INTRODUCTION

A lot of people hear about lead generation and think it’s just for B2C companies. But in actuality, lead generation is a powerful tool for any business, large or small. Insurance agents in particular can benefit a lot from implementing a strong lead generation strategy into their business plan.

For B2B insurance agents, there’s no better time than now to generate more leads. This is pretty much the age of everything being online and our lives becoming more “wired” (no pun intended) to the online world. Young adults who are starting their first business adventure prefer to seek information from products and services that provide a hassle-free, ready-made solution rather than that which requires a lot of manual effort. Unfortunately for insurance agents, creating lead gen content for their target market has always been daunting, particularly for those using outdated tactics of traditional marketing this likely contributes to why many of them don’t have an active blog or regular publications in their area of expertise yet see the need to develop rich content assets and create effective lead generation campaigns which is the backbone of modern digital marketing.

6 lead generation tips for new insurance agents

Risk management insights and more for your business.Finding new insurance clients isn’t always easy, even for the most seasoned agents. That’s why we’ve curated this list of six approaches to lead generation for insurance agents just getting started.

1. Ask for referrals

When it comes to the quality of a lead, a referral from a satisfied client can’t be beat. Unfortunately, referrals are hard to come by when you’re new and your client list is small.

But there’s no rule that referrals must come from a customer. You can get introductions to potential clients from people who already trust you, such as your friends, family, or former colleagues.

And even if you get the dreaded call from a client asking to cancel their policy, make sure you remind them that you’re there for them anytime they need you. Consider creating a system to conduct exit surveys when clients leave to look for areas for improvement.

2. Be active in your community

Volunteering is a good way to establish a reputation as a caring and committed member of your community. But you can also show off your insurance industry chops by doing things like:

Advising local charities on their insurance purchases.
Hosting insurance seminars for small business owners.
Taking part in area meetups or online forums.
Offering to be a guest speaker for business groups.
Assisting clients’ friends or relatives when appropriate.

It may be tempting to do so, but don’t treat these situations the way you would a sales presentation. While ultimately you’d like these interactions to generate insurance leads, your first goal should be contributing to your community. The sincerity you demonstrate will keep your name top-of-mind and draw prospects to your agency when they need your services.

3. Go old school

Spam folders, privacy laws and the Do Not Call Registry have unfortunately made connecting with insurance leads more difficult than in the past. But some tried-and-true prospecting tactics still work, such as:

Fishbowl drawings
- Ask a restaurant if you can collect business cards and offer their gift certificates to weekly winners.
Print advertisements
- Advertise in industry trade magazines with postage-paid pull cards.
Read the local paper
- Scan the marriage and engagement announcements for personal lines sales opportunities.

4. Go new school

Your website is a good tool to help you generate leads. Enable features that request contact information, such as a “Get a Quote” button or newsletter signup. But bear in mind that these elements won’t do all the work for you. You might also want to do things like:

Put contact forms on every page.
Include testimonials to enhance your credibility.
Highlight your contact information.

Don’t bypass the possibility of garnering referrals from social media, either. This often-untapped resource for finding clients can (and should) be harnessed by new insurance agents looking to grow their client lists.Compare business insurance quotes for insurance professionals

5. Start a referral program

In some ways, launching a referral program is as easy as remembering to tell every client something like, “Please keep me in mind if you hear of anyone else I can help.” But to really add momentum, it doesn’t hurt to throw in an incentive for every referral. These incentives could include:

Lottery tickets
Gift cards
Movie tickets

Many state insurance departments allow incentives as long as they aren’t attached to a sale, but make sure you check with your department first.

6. Network like you mean it

Tons of people need insurance, but most of them aren’t sitting in your agency. Start meeting them by:

Joining your chamber of commerce.
Attending meetup groups and networking events.
Getting active on social media.
Connecting with your alumni association.

Don’t let the idea of prospecting, networking, and finding clients scare you away from your dream of opening your own independent insurance agency. By using unconventional tactics, networking, launching a referral program, and bettering your community, you’ll drive business straight to your front door.

their agency or selling it over to someone else, ask if they have any old leads you could buy off them. Chances are decent they won’t care since they’re leaving the industry and may be open to a fair cash offer. While you’re at it, make sure to ask what’s happening to their phone number. You might be able to make an offer for that too, and forward it to your line…. just a thought.

