Insurance Agents Think Tank

On this episode of the Insurance Agents Think Tank Podcast, Todd invites Jeff Hogue (QuoteWizard) to discuss what top P&C agents are doing to scale their agencies using QuoteWizard leads and internet leads in general. Tune in to learn:- How to use smart automations to increase your agency's ROI on leads- How to sell more premium with QuoteWizard leads- What types of systems you need to use in order to have success with internet leads- How to increase your contact rates with leads- Much, much more!Join our community at: https://www.facebook.com/groups/InsuranceThinkTankSubscribe to the podcast for more: https://AgentsThinkTank.com Twitter: https://twitter.com/AgentsThinkTankInstagram: https://instagram.com/InsuranceThink

FULL TRANSCRIPT:Because if somebody has a 10% contact rate and out of those 10% of contact, maybe only half get a quote versus you have somebody with a 30% contact rate and only half get a quote, which company should you invest your money into going forward? It's a no brainer, right? The one that let you quote the mostHello and welcome to the insurance agents think tank podcast. I'm your host, Todd McLean. Today's topic is  one that I hear all the time. Hey, Todd, what do you think about this marketing source? Or what do you think about doing this kind of marketing? And so I really wanted to dive into a fundamental difference between passive marketing and active marketing.It's a subject that many agents don't even consider before building their marketing systems in their office. So don't forget, you can check out this podcast out on agentsthinktank.com. Let's dive into the differences between active marketing and passive marketing. So when I was a new agent, something that I wish I would have been taught upfront is I need to consider, am I doing more of an active marketing type, or am I doing more of a passive marketing type?And let me kind of like dive into what I mean, because this is really marketing 101. If you're not considering, you know, anytime that you get into a different marketing source, you should consider. Is this active marketing or passive marketing. And do I have too much of either in order to hit my goals?So let's go into a different couple of , Examples of what each might be. So passive marketing means you're waiting for someone it's passive to raise their hand in order to get a quote, things like referrals, direct mail, a door to door, right. You're asking people for something in order later, at some point.To get them to reach back out to you now with passive marketing. What I like to tell agents is be careful about passive marketing, depending on how competitive you are in your market. I've seen way too many agents struggle to, you know, for example, build referral relationships, in the Dallas area as a farmer's agent.If I try to build mortgage referral relationships, I'm going to get my butt kicked because we're just not that competitive on home in my current market. I'm not saying don't do it. I'm just saying you want to be cognizant of your competitiveness in your market for passive types of marketing campaigns.The other type of marketing campaigns that you can do are active type of marketing campaign. So you are actively trying, you know, going out there, shaking hands, kissing babies. Careful post COVID world. Right? But you're actively asking people for a quote, you can control your destiny. You can control the amount of quotes that you're doing because of statistics.So that again, with passive marketing, you're waiting on active marketing, you're controlling because of the numbers. Right? So with active marketing, Well, technically with both, you want to know your numbers, both active marketing. It's really important to track your results and so forth in order for you to scale.So let's go into some examples, active marketing for newer agents. I see all sorts of agents when they get into the, to our industry, they start buying internet leads day one, right? So internet leads are active. There are people that are going online, filling something out, raising their hand for a quote.But again, there's being sold probably the three to five different agents, especially newer leads. Right. And one of the things that I want you to be really cognizant of with internet leads is buying them from multiple lead companies up front, do not pick one lead company. You need to have at least two, I recommend three and test them out for 60 to 90 days, because what I want you to track is what your contact rate and your quote rate is for those carriers for those lead providers.Because if somebody has a 10% contact rate and out of those 10% of contact, maybe only half get a quote versus you have somebody with a 30% contact rate and only half get a quote, which company should you invest your money into going forward? It's a no brainer, right? The one that let you quote the most, but if you only tried one company, you would never know that.And you'd just say internet leads suck. And I'm never going to try that again. Right. But at the end of the day, you're able to control your quote volume because you can put the. You know, just a click of a mouse book pad, you can turn up your volume or turn it down. And so how I do it in my office is I have direct mail through smarketingmail.com, a mail provider that I created due to with direct mail, passive marketing.Passive marketing that you can kind of control based on the volume that you send out. So with a passive marketing system, like direct mail, you have to be really careful about not sending enough volume, because if you're contact, rate's not there. You're not going to get the volume, the quote volume you need in order to even break even, or get a good ROI.You know, say 18 months down the road with direct mail. So what I do in my office is with direct mail. I sent out about 5,000 mail pieces per producer. That's, that's the number that I found in my market with my contact rate, with my ROI, in order for me to break, even on that marketing campaign. By my 18th month, I'm sending out 5,000 mail