If you haven’t already noticed, the insurance industry is evolving rapidly and in more ways than one. Changes are happening with carriers, wholesalers, agents and consumers. The consumer has become tech savvy while the industry is lagging behind. There is a noticeable gap between the traditional distribution and the quickly evolving internet distribution model and what is made available to consumers. If you do a quick search for ‘cheap home insurance quotes’ on Google you’ll find that most of the top results consist of top industry carriers:
- Esurance
- Progressive
- State Farm
- Geico, etc.
Agents are competing with these BIG companies for the same business. Those large companies have the budget to hire hundreds of people to service their clients via a call center so it’s easier to give clients a personalized touch and then cross-sell them more policies & coverage.
So the question of the day…
How do you compete with these large companies and direct writers?
One option I found to be the most popular online is purchasing insurance leads. There are tons of opinions online about the pros and cons of buying insurance leads, but it looks like pretty much everyone has tried buying leads at one point. Many agents are jaded about buying leads, mostly because they had no success or perhaps the lead company burned them in some fashion.
The idea...do your homework, research the lead provider first, but also recognize that online leads are ultimately a numbers game. Agents should see leads as an investment, not a cost, and purchase as many as they can afford. They should also learn from the mistakes of other agents and should not give up because they don’t get an instant result after attempting to contact a lead once. In fact, studies from Velocify, conducted across millions of leads and several industry sectors, have shown that the optimal number of calls made to establish initial contact with a new lead which later converted was ‘6'. Not implementing a simple multi-call strategy is simply leaving money on the floor!
One of the biggest lead provider companies I found online was NetQuote. They capture the consumer via some pretty impressive SEO tactics for some rather expensive keywords. For example, for that cheap home insurance quotes search I mentioned earlier, they are listed in the top position on page 1. If you know anything about keywords, that is extremely difficult and impressive. Do you think you could get your website to show on page 1 or 2 if someone searched for a competitive search term like ‘cheap home insurance quotes’? Unlikely...
Anyway, NetQuote caught my eye because they are so highly ranked for a substantial number of insurance terms. So what makes them different? I didn’t take their word for it, I researched them and found quite a few websites that mention and have written articles about them. So in a nutshell, they are one of the few insurance lead providers that offer a wide range of leads (both P&C and L&H) and the biggest plus, they screen all of their leads. This includes filtering their leads through a proprietary lead quality assurance tool known as, Bankrate Insurance Verified 2.0 that blocks out sub-standard leads. They also offer a live phone transfer service which means you could close business immediately and you can return bad leads with a 10 day return window. All in all they seem like a legitimate company offering quality leads.
If you are interested, they are offering a promotion right now for
15 free leads, so it can’t hurt, right? Start your research for free!