You've taken the plunge. You've set up a website and you're going to live the dream of an inbox stuffed with leads every day when you wake up. You've done your research and have your pay per click campaigns, or have gone after some tasty keywords. You're getting some hits. Unfortunately the leads just aren't coming. All that money spent, and nobody calling.

You've just made one of the most common mistakes I see on insurance websites. All the traffic in the world doesn't mean anything if you don't monetize that traffic.

So, how are you going to monetize that traffic? First, we need to decide what it is we're after.

Leads, not sales
I routinely get calls from agents that want to sell online. Well, to put it bluntly, we're in the insurance industry. And that means you've got to sell. No sell, no job.

Most agents get it when I explain that if a website could sell life insurance, then I would be selling life insurance online and we wouldn't need agents anymore. And clearly, that's not the case (anyone notice the influx of tech geeks selling insurance online? No? Me either). If it was as easy as setting up a website and raking in commissions, I'd probably be doing it. Fortunately, it's not like that.

However! You can and should develop leads online. Not sales, leads. It's important to keep this distinction in mind as you develop your site and attempt to monitize your traffic. Always keep in mind you're looking for a lead.

What's a lead?
Knowing that we're looking for leads begs what seems to be a fairly simple question - what's a lead?

Quite simply, a lead is a name and a phone number. That's it. Two pieces of information, nothing more, nothing less. A lead is not a complete profile of the consumer and it's not their email address. Again - stick to name and phone number.

With the name and phone number you now have something to do. Take it completely offline and do what you do best. Pick up the phone, call the consumer, and sell them some insurance! Now that's not terribly revolutionary or bleeding edge. It is however, what works.

You still have to do your underwriting as you do normally. You still have to call. You still have to analyze needs, products, and companies. You still have to sell insurance.

In short, your website needs to be set up to collect names and phone numbers of visitors. Once you have that information, you can forget the fact that you're one of these sexy new brokers doing business on the web. (You are now one of those brokers, but now you've figured out how to really do business on the web).

If you give it some thought, this should come as no surprise. It's still insurance we're talking about, and while technology has changed, some things haven't. Consumer shopping behavior has changed - they now shop online. But when it comes to insurance, consumer buying behavior hasn't changed at all - insurance is still sold not bought.

This shopping behavior will become more prevalent below as we discuss methodolgy of converting traffic to leads. For now, bear in mind that you're looking for a name and phone number.

I want to underwrite/do needs analysis/educate/etc online.
The next fallacy I see frequently is the idea of underwriting online. Let's prequalify the prospect! Let's get their medical information, let's get their address, let's get as much info from them as we can before we call.

Forget it. Stick to the name and phone number mantra.

There are two problems with requiring additional information from a prospect. First, it's a well known computer principle that you always want to take the fewest keystrokes to achieve your end result. As soon as you ask for more information, your conversions of traffic to leads will drop like a stone. Most people are just too intimidated by questions on their cholesterol and blood pressure, they'll simply hit the back key and be gone. There goes your lead.

The second problem is that consumers just don't have a clue when it comes to medical information. All you'll get (besides fewer leads) by asking for a slew of underwriting information on your website is a bunch of questions with nonsensical answers. You'll still have to call and confirm all the information, only to find the consumer just put in answers willy-nilly to get through the form.

So what you'll end up with is two classes of visitor. The first class answer the questions incorrectly. The second class are those that would have given you their information but instead were intimidated by all the questions and returned back to the search engines for a less verbose website.

This seems like a suitable spot to remind everyone to stick to requesting names and phone numbers........

Converting the traffic to leads
I started in the insurance software business back in 1986. Way back then computers were new and cruising the birth announcements in the local paper was still the rage for developing prospects.

At that time I did quite a bit of reading on how insurance was sold. Not only did that help me sell and support software for the company I was employed by, but it also helped me speak knowledgeably to the agents who were buying the software. At that time of course, I was reading sales techniques written the late 70's and early 80's.

One thing that strikes me still is that 20 years later and with the advent of all this technology, the fundamental principles in this industry still haven't changed.

Converting traffic into leads is a perfect example of principles so old and dated you know them instinctively. Funnily enough, we rarely think to apply these principles online. Well this is one case where the old standby's are still valuable.

How are you going to convert a visitor in to a lead? More succintly, how are we going to get a visitor to give us their name and phone number? The answer is so obvious, yet it's is far and away the most common mistake on insurance sites. The answer is:

ASK.

Ask for their name and phone number. We all know that if you want to get the sale, you've got to ask for it. The same holds true here. If you don't ask for their name and phone number, you won't get it. Ask for it,and in a large percentage of cases you'll get it.

Is there anything that screams '70's sales techniques' more than asking for the sale? I don't think so. Yet check your website - are you asking for the lead?

How do you ask you ask? On websites we use what's known as a form to email program. Effectively you need to set up a form that asks for their name and phone number. Once the form is filled out, your website should email you the information. That's how you get your inbox stuffed with leads every morning!

It's really that easy. Offer your visitor a page that suggests if they complete the following form, you'll provide them with an annuity/car/health/dental/whatever quote.

It seems like it should be more complicated than that, but it's not. If you have traffic and offer a response to something the consumer is interested in, a sizeable percentage of people will give you their name and phone number. Granted, you should test your wording on the page and a few other small items, but simply providing your visitor the opportunity to give you their name and phone number gets you easily 90% of the way there. The last 10% is just tweaking the page.

