Buy Insurance Leads: High-Quality Lead Generation

Where To Buy Insurance Leads: 8 Options

1. Online Lead Aggregators

Benefits:

• Buying insurance leads from online lead aggregators is typically very inexpensive, so you can afford to buy a lot.
• You can fill your producers’ pipelines with these types of leads.

Considerations:

• These leads are almost universally low quality because they may be largely composed of people who submitted a form online to play a game or enter a contest—not to buy insurance.
• Close rates for these types of insurance leads are typically low—often in the <1% range.
• These leads cost you time and dedication often for little to no return.

Calling all agents! Make sure your producers are set up for success. Download The Insurance Agent Sales Process Quick-Start Template today.

2. Qualified Online Insurance Leads

Benefits:

• These leads have expressed intent to buy insurance, so it’s more likely agents will have a chance to talk to them and potentially close a sale. They have a relatively high close rate—around 5-10%.
• These leads help insurance agencies grow by keeping their pipelines filled.
• These leads are scalable, meaning you can add more as your team and pipelines expand.

Considerations:

• Qualified online insurance leads initially cost more than other types of leads. However, even though some agents initially experience “sticker shock,” these leads ultimately can have a high return on investment – particularly when you take into account renewals and long-term lead follow-up.

3. Traditional Advertising

Benefits:

• For agents focused on hyperlocal growth, traditional advertising—like radio, billboard, newspaper, and even your-name-on-the-back-of-a-Little-League-jersey—can be very effective in building brand recognition.
• Traditional advertising can be very effective if you’re focusing on your local community exclusively.

Considerations:

• Traditional advertising can be very expensive.
• You have no guarantee the people you want to talk to (your ideal clients) are looking at the billboards, listening to the radio, etc.
• It is difficult (but not impossible) to determine ROI. Tactics like specialized phone numbers for each campaign, unique website URLs, and simply asking clients how they heard about your agency can help to determine if your advertising strategy is paying off.

4. Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

Benefits:

• When you generate exclusive insurance leads yourself, you know exactly where your leads are from and can generally be confident in their validity.
• SEO helps you gain visibility in a broader geographic area, as well as locally.
• SEO is a long-term game—if you consistently work on your SEO marketing efforts by creating original online content, you will almost certainly see gains over time as your presence grows.

Considerations:

• This method of lead generation can be very expensive.
• Unless you have a lot of money or a very large commercial insurance leads business, you’ll only gain a limited number of leads in most cases.
• This method requires a substantial time investment. You’ll either need to hire someone to do SEO or do it yourself, which will take time away from more valuable tasks. Because the operating and labor costs of using SEO tools are very high, we don’t recommend this option as a core strategy for most agents.

5. Your Own Website

Benefits:

• Building out your own website is a must-do for insurance agents. Most agents already have a basic website for their agency displaying the products they offer and contact information. Many people purchasing insurance have trouble bridging the trust and legitimacy gap unless they see their agent’s website, so this method is well worth the effort.
• You can use your website, social media platforms, and organic search terms in tandem to bring high-quality leads in the door.
• It’s inexpensive to create a website—and in some cases, it’s free if your carrier provides a website for you.
• It’s relatively easy and inexpensive to optimize a website and use it to your advantage.
• You can customize your website so visitors can submit their information for a quote. This provides an easy way to quickly gain contact information.

Considerations:

• You may dedicate a lot of resources to this method and still not end up ranking highly in search engines, so few prospects may be able to find you online without directly searching for your agency.
• Your website will require regular maintenance.
• It can take years to achieve the sort of keyword rankings needed to generate even a modest amount of leads.

6. Referrals

Benefits:

• Insurance referrals help you retain customers. You’re working from a pool of people you already may have some connection with as opposed to cold-calling.
• Referrals are typically easier to close, and the small cost involved in acquiring them makes them an incredible value. If 90% of your book retains business with you, that delivers a huge ROI.

