I have had a lot of new health agents asking me about Internet healthInsurance leads lately, mainly about which companies have the best insurance leads and which ones have the best pricing structure for new agents.
The truth is that there is more to the picture than the pricing and quality. Every Internet lead source is going to give you leads that are no good, but there are some that are really good and some that are really bad.
Lets start with the bad ones first. There are some health insurance lead companies out there that have a couple of things that really go against an agent. One of these things is having poor control over their affiliate marketing program. They let anybody get affiliate links and let them put them anywhere. Many times I have gotten leads from companies that the leads info was from a pop up form from some sort of giveaway. These people had absolutely no interest in getting health or life insurance at all but had filled out a form trying to get a freebie. Just think about it, what is the likelihood of someone on line trying to get something for nothing buying anything from you? These companies also have a problem of leads coming from spam email and the worst is that there are some con artists who get these affiliate links and have a network of friends fill out the forms to get paid. It gets really crazy with these companies and it ends up being all on you to get credit. Some of these leads companies even restrict the percentage of returns you can get so you end up stuck with a bunch of garbage.
The other problem that these companies have is that many of them sell either to each other or to higher priority call centers. These are the health leads you get who have been called 50 times that day, or were called an hour before you ever got the lead. Even some so called exclusive leads are just a lead bought from another lead company and sold once by them at a higher price to you. And back to the affiliate spammers, some of them get links from multiple companies and submit captured info to all of them at once.
With that being said, there are some really good quality health lead services out there that eliminate most of these problems. I have three of them listed here and am working with a fourth that I really want on board before long.
The first one, and the one I am most excited about is brokers web. Here is how their system works:
A person looking for the terms “health care” or “health insurance” finds their sites healthcare.com or healthinsurancefinders.com. (google those two terms, you will see how high those two sites are listed and you will see how heavy duty these two sites are.) When the start looking into health insurance they select what type of health insurance they are looking for if it is individual health insurance, family health insurance, group health insurance, medicare supplement insurance, etc. and are asked to enter their zip code. This leads them to a page of pay per click ads agents have placed.
So how does the pay per click ads work? Simple: The agent or agency that has bid the most gets placed at the top and the one that bid the lowest is at the bottom. When the ad is clicked, the prospect is sent to the agents personalized referral page and when they fill out the form, the agent is sent the exclusive health lead immediately. (This happens almost half of the time, that the form is completed.)
So the agents at the top get a lot more traffic, but pay a whole lot more for it. The health agents in the middle of the pack get less, but get it at a better price. The insurance agents at the bottom get very little traffic at all but they also don’t pay much of anything at all. So lets say that you placed a bid at $5 a click and ended up somewhere in the middle. You would be generating truly exclusive health leads for just over $10 apiece. Most lead companies charge over twice that amount and then it is hard to say whether they are truly exclusive.
The next insurance lead company that I have listed is InsureMe. They do generate a good portion of their leads through affiliate sites but they have their quality control in place. They only allow relevant sites to have their links and check on the sources of incoming leads to make sure that they are not posted on incentivized sites or being done through spam emails. They also keep check on the quality of leads, or how many returns they have from their affiliates. If the affiliate violates this they get banned. They also do not buy from other lead companies or sell to other lead companies. This keeps the quality of their leads relatively high. Their lead return policy is also good.
The last company that I have listed is Leadco.biz. They sell exclusive health leads that are phone verified. These leads are generated by them and they specifically target small business owners and self employed individuals. They have been around in this business for quite awhile and I have run into many long time agents who swear by them. They are mid range in pricing for exclusive leads but think about this: they have actually talked to the prospect before the lead ever goes out to an agent. Pretty good as quality goes. And their return policy is also good although they don’t have many of these.
Like I said, there is another company I am currently trying out and am having good results with and I will let you know how that works out. I am also working on doing some interviews with some of these companies management so if you have any questions about health leads that you would like me to ask them, please leave a comment.
Thanks for visiting my health insurance leads blog.
Cheers,
Mac