Close More Deals by Managing Your Online Leads Properly

The insurance industry is an extremely cutthroat one. With many agents around the country competing for sales, you need to make the most of every lead that you receive. To do that, you need a proper system for lead management. You need to keep your leads engaged — and keep yourself at the forefront of each person’s mind — from the point of initial interest to the moment in which you close the deal. These tips can help.

Capture More Leads

If the sales-oriented content on your website already sends leads your way consistently, you’ve got a fairly healthy preneed insurance sales funnel — it’s often very difficult to create sales pages that generate traffic from search engines. You can generate even more leads, though, by adding informational content to your website. Content that isn’t overly promotional often tends to rank better on search engines than promotional content. Use that to your advantage by writing informational articles designed to help people in the early awareness stage of shopping for final expense insurance. 

The people who find your website by searching for general information about insurance probably won’t be quick to give you their email addresses. You’ll need to sweeten the deal by offering a reward. Offering a downloadable item such as an e-book or case study is a great way to attract email signups. Make sure, though, that the reward you’re offering is a good companion to the article that originally attracted the visitor. If you have an article about the typical costs that preneed insurance covers, for example, the email signup reward that you offer should contain bonus content that a person would want to see after reading that article.

Lead Segmentation and Qualification

When you augment your website’s sales funnel to generate leads from informational content, you’ll begin collecting different types of leads. When you collect a lead through a form for requesting a quote, that lead will be very close to converting. A lead that you capture through your website’s informational content is only beginning to learn about his or her insurance needs. You’ll have to nurture that lead differently to earn a conversion.

Since you can’t market to all of your leads in the same way, you need a way to segment them based on their needs. The best way to segment your audience is to use a full-featured email marketing provider with the ability to segment your leads based on how you acquired them. MailChimp is one email marketing provider with automatic lead segmentation features. MailChimp is free to try until you’ve collected your first 2,000 leads. 

Would you like to do an even better job of segmenting and qualifying your leads? Segment them not only according to their current positions in the customer journey but also by the type of content that they read on your website before they provided their email addresses. Suppose, for example, that you have two leads. You acquired one lead through an article about the typical costs that final expense insurance covers. The other lead provided his email address after reading an article comparing your insurance to standard life insurance. Would you market to those people differently? Assign them to different segments.

Keeping Your Leads Engaged

The best way to keep your leads engaged is by providing exactly the content that interests them. A deeply segmented list, then, is a very engaged list because all of your leads will receive personalized content that speaks directly to their needs. The drawback of having a lead database with many segments, though, is that you’ll need to do a lot more work to engage your leads because you’ll provide different content to each segment.

Automation is the key to managing a lead database with many different segments. With a good email marketing provider, you can write an entire series of messages in advance. After writing the series, you can have the email provider send the messages according to a schedule that you determine. Once you’ve created an automated campaign, your email provider can execute the campaign automatically each time someone submits a form on your website. 

Closing the Deal

In any email marketing campaign, your goal is to keep your leads engaged while guiding them toward an eventual sale. Try experimenting with different ways of handling the sales process after your automated campaigns end. For example, you use a call to action at the end of your campaigns directing leads to call you if they’d like to discuss purchasing a policy. That way, your involvement in the lead qualification process is minimal — simply write the campaigns, and wait for the calls to come. You could also use a call to action that moves your leads to another automated campaign flow and further qualifies them.