How to Find Your Life and Health Insurance Agency's Best, Most Profitable Lead Source

Learn how to effectively track insurance lead sources and use that information to grow your business.

If you Google the definition of “lead source,” you’re going to get many different variations of the same idea. To put it simply, a lead source is the first channel through which a contact hears about your health insurance agency, GA, or IMO/FMO.

The most common lead sources for insurance organizations include:

• Referrals
• Purchased list
• Social media
• Website lead form
• Google Adwords
• Cold calling
• Walk-ins/call-ins, and more.

As a health, benefits, and senior insurance agency or upline, it’s likely you know what a lead source is – but why are they important to track? What value does knowing your most profitable lead source bring to your business? Read on to learn how lead source tracking can help you boost your return on investment (ROI).

Why Should You Track Lead Sources at Your Insurance Organization? 

Lead source tracking paints a very telling picture of how effective or ineffective your lead generation sources are. Knowing this can help you effectively hone your lead-generation tactics. Every business must strategically use its time, energy, and resources. If you don’t know your most profitable lead sources, you risk underestimating successful ones – or worse, focusing most of your resources on unprofitable ones. 

The only way to know where to focus your resources so that you generate the most ROI is to track the source of every lead that comes in. By learning what’s working and what’s not for your agency, GA, or IMO/FMO, you get a clear view of how you should be focusing your efforts and can create efficiencies in your business strategy.

The most important part of lead source tracking is using an industry-specific platform that keeps all of your lead source information in one place, which we’ll discuss later on.

How to Use Lead Source Data to Optimize Your Sales and Marketing Efforts 

As an insurance organization, whether you sell directly to consumers or support downlines, your sales process and marketing tactics work in tandem to support your business’ growth. Marketing helps get your agency in front of the right people at the right time, and sales supports these efforts by leading clients through their buying journey or agents through their recruitment journey. 

Regardless of your lead sources, tracking them is key to ensuring your business’ effectiveness in both of these areas. Here’s a quick walk-through on how to do so.

Step 1: Learn Your Top Lead Sources

Knowing which lead sources are driving the most leads gives you a better idea of how effective your sales and marketing efforts are and what your target audience is drawn to. For example, are your organic social media efforts drawing in more leads than your paid ads? Is your website’s lead form driving more contacts but not conversions? Once you know this, you’re able to strategically tailor your marketing strategy to capture high-quality leads more effectively. 

On top of knowing your top lead sources, you also want to know the value that lead source brings to your business. Look at the cost per lead compared to the income generated from that converted lead. Understanding your ROI gives you a better idea of where to focus your efforts.

Step 2: Calculate Your Conversion Rate

Figuring out your sales close rate, also known as your conversion rate, can give your leadership and sales teams a lot of valuable insight into your lead sources. 

For health insurance agencies, see how many of your leads from a certain source end up purchasing a policy and becoming a client. For insurance uplines, look at the conversion rates of agents contracting with your company. 

Conversion rates can be calculated for many things, like landing pages and advertisements. This metric can help you determine how well your marketing efforts interest your audience. Conversion rates also provide insight into how efficient and effective your sales team’s techniques are, helping you measure your agents’ performance and lead management strategies. 

There are a lot of variables when it comes to conversion rate and sales close rate benchmarks. Conversion rates, for example, will vary across channels — like email, landing pages from paid ads, social media, etc. The best standard to measure against is your company’s historical data. Tracking how your conversion and close rates regularly will help you address immediate issues and set goals. 

In the image below, you can see that this agency is tracking its lead source information in one centralized location. Because of this aggregate view of their data, they’re able to identify which lead sources are working best for them. This agency’s Client Referral lead source brought them into contact with the most groups, but in the end, their affiliates (partners) delivered the most sold policies.

Image Source: AMS+ Groups & Policies by Lead Source Report

Step 3: Tailor Your Sales and Marketing Strategy Accordingly

With your data insights, your leadership and sales teams can discover gaps in your business strategy and adjust how you’re generating and acting on leads. From the report pictured above, for example, it’s clear that this agency’s client referral lead source could be profitable — but while the leads they’re getting are the highest, their actual conversion rate doesn’t match up. This clear view helps you find potential gaps in your business strategy; this agency may now investigate why their client referral leads aren’t closing at their expected rate. They may find that there are some small changes they can make to increase this conversion rate, like starting an automated email campaign to nurture leads and ensure agents reach out as soon as possible. 

Since your sales and marketing efforts work in tandem, you want to make sure you’re monitoring both from a lead source perspective. Doing so informs your organization on how to allocate your marketing budget and resources toward the lead sources that reliably generate leads. 

In addition to tracking your lead source data, you also want to track the performance of your sales and marketing efforts. Read this blog to get a better understanding of how to do this: The Sales and Marketing Metrics Your Agency Should Track. 

What Is the Best Way to Capture and Track Your Lead Sources? 

Choosing a platform that stores all of your lead source information in one place will make your job a lot easier. Many agencies and uplines opt for an insurance CRM or agency management system (AMS) to get the job done. We recommend using an industry-specific platform that has various features that are built specifically for your organization. This is the best way to track and analyze your lead sources and act on that data. Here are some key features that you should look for in your agency management platform to support your lead source tracking efforts: 

• Lead forms. Using custom lead forms makes it easy to get lead information and ensures you’re getting all the lead information you need. A great benefit of having this capability built into your agency management platform is that the information goes directly into the system, making managing leads much easier.
• Integrations and API. Data management can be a daunting task – and handling data incorrectly can open you up to unwanted security risks and compliance issues. Choose an agency management platform that provides integrations and access to an open API. This enables you to utilize the best tools for different parts of your business without creating data silos or friction in your internal processes. Plus, data integrations help you migrate sensitive information seamlessly and securely so that it’s all in one easily accessible, centralized place. 
• Analytics and reporting dashboards. Manually sifting through and analyzing all of your data to find your lead sources isn’t the best use of your time. You want to choose an agency management platform that has built-in data analysis and reporting capabilities. Not only will this save you valuable time to invest back into your business efforts, but it will also make it much easier to gain key insights to pivot your marketing and sales efforts quickly.
• Online meeting scheduler. Using an online meeting scheduler is a great way to help leads seamlessly take that next step in their buyer journey. If a prospect schedules a meeting with one of your sales reps or agents, their information is instantly populated in AMS+ as a new lead record. Once that record exists, your sales team can fill out their information, add notes, attach documents, and continue working the lead with ease.

Lead sources are only part of the equation. You also want to make sure that when leads come in, they’re promptly routed to the right people. Choose a platform that offers automated lead routing and agent assignment to save time and ensure quick follow-up.

What has all of these critical features and more? AMS+, an AgencyBloc solution.

Use the #1 Recommended Insurance Industry Growth Platform to Make Tracking Your Lead Sources Easier Than Ever

AgencyBloc’s Plus Suite is an industry-specific agency management platform made to help insurance agencies and uplines, like yours, work more efficiently and effectively than ever before. Our robust suite of features is designed specifically to help your health organization optimize your processes — from Automated Workflows that ensure all the necessary steps are taken for lead conversion to custom reports to better understand your lead source performance, and beyond.

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This blog was originally published on June 2, 2016, and has been most recently updated and republished on April 16, 2024.

Posted by Kelsey Rosauer on Thursday, April 18, 2024 in Reporting & Data Analysis

1. data management
2. prospecting
3. selling