How to Generate Exclusive Life Insurance Leads Using Insurance Lead Generation

Lead generation for life insurance is challenging and expensive. Whether you are an agent, agency, or broker, you often pay upwards of $30 to $80 or more per life insurance lead. Even if you close 25% of the insurance leads you receive, you are looking at an average cost to acquire a new client of $120 on the low end to $320 on the high end for new customers.

With the average monthly life insurance premium being $26 a month, you are running single-digit profit margins. You may even lose money in the first year to acquire a client and generate sales initially. The only way you will thrive selling life insurance to achieve your dream life with your dream house, car, and lifestyle is by generating life insurance leads at a lower cost that closes at a higher rate. 

The truth about life insurance lead generation companies is that most of their insurance leads are not exclusive to you. This means that one, two, or ten other insurance agents are receiving the same lead as you and working that lead to death. Even when insurance leads online are sold as exclusive, they may differ from what you think. We are not saying the lead you purchase is not an exclusive lead, although some companies are less ethical and sell non-exclusive leads as exclusive. How were these insurance leads generated?

 Typically inbound insurance leads have a much higher close rate than outbound insurance leads for generating new sales. Since inbound leads seek you out with a burning desire to pay for life insurance, and outbound leads, you go to them hoping they need life insurance so you can generate new sales. Most lead generation companies are selling outbound leads or scraped leads from the internet; only a select few are selling inbound leads, and inbound leads come with a costly premium price for life insurance leads and sales.

When you buy life insurance leads, you lose control over targeting your ideal customer, which could best be served by your unique solution in the life insurance industry. There is less control over targeting and the quality of the life insurance leads. In general, you are purchasing a broader, less qualified lead when you purchase life insurance leads. Purchasing life insurance leads can be a fantastic option for your business. However, you want to buy exclusive leads whenever possible that are mostly generated online using inbound life insurance marketing; these leads have the highest close rate and are highly qualified. 

Why Leads Cost More Year After Year in the Insurance Industry?

The cost of purchasing leads only goes up yearly because of increasing competition and demand for the same leads. At the same time, consumers are becoming desensitized to insurance advertising. As a result, lead generation tactics are becoming less effective at enticing consumers to fill out an insurance lead form. 

The increased competition and demand combined with less effective marketing drive up the cost per lead to ranges a life insurance agent cannot afford. Even more, big insurance companies like State Farm and Progressive can afford to lose billions in marketing costs if it puts more of the competition out of business. The enormous war chest being deployed by the largest insurance companies in the world is driving up the cost of leads in the insurance industry. 

Yes, cold calling for insurance leads is 100% worth it. Building and scaling an MLM team of insurance advisors to execute life insurance sales and recruit other advisors is an effective way to grow your agency. The only downside is that it is very challenging to scale since most agents quit within 90 days, and you are constantly on a grind to hire new agents. 

On average, only 2% of cold calls become prospects meaning you would have to make 100 calls and experience 98 rejections before generating two leads; this is why most agents quit within 90 days. Cold calling is great when your business is just starting to generate life insurance clients at no cost. However, when you want to get to the next level building an inbound strategy to generate exclusive life insurance warm prospects on demand makes it easy to scale.

Suppose you have made it this far; you have probably realized that you need to take your marketing into your own hands to be successful in insurance sales and get to the next level. You must choose lead generation strategies that deliver profitable revenue growth at the lowest cost. Not all insurance marketing tactics are created equal; some are better for the short term, and others for the long term. While others may be better for conversions and others may be better for branding. 

Even more, the insurance industry has some of the highest advertising costs. On average, it costs an insurance agency $900 to acquire a new client, and for outbound strategies like Google’s Pay Per Click Ads, the average cost of acquiring a new client has risen to $1,609. How do you know which lead generation strategies deliver profitable revenue growth at the lowest cost for the short and long term? Keep reading as we share exactly what to focus on for your insurance agency. 

The best way we recommend to beat out the big five insurance companies that have astronomical advertising budgets is to invest in an organic marketing strategy and organic marketing tactics. Organic marketing is marketing that works for you and grows even when you are not investing in it. Price plays a major role in consumer decisions when choosing the best insurance plan for their needs. Big insurance companies know this and use it to their advantage to drive up advertising costs for their competitors. They are willing to lose money for years if they control market share and the insurance options within the marketplace. With higher advertising costs cutting into your profit margins, you are not able to deliver competitive insurance options for the end consumer. 

Using organic marketing, you could drastically lower and even eliminate your advertising costs to generate free life insurance leads for agents on demand. Since organic marketing tactics cannot be bought, they have to be earned no matter how much money the big five insurance companies throw at organic marketing; if you have an excellent strategy and excellent execution, you could beat them out. One of the highest-value organic marketing tactics is SEO or Search Engine Optimization. Other organic lead channels are social media and email.  

