How Text Messages Can Help Generate Insurance Leads

In a study conducted by the National Association of Professional Insurance agents, 1,500 independent insurance agents and brokers listed their top challenges. Two of the top three were marketing related. They were:

• The absence of marketing support from large insurance carriers 
• The difficulty of marketing in a cost-effective way

Marketing and lead generation for insurance agents is notoriously tricky. Insurance customers are expensive to acquire, with the cost of customer acquisition reaching as high as $900 per customer

We’re the first to acknowledge that there are a lot of lead generation strategies that work well for agents. There are also a lot of strategies that aren’t the best fit.

Some insurance agents invest heavily in content marketing, and it pays off tremendously for them. Other businesses bite the bullet and pay the $55 cost-per-click for insurance-related keywords.

We’re sensitive about telling agents that they “need” to be doing this or that. But there is one thing that we truly believe that you should be doing: using text messages to generate leads. 

Before you write this article off as just another company flouting its product as the holy grail, consider all the calls, emails, and ads you ignore. Now answer us this–how many text messages have you completely ignored in the past month? 

In this article, we cover:

1. What Makes Texting Effective
2. 5 Creative Ways Text Messages Can Generate Insurance Leads

What Makes Texting Effective

Texting is one of the most effective ways to generate insurance leads because marketers haven’t yet strip-mined it. Don’t believe us?

People no longer answer their phones because robocalls increased by 35% from 2018 to 2019. People no longer read their emails because the average office worker receives 121 emails per day.

When everyone starts using the same channels for their advertising and outreach, then those channels become ineffective and expensive. On the other hand, only 7% of people report using text messages to communicate with businesses.

All of this means that SMS marketing is lurking the background, waiting for insurance agents to capitalize on it. Here’s how to use text messages to generate insurance leads.

5 Creative Ways Texting Can Generate Insurance Leads

Below we’ve listed five creative ways text messaging can help insurance agents generate more leads. All of the methods below take into consideration the fact that leads usually have to see your message at least seven times before they’re ready to buy.

Texting is a great way to integrate your insurance message with other digital channels at an extremely affordable rate. (Our plans start at $29 /month for 500 SMS.)

1. Use Texting to Generate Reviews

It’s evident in recent years that customer reviews not only help build trust and local SEO rankings but can also help your conversion rate. 

For insurance agencies, the two most important review sites are Google and Facebook. These two are plugged directly into major search engines, where most people are searching for insurers.

Insurance buyers are getting smarter–they want that unvarnished truth, and that’s what reviews do for them. A positive review like this has an extremely positive impact on your conversion rates.

It’s one thing for you to serve up a reference or a case study on a landing page, but buyers intuitively know that those are all coming from specific satisfied customers, versus the wisdom of their collective peers. 

Reviews have become so important that a study by the Harvard Business Review found, “a one-star increase in Yelp rating leads to a 5-9% increase in revenue.”

So, what role does SMS play here? You can text existing and previous customers a link requesting a review. 

💡Learn How: 3 Ways to Send Review Requests via SMS

2. Combine Facebook Ads and SMS

Successful advertising on Facebook is often a multi-stage process, with resources split across developing brand awareness, generating and nurturing leads, before slowly-but-surely bringing on new clients.

Most of your lead generation is going to be a multi-ad, multi-device process. A lot of marketers tout the benefits of marketing automation here. They usually are referring to email automation and email nurture programs. But, you can also take advantage of the high engagement rate of SMS to deliver automated text messages to warm leads until they’re ready to convert.

💡Learn How: How to Generate and Nurture Leads with Facebook and SMS

3. Use SMS at Events

A tried and true marketing strategy for insurance agents is to host a seminar. The goal is to bring in prospective clients by offering breakfast or lunch in exchange for a presentation and an opportunity to work together.

You can use SMS to gather RSVPs and fast-track the collection of information about registrants. You can create a specific keyword–an SMS keyword is a word or phrase that your customers can text to receive your messages–and advertise it. 

Not only are people now subscribed to receive future text messages, but you can also send an autoresponse that asks for their name and email. Not only do you get their phone number, but also their email and full name.

If someone misses the event, you can ask them if they are interested in a free consultation.

💡Learn How: How to Set Up a Keyword

John Smith, john@gmail.com

4. Encourage People to Sign Up For Special Deals

Exclusive deals and promotions are the bread and butter of text marketing. You’ve probably seen an ad that asks you to text in a keyword in return for a discount. 

It also works for service-based businesses and can generate leads at an affordable rate.

Imagine that you’re an insurance broker specializing in local businesses, you invite prospects to text you to receive a custom quote or a guide to the questions every local business person should ask before buying insurance. 

Once they do that, you can send the information along and put them into a lead nurturing sequence. Within SimpleTexting, you can create segments based on whether someone clicked on a text in a previous message. 

So in the example below, you can send separate follow-up messages based on whether people clicked on the link to the form or not.

💡Learn How: How to Send a Mass Text Campaign

5. Text-Enable Your Google My Business (GMB) Listing 

An optimized GMB page helps Google understand more about your business: who you are, what you sell, your location, and what your website is (so they can crawl it for more info).

The more Google knows about you, the more types of searches your GMB listing appears in. That’s good news for your SEO strategy.

That’s not the only reason to pay attention to your GMB page. With over 60% of searches occurring on mobile devices, it also makes sense to allow people to reach out as easily as possible by adding a click-to-text button to your GMB listing.

It’s an easy way to increase the number of leads you generate.

💡Learn How:  How to Add Text Messaging to Your Google Business Listing

Take SimpleTexting for a Test Ride

Want to see if our text messaging service can help you generate more insurance leads? Give SimpleTexting a try for free for 14-days to test it for yourself! If you decide to move forward, be sure to revisit this article and apply one or two of the above strategies.