8. Fishbowls – Yup, I said it… fishbowls. Talk with other local businesses, especially those that are really close to your agency and offer to pay for the cost of a gift certificate to their store once a week or month if they collect business cards for the drawing and give you the contact information. Or just offer to convert the leads onto a spreadsheet for the other business owner in exchange for letting you have the information.

10. Get a Better Website – It’s hard enough getting people to your agency website, are they impressed when they get there? If your website isn’t clean and professional nobody’s going to trust you enough to call or request a quote online. It’s easy and cheap to get an impressive website for your agency nowadays so it’s time to upgrade your online presence.

10. New Home Purchases – In addition to home insurance, new homeowners are great targets for life insurance and other financial products. Since the transactions are public information it’s easily accessible. Your local government website might have the information or you can always look into a lead service that provides information like this. Just Google “new homeowners list”.

11. Online Marketing – It’s hard to find a better place to generate leads nowadays than online but it can be challenging to manage all the different aspects through different vendors. There are online marketing companies that specialize in insurance agents who offer complete online marketing packages that include everything, website, SEO, social media, email, PPC, etc. You can save yourself a lot of time and amplify results with a full marketing package from one trustworthy company.

12. Marriage/Engagement Announcements – A lot people who get married or engaged put announcements in the local newspaper. These couples are the perfect target for insurance agents because they’re often looking for new policies like life or home but they’re also entering a new life stage and should be more receptive to conversations about the value of a trusted insurance agent.

13. Mailback Newspaper Inserts – I know some agents that swear by this lead gen tactic. Mailback cards are small postage paid postcards people can use to enter their contact information and drop it in the mailbox. There’s no stamp needed because the post office bills you for the postage. All the agents I knew who liked this idea were captive agents getting the cards for free so if you had to pay for the original printing I’m not sure if the payback is quite as worthwhile.

14. Email Your Clients – Is your agency sending out a monthly newsletter? If not you’re missing a great way to stay in contact with your customers and generate new leads. Each newsletter is a chance to ask for referrals and cross-sell new products to every single one of your clients. If you don’t have time to make a monthly newsletter check out this email newsletter service for insurance agents.

15. Exchange Leads with Other Local Businesses – I’m sure most of the local business owners around you would love to get their hands on your customer list for sales leads. Of course you aren’t going to give that out to anyone, but if you can find a few other local entrepreneurs you can trust who also have lists of their own, consider exchanging information.

16. Buy a List – You can buy a list of just about anything. Want the fax numbers of all the chiropractors in your state? Mailing addresses for all the beauty salons? Whatever you want, there’s a list company that’ll happily sell it to you. Infogroup is one of the biggest providers and I’m pretty confident about their data quality.

17. Live Quotes on Your Website – You already know that people want to shop online for insurance, but can your website provide live quotes? In our experience here at InsuranceSplash, live quoting on your website works best for products that don’t need to ask too many questions to generate a fair price. Our website clients have had great results for life insurance especially. If you’re considering adding live quoting functionality to your site Check out NinjaQuoter. We’ve worked with just about all the online raters and they seem to have the highest converting forms out there.

18. Hire a Telemarketing Company – Why not leave it to the experts? The beauty of hiring a telemarketing company is that they often can provide the scripts, the phone numbers, the training and everything else and all you need to do is pay for the leads. The best leads are those that can be warm transferred so it’s highly recommended to only pay for telemarketing done on your behalf during the times when someone in your office can take over the call.

19. Your Facebook News Feed – I’m not saying your news feed is the place to go when you need to make a sale today, but if you’re an avid Facebook user and you pay attention you’ll realize that your news feed is full of sales opportunities. People having babies, getting married, buying cars, houses, and other cool stuff that needs insurance.

