5 Tips for Working Insurance Leads When You’re Understaffed

Don’t let a hiring crunch stop you from growing your business. Here’s how you can adjust your lead-working strategy to maximize results when you’re shorthanded.

Here's how insurance agents can drive sales from their online leads—even when they're understaffed.

One potential roadblock to getting the most out of your online insurance leads is when you simply don’t have enough people power to work them. Indeed, even when insurance agencies want to hire new producers to expand their sales capacity, they sometimes run into labor shortages that prevent them from bringing on new people to identify, call, and close prospects.

Fortunately, you don’t have to let a hiring crunch prevent you from growing your business with high-intent online leads. All you have to do is adjust your approach. Here are six tips for generating new business from online insurance leads—even when you’re shorthanded.

1. Use targeting tools to hone in on the leads that are most likely to convert for you

If you only have so many labor hours to work your leads, you’ll want to shift your focus from quantity to quality. That is, the goal should be to work a smaller number of leads that are most likely to convert for you.

By analyzing your past lead-buying performance, you should be able to identify patterns in the shoppers who are most likely to bind with you. Maybe it’s shoppers who live in a certain zip code, or consumers in the Premium or Preferred groups who perform best for your office. By refining the targeting settings of your campaign to hone in on these shoppers, you can ensure that you’ll only be spending time on the consumers who are most likely to buy a policy from you.

2. Take advantage of low competition by working leads on nights and weekends

If you’re short-staffed, you might be too busy with other tasks to work leads yourself while your office is open during the workweek. That’s why it might be a good idea to buy and work leads on nights and weekends when you have less on your plate.

If you put in the extra work to contact leads after hours, you’ll also enjoy an additional benefit: you can usually count on facing less competition from other agents to reach these shoppers. This allows you to lower your customer acquisition costs while still getting the volume you need to grow your business.

As a reminder, you’ll want to make sure you’re following the law.  The Telephone Consumer Protection Act (TCPA) forbids calls before 8 a.m. and after 9 p.m. in the consumer’s local timezone, as well as calls on Sundays in the states of Alabama, Louisiana, Mississippi, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, and Utah.

3. Set a daily limit to make sure you don’t buy more leads than you can handle

Maybe you’ll find yourself in a situation where your agency has a little time to work leads, but not as much as you used to. In this instance, it can be a good idea to place a limit on the number of leads you buy each day.

By adjusting your daily limit on the settings page of the MediaAlpha for Agents platform, you can set a cap that works for you. This way, you can still continue building your business even if you only have the capacity to work a few leads each day.

Additionally, you can adjust your “on hours” in the MediaAlpha platform so that you will only receive leads at times when you and your team are available to work leads.

4. Pause your campaign until you’re able to work leads again

If you have no capacity to work leads at all, you can always put a pause on your lead-buying campaign right inside our platform. This means you don’t have to waste precious time sitting on hold with customer support. And while other lead vendors will automatically restart a paused campaign after a week or two, we place no limit on how long you can stay paused.

5. Reach out to your client success manager when you need help

One of the most frustrating and time-consuming aspects of lead-buying is when you have a problem with one of your leads and you can’t get it resolved. Fortunately, we offer hands-on customer service to every one of our clients. If you ever run into an issue, all you have to do is reach out to your client success manager. We’ll be in touch shortly to help you resolve it, and you can go back to focusing on the rest of your work.

Want more advice on achieving your lead-buying goals? We’d love to chat.

Sourced exclusively from high-quality publishers, our online leads empower agents to connect with in-market insurance shoppers just as they’re getting ready to make a purchase. In fact, some agents even report connecting with as many as 95% of the leads they bus from us.

When you’re looking to grow your business, these high-quality leads are just too powerful to pass up simply because you’re understaffed. By using the tips outlined above, you’ll be able to continue growing even in a hiring crunch.

And if you have any other questions about how you can use our leads to generate new sales, we’d love to speak with you. Contact your MediaAlpha for Agents client success manager to set up a meeting, or schedule a time to speak with us on our website.