to appear in the local pack
To make your way up Google’s search results, visit our guide to local SEO.
2. Instagram
All the marketing gurus will tell you that the key to success is to build your personal brand. From the founder of a local life insurance agency to the CEO of multinational, personal brand matters.
If we take the example of Elon Musk, we notice a clear connection between the rise of his personal brand on social media and the success of his companies (predominantly Tesla).
Instagram is an ideal platform for developing your personal brand. There are high chances that your ideal customer profile is on Instagram.
Also, acquiring leads on Instagram is a relatively recent marketing strategy, and you may actually be the first in your niche to tap into its huge audience (50% of US citizen use Instagram). With Instagram, you have the potential to reach thousands of potential customers all over the country.
Here are three things I consider when starting a personal brand on Instagram:
- Format: Analyze your competitors and understand what formats work best for them
- Hook: A strong hook will stop the scroll, identify what are good hooks for you, and try them out
- Call to action: Tell your audience what they should do next: click on the link in your bio, comment on your post, send a private message, etc.
3. YouTube
Launching a YouTube channel is a great way to generate the best life insurance leads while building a strong personal brand. With its 10-minute video format, YouTube is a great platform to generate trust with your audience by delivering free value to them. Life insurance leads coming from YouTube are already “sold”, so if you are the type of agent that doesn’t like pitching leads, YouTube may be the right option for you.
Like Instagram, YouTube’s potential reach is huge with 70% of the US population using it. This may be your ticket to tremendous growth.
Here are three questions I anwser when launching a YouTube channel:
- What’s your niche? Define clearly your niche and cover it extensively
- Video format? Identify what formats work best for your competitors (no need to reinvent the wheel)
- What content? Clear video structure, content, thumbnail, and title
YouTube can take time to send viewers to your videos. Don’t give up if after 10 videos you haven’t hit the jackpot yet. YouTube is a long term investment with a big learning curve. Try to post at a frequency that suits your schedule, and to be better at each video.
4. Direct mail
You may think: “I’m reading a blog article that is supposed to teach me something new, and I read about the oldest marketing strategy?”. And you may be right about it 🙂
However, for some customers, direct mail can work perfectly.
Imagine you specialize in final expense life insurance. Your ideal customer profile is probably a 50-80-year-old individual. And what is certain about this target group is that they read their mails, especially the commercial ones.
There are certain things to do to make direct mail a successful acquisition channel of life insurance leads.
There are many parameters that impacts the success of your direct mail strategy:
- Offer
- Geography
- Customer profile
- Mail format
- etc.
To be successful, you need to test each parameter. Work with batches: for each batch, test a unique parameter, for example, the offer. And use KPIs (Key Performance Indicators) to track the results, for example, the Response Rate.
Once you optimized one parameter, proceed to the next (for example: geography), until you optimize all the parameters and end up with the perfect direct mail approach.
5. Buy life insurance leads
I promised to be realistic in this article. In my opinion, buying life insurance leads may not be the best channel for most agents, especially when they are new in the industry.
As tempting as it sounds, there are many hurdles to overcome to make this channel successful. I’m going to list a few of them so that you can figure out whether buying life insurance leads is the right marketing channel for you or not.
Budget: The price for an exclusive life insurance lead can vary between 20$ and 50$. Considering a conversion rate of 5%, that will cost you up to 1,000$ per sale. To generate profits at this acquisition price, you need to have a strong grip on your Conversion Rate and your CLV (Customer Lifetime Value).
Vendor selection: There are dozens of life insurance lead vendors out there, and you will need to test a few before finding the one that fits your offer. To test a vendor, you will need to buy enough leads to get a conversion rate that is statistically significant. Depending on your conversion rate, you’d easily need to buy at least 500 leads per vendor.
Sales process: Finding the right sales process to optimize your conversion rate is key when you are buying life insurance leads. For this, you need to test different sales processes to quantify the one that performs best. Sales processes can be: email or call sequences, meetings, SMS sequences, direct mail sequences, or a mix of all.