Social media is best for acquiring brand awareness around a new offer inexpensively, and email is best for converting attention you have garnered using social or SEO. The only downside to organic growth channels is that they take a long time to get going and begin receiving a return on investment. However, there are tactics to shortcut the time it traditionally takes to start receiving ROI to half or less without breaking any guidelines or rules.

How Paid Ads Fill a Short-Term Need for Leads in the Life Insurance Industry?

Paid ads are an excellent short-term revenue driver to acquire more leads and sell more insurance. Be wary of depending on the paid ad hamster wheel for generating most of your leads and insurance sales. On average, here is how much paid advertising for insurance sales and leads has been increasing year over year:

• Meta (previously known as Facebook) CPM (cost per thousand) increased 61% year over year to an average of $17.60/CPM. 

• Google’s programmatic display CPM (cost per thousand) increased 75% year over year. Search ad CPC (cost-per-click) increased 14% year over year.

• TikTok’s CPM (cost per thousand) has increased 185% year over year, averaging USD $9.40/CPM.

Instagram’s CPM (cost per thousand) increased 23% year over year.

Why Paid Ads for Leads Cost More Year After Year in the Insurance Industry?

Advertising costs only go up over time as demand and competition increase; if you depend on paid advertising for your leads, you may spend double or more over the next year to three years to acquire a new insurance lead and client. For new businesses using paid ads is a great way to acquire new clients in a short period, but over the long term, the costs outweigh the reward of being fully dependent on paid ads. That said, incorporating paid ads into a long-term strategy and other long-term focused tactics is important to success in the insurance industry. 

Why is SEO Life Insurance Lead Generation the Best Long Term?

Long term, there is no other web sales channel that delivers like Insurance SEO. For those unfamiliar with SEO to acquire insurance customers, SEO is a process for generating more profitable revenue at a lower cost from search engines like Google, Bing, and DuckDuckGo. There are paid search results on search engines where a business can buy traffic and revenue. Then there are the organic search results where a business can earn traffic and revenue. 

Paid Search Results:

Paid search results make up only 5% of clicks on Google, and less than 15% of all website traffic goes to paid advertising. The only way to earn revenue and traffic from the paid search results is to purchase it from Google. The advantage of paid search results is that you do not have to wait for results; you get results within a matter of months at most. 

The downside of the paid search results is that over time your advertising costs on Google go up 75% for programmatic display ads and 14% for search ads year over year. If you only depend on the paid search results for business, your profit margin will shrink year after year for your insurance business, and leads will cost more. The average cost per acquisition for an insurance financial advisor from PPC is $1,609.60, and you could expect to spend $402.40 before receiving any leads. 

Organic Search Results:

Over 95% of clicks on Google go to the organic search results, and only 5% go to the paid search results. More than 50% of all website traffic on the internet is generated from the organic search results. The only way to earn revenue and traffic from the organic search results is to earn it using a process called SEO. The advantage of the organic search results is that your ROI is nearly infinite over time and your cost per lead is $0 or as close to $0 as possible over time, which increases your profit margin and revenue while decreasing your costs. The downside of the organic search results is that you are investing in SEO for the long term, so you cannot expect results in the first few months. 

On average fantastic results occur after 6 to 12 months. However, if you have existing SEO work done on your website or are willing to invest more in a shorter period, you could expect faster results in three to six months or less without breaking any guidelines or laws. On average, businesses that invest in SEO for a year to acquire leads in the insurance industry acquire new clients at the cost of $116 per client and new leads at the cost of $29.

Unlike PPC, where the moment you stop paying Google for leads is the moment all leads, traffic, and revenue stops. When you stop investing in SEO, all leads, traffic, and revenue continue for your website indefinitely. This is what creates the potential for an infinite ROI over time. Here is what SEO Versus Paid Advertising looks like in a visual:

Instead of paying for leads at the cost of $30 to $80 per lead, you could invest in SEO for a year, and within the next couple of years, you are acquiring leads for free. Instead of spending $120 to $320 to acquire new clients by purchasing leads, you could spend $116 per lead after a year of investing in SEO, and after a couple of years, your leads could be free. Consumers trust the organic search listings more than the paid search listings, with more than 80% of users ignoring the paid search listings and scrolling straight to the organic search listings. 

The leads you generate from investing in SEO close at an exponentially higher rate than purchased leads or leads generated from paid advertising. These are leads who are seeking to purchase your service instead of you seeking these leads to purchase your service. Compared to purchasing leads, where most lead providers are selling leads that are scraped data you could get on the internet or leads that have been sold to many other agents. When you invest in SEO, every lead is an inbound lead seeking your service exclusively to you.