In the Internet crazed world of today, you might think the only way to generate insurance leads is on line. While this is the trend, there are still a few viable ways to generate insurance leads using direct mail, community newspapers and telemarketing.

Let’s take a look at three ways to conduct insurance lead generation on line as opposed to mailers, telemarketing or other methods which we will cover in a later post.

Low Cost Print Advertising Works
We used a similar system advertising in community newspapers and senior newspapers. The investment for the insurance lead ad was $200. We got 20 replies. Same as the insurance lead direct mail piece, the ad offered the free booklet. We would send the 20 booklets, call 2 days later, get 8 appointments and close 4. Of course, we had to run ads in several publications. The investment was about $1200 a month over 6 publications and we had to “waste” some money until we found the 2 publications that produced the best results. Unfortunately, most insurance agents will give up before they perfect their system for insurance leads (and thus, that’s why most are poor).

Telemarketing Works
Whether you hire your own telemarketers or outsource it, people do respond. However, I don’t recommend this for insurance lead generation unless you are selling a low end product like Medicare HMOs or final expense insurance. Since people with money are on the do not call list, you will only get through to the less affluent suitable for these low end products.

Direct Mail Works
Direct mail for insurance lead generation works when done correctly. Unfortunately, the mailers you get from insurance companies are junk. They violate every rule of copy writing and direct response marketing. We created our own direct mail piece for annuity insurance leads because we could do a much better job than the product-focused mailers provided by insurance companies so in love with their products. We used direct mail for insurance leads for years as follows:

• We sent a simple postcard on yellow stock offering a free booklet called "Annuity Owner Mistakes"
• We mailed to households age 60-79, incomes of $50,000+, home owners
• We got a 1.2% response rate in an educated affluent area on the west coast (the more educated and affluent the area, generally the more skeptical the respondents but the more money they have and the better the insurance lead quality)

So from 1000 insurance lead mailers, we got 12 replies. We send the booklets and then call the 12 people within 2 days and make 2 sales, generally, 2 annuities each over $100,000 (all of our annuity sales in this area were over $100,000). So at 6%, we made $12,000 for an investment of about $500. This is a LOW volume HIGH quality insurance lead system. Most agents do it backwards--they like a lot a lot of volume so they can waste their precious time calling 100 people to find the two interested prospects. Note that we only make 12 calls to make 2 sales.

Important lesson—make sure however you get insurance leads, the system is LOW volume, HIGH quality so that you invest little time. It’s incredible to use that so many agents think that a system that generate more insurance leads is better.

A major way to conduct life insurance lead generation on line is to use pay-per-click marketing with the major search engines (Google, MSN, Yahoo) so that when a prospect does a search for your product or service, they will see your ad.  The best aspect of pay-per-click marketing is that your ad is exposed only to people who look for it.  The worst part is that you pay each time someone clicks to see your full ad.  The prospect clicks a small link that might say “The Truth about Annuities.”  At that point, you pay the search engine for the click (How much you pay depends how much you bid.  If you bid high, a lot of people will see your ad and you will pay for a lot for clicks and hopefully get a lot of insurance leads.  If you bid low, few people will see your ad and you won’t get much response).  The prospect is then directed to your landing page which needs to be well written and engage the prospect to take the next step (i.e. fill out your form with their contact information).

Obviously, when using pay per click marketing for life insurance leads, you pay for all the clicks but only a small percentage of the respondents are viable prospects.  Big life insurance companies and annuity companies will out-bid you for life and annuity insurance leads but since you can target your ads to just your geographic region, you can outbid them for just your area and get plenty of insurance leads.

The next method of life insurance lead generation is called co-generation.  Your ad runs on the websites of other business that do not compete with you.  When the prospect is filling out the form on the other web site, they get an option to also have their information sent to you—i.e. they see your offer. If a prospect sees your ad and completes a form with their contact information, you then pay for this insurance lead.  This is called “cost per action.”  The best part of this type of life insurance lead generation is that you pay for the prospect’s contact information. If the prospect does not fill out a form, you don’t pay.  The worst part is that your ad may appear on a vitamin site and the prospects did not “go looking” for your product or service.

The third way of conducting life insurance lead generation on line is to use banner ads.  These are ads that have color and graphics and tend to attract the eye.  Prospects click on them, are taken to your form and hopefully complete their contact information. In this type of lead generation, you pay per 1000 impressions, similar to running an ad in a magazine where the cost is based on the circulation.  Generally, this is not the type of insurance marketing I recommend but, on small sites that have local traffic in your area, you can generate some good insurance leads for a low cost (tip, if you are in say, Columbus Ohio, do a search for web sites using the phrase “Columbus Ohio seniors).”

If you have a limited budget, the first two options for on line life insurance leads work best.

Although we have not yest tested, we see a number of services that will telemarket for you and then you pay ONLY for a direct connect to the insurance prospect.  This seems like a very good way to generate insurance leads to us.

Here's what happens.  You contract with the insurance lead telemarketing firm for say 100 direct connects with insurance prospects.  Say the cost is $600.  They will dial (i assume using an auto dialer) and play a message that they will develop for you (or you can specify).  The message might be something like this, "With household budgets tighter than ever, many families feel they still need to have life insurance just in case yet need another solution to save money.  To hear how to obtain the life insurance you need at half the cost, press one."  The prospect who press are connected to you.  A HOT insurance lead!

Of course, be realistic.  Expect your share of prospects who tell you, "remove my 3$%^& number from your list you SOB."  On the other hand, can you think of anything better than to have your phone ring and the caller says "I am interested in your solution for life insurance at half price."  This type of insurance lead is an insurance agent's dream.

Of course, you can simply outsource all of your insurance lead generation to firms that will just charge you per lead. But you may want to outsource just pieces. For example, in the section we cover on pay per click insurance lead generation, you can outsource the just the bid management for your insurance leads. You can waste a lot of time monitoring your bids so that you don't overpay. The "going rate" for these insurance leads can change any time as you competitors change their bids.

So you could either "rent" software that helps automate this task for you (you set parameters and it runs 24/7 adjusting your insurance lead bids to your parameters--e.g. you might set a limit of $3 per insurance lead). Alternatively, you can hire a firm that uses such software and then appoints a manger to your account.

You have available the entire continuum of how you generate insurance leads from totally outsourced to totally do-it-yourself.