Insurance Lead Scoring and the Benefits for Your Sales Strategy

Your agency’s website is an essential tool for attracting leads and prospects, but evaluating those leads is another story. Some leads may not be ready to use your agency’s services immediately, and others may not be ideal customers. Lead scoring can help you to distinguish promising leads from unqualified ones, saving your agency time and money. This week?s post will explore insurance lead scoring and the benefits a strong lead scoring strategy can have for your agency.

What is insurance lead scoring?

Lead scoring is a process that agencies use to assess the quality of leads. While you may have thousands of leads expressing interest in your agency, many will not convert to paying customers. Nurturing leads that aren’t likely to become customers costs your agency valuable time that could be spent cultivating and closing quality leads.

Agencies who use an insurance lead scoring model assign a numerical value to their leads. These numerical values indicate whether the lead is ready to become a customer, needs to be nurtured, or should be eliminated. The process begins by creating a lead scoring model that answers two main questions:

1. 1. 1. Are these leads a good fit?
      2. Are these leads engaged with my agency?

The model typically has a scale of 0 to 100, with 100 representing the best-qualified leads. Leads are scored on a variety of criteria, such as demographics, industry, online behavior, and email behavior. When evaluating a lead, it’s important to consider if they are the type of person your agency generally targets, and if they regularly interact with your online content.

The quality of the leads is more important than the number of leads your agency has. Insurance lead scoring can help your agency focus your efforts on high-quality leads who have a good chance of becoming customers.

Why should you invest time in insurance lead scoring?

Investing time in developing a lead scoring process can be advantageous to your agency in the long run. Some important benefits of insurance lead scoring include:

More Qualified Leads

Following the 0-100 method based on specific characteristics and engagement, leads with scores between 75-100 can be categorized as ?hot? and become top priority. Those with low scores are ?cold? leads and agents can follow up with them last if they opt to follow up with them at all. By focusing on the ?hot? leads, your producers and sales reps will be following up with quality leads that have the greatest chance of becoming customers.

Higher Conversion Rate

Insurance lead scoring doesn’t necessarily mean you will increase your number of leads, but it can help you increase qualified leads. Focusing your attention on qualified leads increases the likelihood that they will become revenue-generating customers. In fact, a 2014 survey found that 38% of participants who implemented lead scoring saw an increase in their sales conversion rate.

Increased Productivity

Using lead scoring gives agents the opportunity to speak to the most qualified leads first. This greatly reduces the amount of time agents spend contacting leads with a low potential of becoming customers. In addition, agents can respond to qualified leads in a more timely manner, which may motivate them to choose your agency over your competitors.

Develop Targeted Pitches

Insurance lead scoring gives you more insight into the demographics, online behavior, and industries of your most promising leads. This can help you to understand their benefits needs and to develop targeted pitches that address their specific concerns. For example, if your lead has a group made up of single millennials looking for an affordable employee health insurance policy, you can create a pitch that explains how your agency can recommend appropriate plans for them.

How Lead Scoring Filters Out The Noise

If your agency is inundated with leads, generally only a percentage of those leads are qualified. If agents begin contacting these leads indiscriminately, they are likely to waste time speaking to leads who are not ready to use your agency’s services. Lead scoring acts as a filter, helping you understand which leads are genuinely interested in your agency’s benefit offerings.

The data you use to develop your insurance lead scoring model is essential to this process. For maximum effectiveness, it’s important to compile data from a variety of sources such as online forms, account information, and past communications with your contacts. This can help you understand what converted leads have in common. Also look at contacts who didn’t become leads and note any trends. Then apply what you’ve learned to develop an effective lead scoring model.

This data helps you evaluate your leads and identify which ones are the most likely to convert to customers. As a result, your agents can focus their efforts on the most qualified leads and avoid the unqualified ones.

Final Thoughts About Insurance Lead Scoring

Lead scoring is found within most marketing automation software and can greatly increase the effectiveness of your agency’s marketing strategy. It helps you to develop a complete picture of your leads so your agency can follow up with the ones most likely to become paying customers. Lead scoring is an essential practice that can help you identify the most qualified leads, communicate with them more effectively, and increase your agency’s conversion rate.