20. Pay Per Click Ads – Pay-per-click ads are the results you see above the normal results on Google, Yahoo, and Bing. They’re not always cheap in the insurance industry, but you bid against other insurance agencies for the traffic so the prices are generated by the market. For generating leads, it’s best to send the traffic to a squeeze page – a page focused on collecting the visitors information with no external links or anything else. (As opposed to sending traffic to your agency’s homepage). And if you need help running the ads work with an online advertising company that specializes in helping insurance agents.

21. Networking Events – What do you call the 30 business cards in your hand at the end of a networking event? Leads. With any leads though, the key thing is your follow-up. I recommend using social media for most of your networking follow up since it’s quick and easily opens the doors to developing stronger relationships.

22. Sponsored Table List – Any time you’re sponsoring a table at a local community or business event ask the organizer for a list of all the attendees and the other sponsors. Of course the idea is to generate leads with the interactions you have, but if they might give you a list of everyone who shows up why not ask for it?

23. Hook Up With Accountants – A recommendation from an accountant is very powerful. It’s like your dentist recommending a toothbrush. It takes more than a casual relationship with an accountant to generate leads, but if you can gain their trust and help their business, accountants can be a really great source of leads. I know a couple agents who’ve grown considerable sized books almost exclusively from referrals from a close accountant friend so I know it can work.

24. Motorcycle Dealerships – They’re selling motorcycles, you sell insurance for motorcyles. I guess it’s a pretty good fit, right? Remember that motorcycle dealers don’t want you to pay them commission, they don’t want to help their clients get great coverage at affordable prices. They want to sell motorcycles. Make it easy for them to sell more motorcycles and they’ll like you. Offer to drive to their dealership within 20 minutes to write a new policy anytime they need the coverage to sell a motorcycle.

25. Referral Breakfast Group – There’s referral breakfast groups just about everywhere. If you haven’t been to one before here’s how it works. A bunch of entrepreneurs (only one per industry) get together once a week to discuss business, network, and give referrals to each other. The nice thing about being an insurance agent in one of these groups is that it’s pretty easy for other members to refer your service since everyone needs insurance. The taxidermist on the other hand…

26. Hire a Telemarketer – If you really want someone in your agency to be dialing out all day long, hire someone specifically for the purpose. When their expectations are appropriate right out of the gate you’ll have a much higher chance of success. Keep the hourly pay low but make sure to reward the generated leads and sales generously.

27. Alumni Database – Does your college or high school have an alumni database? If so it’s a great place to look for potential people to reach out to. Where I went to school they even let you search by industry, job title, and location so it could be a goldmine of leads for the right person.

28. Blank Business Cards – Ever run into someone that could be a great sales lead or referral source and they don’t have a business card to give you? What happens? Most likely nothing. Carry around a few blank business cards and a pen so you can write that person’s information down and put it in your wallet. I suppose you’d better be careful doing this with a member of the opposite sex. It could be easily misinterpreted!

29. Informational Whitepapers – A “Whitepaper” is basically just a informational report that is considered to have some value. If you want to collect the email addresses of a specific demographic or people in one industry you can create a simple landing page that offers the downloadable whitepaper in exchange for the visitor’s email address. Warning: Make sure the topic of your whitepaper is really REALLY enticing.

30. Facebook Ads – If done correctly, Facebook ads can be very affordable and extremely effective. The trick is that you can’t just go straight to offering a quote. People aren’t using Facebook to get insurance quotes and they know they can get a quote whenever they want to anyway. To generate leads with Facebook, offer something people would want in exchange for their information. If online marketing isn’t your expertise you can also work with a company that specializes in online ads for insurance agents.

31. Chamber of Commerce – Chambers of Commerce are great for networking events and meeting new members of the community, but they’re also great sources for leads. Many Chambers will give their members a contact list you can use to find all the other members but if that’s not possible check their website for an online directory. Even if you’re not a member you should be able to use the online direcctory of most Chamber websites to find local businesses.

CONCLUSION

This blog post talks about various ways to generate leads for insurance agents, including generating them online. It will also enable agents to rank better in the search engines, and give useful tips on how to do it.

Many insurance agents can agree that generating leads is one of their biggest challenges. The best way to get the right people to call you is by creating a lead generation campaign tailored to you.

Lead Generation for Insurance Agents