Considerations:

• There are none! If it were possible, we’d recommend employing referrals as your main lead-generation method for almost any insurance agent looking to build their business. (What keeps you from doing that is, of course, running out of existing customers!)
• Referrals are almost exclusively based on excellent customer service, which means you need to focus on that and put significant effort into it. If you don’t already serve your customers well, you may not get a good number of referrals.

7. Cross-Selling

Benefits:

• These are free leads! Cross-selling maximizes your book of business by selling additional products to your existing customers.
• These insurance leads are generally more likely to close.

Considerations:

• Again, none! Cross-selling to your existing book of business is a must-do for all insurance agents.

8. Cold-Calling

Benefits:

• Cold insurance leads are typically very inexpensive.
• Cold calling can be beneficial for new agents who need experience working on their scripts with potential clients.

Considerations:

• This option is very ineffective, as the people you’re contacting are most likely not looking for an insurance solution.
• You could be wasting time and money that you could be directing elsewhere.
• When contacting cold leads, agents must be cognizant of federal and state laws that address emailing, calling, and texting consumers for marketing purposes (i.e., laws prohibiting the use of auto-dialers, ensuring opt-out or do-not-call requests are honored, etc.).

How To Determine Which Method Of Generating Insurance Leads Is Best For You

As we covered in our article, How Do Online Insurance Leads Compare To Other Methods?, there’s no one-size-fits-all answer to this question. To figure out how to find the best insurance leads for your business, do the following:

• Evaluate your business type. Do you have an existing book of business you can sell to? If so, cross-selling and referrals may be a great first step. In fact, we suggest every agent work with their existing network because it’s the cheapest way to get leads that will last at least a month or two. However, don’t plan to rely solely on referrals!
• Evaluate your local market. How saturated is it? If there’s potential to grow locally, you may want to invest in local advertising—but be sure you do this in a way that’s trackable to avoid wasting your investment dollars.
• Evaluate your willingness to grow. Are you looking to grow your agency beyond your local market? If so, then an online insurance lead provider like EverQuote is a great option because it can provide the pipeline you need outside your local market to potentially bind more policies. If you’re on the fence about partnering with EverQuote, take a look at the insurance leads reviews our happy customers have shared.

How EverQuote’s Lead Generation Works

It all starts with the online consumer searching for keywords around insurance, such as “ insurance in my area,” “cheap insurance,” and “buy car insurance leads.”

Whether we rank organically for that keyword or we bid on it, EverQuote is often one of the top links on the page. EverQuote also sources consumers through other channels—from email to our verified partner network. Consumers go to our website (or a partner site) and let us know what type of insurance they might want to purchase. We capture their ZIP code and then start the process of collecting 40+ specific data points about them. It usually takes about 7 to 10 minutes to complete the form, which we’ve engineered to be long enough to weed out those who are less motivated to buy but not too long to drive away real prospects.

All of our leads are consumers who opt-in to be contacted by an agent, so you can rest assured that each EverQuote lead has agreed to be contacted by you and your producers.

We weed out the junk to ensure we’re sending you valid leads—and offer no-questions-asked returns.

In addition to the filtering we do when consumers fill out our forms, we want to make it as simple as possible for you to get ROI-generating leads. We’ve shifted our entire returns process and policy, so (depending on the account type you chose) agents receive a blanket 20% return policy each month, no questions asked. We’ll take back insurance leads (up to that 20% monthly threshold) for any reason—no criteria needed. We are serious about providing the best experience, and this is just another way we are able to do that for our agents.

Your leads are delivered when you hit “submit.”

As an agent, we make it as simple as possible for you to get the quantity of leads you need to fill your producers’ pipelines and meet your sales goals. Depending on your commitment level, you have access to varying levels of service: everything from personalized onboarding to analytics to customer service. For agents who join our Accelerated Growth Program (AGP) and are looking to scale, a dedicated EverQuote business consultant will provide advanced analytics and monthly business reviews to help optimize your lead allocation.

See how online lead generation can benefit you—contact us today to get started!

With EverQuote, you have complete control over how many leads you receive each day. You can even customize your parameters and pause your account. Click here for a tour of the software with one of our experts.