5 Mistakes Agents Make With Insurance Leads

Plus, How to Fix Them!

Generating and managing insurance leads is critical to an insurance agent’s success, but too often, insurance agents make mistakes in this area. Whether it’s turning prospects away by being overly promotional, forgetting to follow up with existing leads, or several other issues much can go wrong. 

That said, insurance agents can make a few simple tweaks to improve their lead generation activities and grow their businesses. Paying attention to general marketing best practices and focusing on how your potential clients respond can go a long way toward getting better results.

In this article, we’ll explore five mistakes that insurance agents often make when it comes to insurance leads. We’ll also cover how to fix these mistakes so that you can close more deals. 

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Insurance Lead Mistake #1: Relying Too Much on Paid Leads

With so many services claiming to offer high-quality insurance leads for a fee, it’s easy for insurance agents to fall into the trap of relying too much on paid leads. The problem, however, is that paid leads are often unreliable. 

How do you know if the insurance leads on a list have already been contacted by other agents, or if they’re even in the market for the type of insurance you’re selling? An auto insurance agent might buy a list that doesn’t even include vehicle owners, or a supposed life insurance lead might already have coverage through their employer. And if you’re a commercial insurance agent, maybe no one on the list is a business owner.

Worse, paid leads might have been acquired and/or sold to you in violation of privacy laws or other regulations. Even if it was legal, reaching out to paid leads might not always go over so well, as not everyone responds positively to unsolicited outreach. 

So, if you’re primarily relying on buying insurance leads, you may want to look into a more organic lead generation strategy, like content marketing. Or, if you do want to pay for leads as a way to save time, there may be better routes to take to get warm insurance leads, like using Facebook ads or Google search ads.   

Insurance Lead Mistake #2: Being Overly Promotional With Your Marketing

While not being too promotional with your marketing may sound contradictory, the reality is that many people don’t want to be aggressively sold to. The rise of content marketing, for example, demonstrates how providing more value to your audience can result in getting quality inbound leads. 

There can be a time and a place for being promotional, such as in some ads, but you don’t want to overdo it. A “buy insurance now” message probably won’t move the needle for those who aren’t ready to make a purchase, yet that doesn’t mean they can’t still be a quality lead.

For example, an entrepreneur might be planning to open a new business in the next few months, and thus will need commercial insurance. If they see promotional content from you, like a social media post saying how great your insurance prices are, they might scroll by and forget about your agency by the time they’re ready to buy in a few months. But instead, if you provided something more helpful, like a link to a blog post about successfully launching a new business, that could lead to more lasting engagement. 

In this scenario, the entrepreneur might click through to the blog post. While on your site they might put in their contact information to download a lead magnet, like a checklist on what risks to prepare for when launching a business. So, by not being overly promotional, you’ve gone from someone scrolling by on social media to someone willingly giving you their contact information, and you can then nurture this new insurance lead until they’re ready to buy. 

Insurance Lead Mistake #3: Focusing Too Much on New Insurance Leads

Getting new insurance leads can be exciting, but it’s important to not lose sight of the rest of your insurance leads. Let’s go back to the previous example of an entrepreneur who’s opening a business in a few months. Perhaps you start a conversation and they inform you that they’re not ready to buy insurance yet, but they’ll keep you in mind in a few months. If you then focus all your energy on getting new insurance leads, it’s easy for this existing lead to fall through.

Instead, make sure you’re continuing to engage with existing leads. Using technology like customer relationship management (CRM) software can help you track deals throughout the customer journey so that you know where you stand and what actions to take. 

After your initial outreach, for example, you might move that existing lead to the next stage, which might mean following up with them again in a couple of months. At that point, they might generate an insurance quote but not yet buy, indicating that you’re close to closing the deal but may need to engage a bit more. 

Tracking all of this can then help you close more insurance leads. You don’t have to necessarily generate as many new leads if you can get more out of your existing ones. Plus, even if that lead ends up not purchasing from you, if you develop more rapport along the way, they could be more likely to make a referral.

Insurance Lead Mistake #4: Not Testing/Measuring Lead Gen Strategies

Another mistake that insurance agents often make is not testing and measuring how their lead gen strategies work. Especially when acquiring internet leads such as through social, the data is often readily available. So, insurance agents just need to look at how their lead gen efforts performed to find ways to improve.

For example, instead of just running a Facebook ad and hoping for the best, an insurance agency could run two Facebook ads to test against each other. One ad could lead to a landing page that asks visitors to input their information to generate an insurance quote. Another could be a landing page for a lead magnet that’s more informational. See how the results compare to determine if you should invest more in one approach over another.

Similarly, it’s important to measure lead gen results in terms of eventual outcomes. Getting lots of new insurance leads from a lead magnet is great in theory. But that’s not very valuable if you can’t convert a lead into a client. Measuring how many of your leads from specific channels turn into customers can then help you improve. Perhaps your lead magnet needs to be refined to pull in more relevant insurance prospects, instead of appealing to, say, someone looking for health insurance when you’re providing errors & omissions coverage.

Insurance Lead Mistake #5: Expecting Lead Gen Strategies to Work Right Away

Lastly, insurance agents should not make the mistake of expecting lead gen strategies to work right away and then abandoning strategies too quickly. In some cases, the problem might stem from having a small sample size. If you run a social media ad for one day and you don’t get any new insurance leads, that doesn’t mean social media advertising doesn’t work for you. Perhaps you need to wait a week so that your ad gets in front of a large enough audience to eventually convert.

Being patient is particularly important with content marketing, such as when building out an insurance blog. Posting one article probably isn’t going to cause you to get flooded with new leads. But over several months, articles can build off each other, improve your SEO and eventually pay dividends. 

Digital marketing agency Sprk’d notes that “for a small to medium-sized business, a strong content marketing strategy generally takes between six and nine months to yield real results.”

Turn Mistakes Around

While it’s easy for insurance agents to make these types of lead generation mistakes, it also can be easy to turn these mistakes around and get more qualified leads. Being patient, following the data, keeping up with existing leads, providing helpful advice, and finding leads through your own organic channels is well within reach for most insurance agents.

When you do start to pull in more leads, using InsurTech tools like Wheelhouse can help you convert more leads into insurance customers. Making it easy for prospects to generate bindable quotes can lead to more insurance sales, which makes your lead gen efforts all the more worthwhile.