pieces, but I, you know, on a, on a good month, I'll get about a half a percent contact rate on a great month.About 0.7, 5%. But what I can do is every morning when my producers come in, If they're noticing that they're not getting the, the colon volume that they need, they can easily turn up my internet lead volume. And then if they are getting good contact rate and they, maybe they can't even keep up with the quotes that they're getting on the call, inbound calls, they can simply just click a button and pause and turn down my internet leads.So it's really important that you have a balance of both passive and active because on the passive side, it's kind of like a, a breather for your staff. It's it's easier to close leads, but I do want to disclose with something like direct mail, those, those cost per lead cost per inbound call is extremely high.So you had never let a brand new producer work. Direct mail inbound calls, right? You want the best closers, the people who can close those expensive call-ins uh, to work those with the active marketing, like your internet leads. That's what I put newer agents on, making sure that they learn how to quote that they're getting their sales pitch down.The other thing with passive marketing. So a lot of people like to build referral relationships, mortgage brokers, realtors, it's, it's one of the best marketing sources that you can do. Now again, I'm going to go back and say that if you're not competitive, if you're in a bad rate cycle, I would spend more time on the things that you can control because in a bad rate cycle, you need higher volume.You can't get good high quote volume from referral source because the more they send you, if you're hurting their, their DTI and their. The requirements for the payment to be lower your, your, your Mo volumes going to drop, right? So in bad rates cycle environments, you really need to focus your time and energy building active marketing campaigns.Telemarketing, you need to be able to control your contact, rate your speed to contact. So using a dialing system, and then you can figure out just as an example, with telemarketing, if I put a telemarketer. And by the way, you can get scripts and things like that in our files section of our insurance think tank Facebook group, just click on the files.But with the telemarketer, I know that if I load a thousand leads and a dialer system, and I figured out over time, my, my telemarketer can make a hundred dials an hour. I can see that she made 10 contacts. And one quote on average from 10 contacts. If you know those statistics, then you can get reasonable expectations and kind of forecast what you're going to make off telemarketing.Same exact same thing with internet leads. Once you track over time, you can start to figure out what your expectations should be. And once you know your numbers, I mean, your eyes kind of open up. It makes the world a lot easier place to live in because you know what your expectations should be. Given the results over time, uh, things like events.I've seen people at success with both shows with wedding venues, with all sorts of things. Just make sure that with events, it is a type of action, active marketing, because you're trying to, you're physically in front of people. Sure. What post COVID events are going to look like? Hopefully they come back in the fall, but events are going to get you that face to face active marketing.And we'll talk more about each topic in depth on what to do, but this really is all about how you should think about structuring any type of marketing source that you're going to get into. So just in summary, if you're thinking about doing marketing, okay, whatever type or source of marketing that you're doing, I want you to first ask yourself, is this passive or is this active?If it's passive, do you have reasonable expectations on the results you're going to get. Right. Do you have the right contact rate? If it's any kind of like outbound ad that you're going to send or direct mail that you're going to send, do you have the right expectations? Do you have the right people working it?If it's a passive referral source, are you competitive in your current marketplace? If you're not competitive? You might not want to spend too much time in energy and trying to build referral relationships until you can compete in your market with those, with the numbers that they need to hit on their DTI.If you're in a bad rate cycle, then I would totally focus my time and energy on my active marketing sources. And if I'm going to do an active type of marketing source, Am I tracking the metrics that I need in order to scale this, which is my dial rate, my contact rate and my quote rate. And I might be buying leads from the best source after trying at least two or three sources for each.So hopefully this just got your brain juices flowing. You're thinking about, am I doing active or passive? And am I tracking the results that I need to be tracking in order to have a successful marketing platform for my agency. Again, you can check out our podcasts on agentsthinktank.com and I look forward to many future podcasts.We have some exciting podcasts with guests going over each type of marketing system that they do in their office. And hopefully give you guys some great tips and ideas that you might have not thought about. Have a great day.Join our community at: https://www.facebook.com/groups/Insur...​Subscribe to the podcast for more: https://AgentsThinkTank.com​ Twitter: https://twitter.com/AgentsThinkTank​Instagram: https://instagram.com/InsuranceThink

Craig Pretzinger and Jason Feltman are The Insurance Dudes, host of The Insurance Dudes Podcast, the best resource for agents in the industry. They help agents compress their learning curve to achieve exceptional results. Craig and Jason built the #1 podcast in the industry from scratch by dedicating their time and energy to delivering episode after episode of actionable content. Today they talk to Todd all about a hot topic: telemarketing.

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