What’s an automatic insurance lead generator?
Have you ever seen those drinking bird toys? Two bulbs at either end of a tube pivot on a crosspiece. The tube swings up and down mimicking the appearance of a bird drinking from a glass of water. To put it in motion, you just dip its head in water. As long as the head keeps getting wet, the temperature differential between the ends of the tube keeps the bird bobbing up and down.
An insurance lead generator works the same way. Once you set it in motion, it produces leads automatically.
Most insurance agents already have the basic components of an automatic insurance lead generator: a website and an email account. The challenge is setting them up to work together effectively. Like the bird toy, the automatic insurance lead generator has one serious flaw: it will not work without a steady stimulus.
The Missing Ingredient
The bird toy needs to wet its beak to create the temperature differential. The insurance lead generator needs content to maintain prospect engagement.
It’s amazing how close agents come to figuring out how to put together an automatic lead generator while leaving out that one absolutely necessary ingredient.
I talked to an agent the other day who I’ll call Skip. Skip was on the right track. He had been buying online ads and experimenting. He figured he could break even on his ads targeted toward people interested in Medicare insurance if he got just one out of 20 clicks to fill out a Medicare application — and of course anything better than that he’d make money. His goal was to get one completed app for every 10 clicks. His problem was he could only get one for every 50.
But is that any wonder? How could you expect someone to just fill out an application for insurance after only reading a 25-character Google Ad Word?
Short Term Gratification or Long Term Success?
Skip was smart about driving people to his website. But his concept of a lead generator was entirely focused on short-term gratification, rather than developing long-term relationships. Skip was missing so much in defining his goal so narrowly.
In the first place, most prospects are not ready to buy when you’re ready to sell. This may be less true of people who respond to an online ad, but the other problem with Skip’s approach is that most people are not going to do business with someone they know nothing about and have no relationship with.
What Skip should have done after prospects clicked on his ad, rather than immediately go for the close and shove an insurance application at them, is bring them to a landing page. Once there, Skip could establish his agency’s authority and expertise in Medicare insurance and offer a free report or booklet, something like “Everything You Need to Know about Medicare.”
In exchange for the free report, prospects would give Skip an email address and maybe even a phone number. At that point, Skip would start sending them a regular flow of helpful information, such as weekly emails, seminar announcements, occasional additional special reports and more. Skip would build trust and demonstrate his expertise. By nurturing his prospects, he would be there when they were ready to buy. With this method, Skip could achieve a close ratio several times better than one in 20.
That is how an automatic lead generator works. Just as water makes the bird toy go up and down, content makes the insurance lead generator create new business. With a steady supply of content you build trust, demonstrate expertise, establish confidence — and make sales to new customers more frequently and so much more easily.
How To Set Up Your Own Automatic Insurance Lead Generator
If you have a website and an email account, you can set up an automatic lead generator. Here’s how:
- Create up a call to action on your website, preferably on your home page and in the sidebars of your interior pages, promoting a free report to your target audience. Before you let someone download the report, ask them for their email address, so you can send them other helpful information. You might also ask for (but not require) their phone number. It will depress results if you require a phone number.
- Set up an auto-responder on your website that thanks your new subscribers for their email address. Tell them that they can look forward to getting more helpful information from you soon. Let them know that they can unsubscribe any time they want.
- Add your new subscribers to your email list and send them your weekly articles, announcements and new special reports.
- If you collected a phone number, give your leads a call after a few weeks or months and ask if they’re enjoying the newsletter and whether you can have an opportunity to quote their business. (If you don’t have a phone number, there are resources that will probably enable you to figure it out.)
- Add new featured reports to your main website call to action. Also, create a web page with links where visitors can access any of your reports if they supply their email address (and phone number).
- Repeat in perpetuity.
- In addition to offering free reports to visitors who sign-up at your website, build your lead list by:
a) buying online ads to drive business to your website, like Skip did
b) asking for referrals from existing clients — if you’ve done a good job and inspires confidence, just ask
c) offering free gift cards ($10 or less usually) for referrals on your website and in your social media posts
d) including newsletter subscription offers in all your online (such email) and offline communications
e) collecting business cards
f) giving referrals to others — and they’ll give them to you in return, especially if you can set up a referral network with other professionals, and
g) being remarkable in how you do your job and inspiring people to recommend you.
My original title for this report was “How to Build a Perpetual Insurance Lead Generator.” But of course the system I’m describing only works if you keep supplying content that engages your audience. Other than that, it really is a perpetual insurance lead generator.
if you need content for your perpetual automatic insurance lead generator, please contact us. If you think the information in this article is useful, please consider sharing it. Or if you have a different opinion or think I’ve missed something important, let me know in comments! Thanks for visiting us!
PolicyGenius and Coverhound are building platforms for the insurance consumer who doesn’t want or even appreciate the need to talk to an insurance agent. Their target audience, in particular, is millennials who already handle their other financial transactions, such as banking and investing, online.
