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

Learn how to effectively track 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 agency.

The most common lead sources for insurance agencies include:

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

As a life and health insurance agency, 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 find out how lead source tracking can help you boost your return on investment (ROI).

Why Should You Track Lead Sources at Your Insurance Agency? 

Lead source tracking paints a very telling picture of your target audience and, in turn, how effective or ineffective your lead generation strategies are. Knowledge is power and every business has to be strategic with how they allocate their time, energy, and resources. If you don’t know your most profitable lead sources, you risk underestimating successful lead sources – or worse, focusing the majority of your resources on unprofitable ones. 

The only way to know where to place resources to get 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, you get a clear view of how you should be focusing your efforts and are able to create efficiencies in your business strategy.

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

Lead Source Data Can Help You Optimize Your Sales and Marketing Efforts 

As a life or health insurance agency, your sales 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. 

Regardless of your agency’s 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. 

In addition to 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 of your ROI gives you a better idea of where to focus your efforts.

Step 2: Calculate Your Conversion Rate

How many of your leads from a certain source end up purchasing a policy and becoming a client? Figuring out your sales close rate, also known as your conversion rate, can give you a lot of valuable insight into your lead sources. 

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 give you insight into how efficient and effective your sales team’s techniques are, helping you measure your agents’ performance and lead management strategies. 

As for conversion rate and sales close rate benchmarks, there are a lot of variabilities. Conversion rates, for example, will vary across mediums—like email, landing page, advertisements, etc. The best standard to measure against is your own historical data. Tracking how your conversion and close rates are doing on a regular basis will help you address immediate issues and set goals for the future. 

In the image below, you can see that this agency is tracking its lead source information in one place. Because of this, they’re able to identify which lead sources are working best for them. Clearly, 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: AgencyBloc Groups & Policies by Lead Source Report

Step 3: Tailor Your Sales and Marketing Strategy Accordingly

With these data insights, you’re able to discover gaps in your business strategy and tweak how you’re gathering 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 tweaks they can make to increase this conversion rate, like putting automated emails into place and ensuring 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 helps you know how to allocate your marketing dollars and resources – putting them toward the lead sources that reliably bring in worthwhile leads.

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

You want to make sure you choose a platform that stores all of your lead source information in one place. An industry-specific agency management system (AMS) is the best software to track and analyze your lead sources. The AMS you choose should have key features that simplify and streamline your lead tracking efforts: 

• Lead forms. A lead form builder makes it easy to get lead information into your AMS. Look for an AMS that allows you to build custom lead forms so that you can make sure you’re getting all necessary lead information. A great benefit of having this capability built into your AMS is that the information goes directly into the system, making managing leads and guiding them through your sales pipeline much easier.
• Integrations and API. Data management can be a daunting task – and handling it incorrectly can open you up to unwanted security risks. Choose an AMS 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 AMS 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 valuable insights to pivot your marketing and sales efforts in a timely manner.

What AMS has all of these critical features and more? AgencyBloc.

Use the #1 Agency Recommended Management System to Make Tracking Your Lead Sources Easier than Ever

AgencyBloc is an industry-specific AMS made to help insurance agencies, like yours, work more efficiently and effectively than ever before. Our robust suite of features is designed specifically to help your life and health agency 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.

As you can see below, our AMS also allows you to assign a lead source to each lead that comes in, making lead source tracking easier than ever. You can also set a list of custom terms you’d like to use as lead sources, as this agency did.

Image Source: AgencyBloc Lead Source View

---

This blog was originally published on 6/2/2016. It has been updated and republished on 10/27/2020 and again on 4/12/2022.