The next section I'll show you a specific way to develop leads online, but it's also needed background information on the section after that were we deal with some further details on setting up the form where we ask for the visitor's name and phone number.

Compulife
If you're in the life insurance side of things and don't subscribe to Compulife, you need to change that right now. Compulife is a software firm that provides agents and agencies with multi-company insurance shopping software on your desktop. Give them a call at 800-798-3488 and get a free 30 day trial of their software or visit www.compulife.com.

Now, their software is fabulous and they've got an exhaustive database of products for you to shop from and they're notoriously accurate - that alone is enough for me to recommend them. However there's some further reasons why as a website owner involved in life insurance that you need to climb on board with their service.

First, they operate the www.term4sale.com website. You need to be listed on that site. The only agents listed are subscribers. Ergo, become a subsriber. It's cheap and worth the price of admission to the term4sale.com site.

Now why is the term4sale.com site so important? First because it ranks in the search engines. They get some traffic from that. That traffic (consumers looking for life insurance) clicks through to the directory on the site and finds your name. They call you and buy some life insurance. Sweeeeet. Actually, I routinely get rave reviews from my clients about the business they get from this site. It's not much business - very low volume - but it seems just about everyone gets some leads from it and those leads are real easy closers. In fact, when you sign up, make sure you buy as many zip codes as Compulife will allow. All of our clients that are pushing their websites hard are doing this. Couple of sales a year from the leads generated from the site is a real nice perk.

The other thing about term4sale is that it gets a lot of favorable press. They've been mentioned in the Washington Post, featured on the national news on MSNBC, and a whole host of other national and well known media outlets. That's because they're a software company and are unbiased when it comes the to consumer buying insurance. They don't care what company a consumer buys. The press likes this and consults with them. Every time one of these stories makes the press the site takes a lot of traffic. Now that doesn't happen every day, but you can imagine that when it does the site gets a lot of hits (and again, those hits trickle down into leads for you).

Now the next reason you need to be a subscriber to compulife is.......

Online term life insurance quotes
Now I can't speak to other insurance products, but in the life insurance industry, online term quotes are the killer app. If you don't have online term quotes on your website, your leads are going to be far fewer than what other sites are getting.

The fact of the matter is that consumers are looking for information. What better information can you give them - or more exciting from the consumer's perspective - than live online shopping. See prices immediately, shop now, get company names. All that stuff. The fact is, consumer's you've brought to your site want to get it over with. And they're suspicious of agents and being sold a product that's going to cost them money. Throw online term quotes on your site and you've got a very attractive site for consumers.

Now - why do you want to use Compulife's online term quotes? First, Compulife has the largest database of life insurance products available. Remember the link building you're doing (For those of you doing advanced search engine optimization work, convincing other websites to give you a link is vitally important)? There you go. Reliaquote. Quotesmith. Intelliquote. Check 'em all out. You've got MORE companies on your website than they do. And you can use that when you're requesting links. "Gee Mr. Website owner, I see you've got a link to insure.com. We actually quote more companies than they do, would you consider giving my site a link as well?". It's a very good reason for people to link to you.

It's also the fastest quoting engines available. You'll recall earlier I discussed server speed. You can't be waiting 10 seconds for a quote! Make it snappy and you'll get more traffic and more conversions to leads.

Compulife doesn't actually provide online term quotes to their customers, just the desktop version. They however do have 4 authorized providers who offer this service. Not surprisingly our company Insurance Squared is one of those providers. And I'd like to think you should use our service. That being said, if you go to Compulife's site you can check out our competitors services. Here's a few reasons why you should consider our service:

• Cheap. Only $179 a year for Compulife customers.


• Fast. We have the Fastest Quotes On The Web(TM). We're using Compulife's already fast quoting software and have done additional tweaking to our systems to ensure we are fast. We have the fastest term life quoting system on the web, period.


• We're the largest provider of online plug in term quoting systems in North America. And we've been doing insurance websites for 5 years now.


• Our control panel lets you develop leads (they're emailed to you automatically). You can generate quote request leads (consumer fills out name and info before they run a quote) or app request leads (consumer runs an anonymous quote, but then clicks on an 'apply now' button to fill out their info). It's all automated and already in our plugin.


• We're experienced in SEO. Sites that are ranking are using our services. Our term quoting system is the only one online targetted at developing leads on your site - and we've got the experience to make that happen. Do you want to place such a vital part of your website strategy in the hands of companies that aren't hardcore experienced in search engines, online marketing, and converting traffic into leads?

Anyway, end tooting my own horn. Back to some more facts.

Quote Request/App Request leads
I mentioned above that our system allows for app request or quote request leads. Why would you use one over the other?

If you're bringing clients and prospects to your site that you've already had contact with, you're going to annoy them by demanding personal information before letting them run a quote. If that's your situation by all means use app request leads. Let them run a quote.

However if your traffic is anonymous then you should use quote request leads.

My initial reaction to this is disbelief. Yes, I'm suggesting that you require the name and phone number before allowing anonymous traffic to run quotes on your site.

"But Glenn" you say. "Most of my traffic will immediately exit my site!"

And my response would be:

So what?

Don't focus on the customers that leave, focus on percentages and those prospects that will give you a name phone number.

More specifically, if you set your site up with application requests, 100% of visitors will run a quote, right (they don't need to give you their name and phone to run a quote – the app request comes after the quote)? Unfortunately, only about 2.5% of them will turn into application requests. Let's say it's 3 leads out of 100 visitors. Now those three leads are super hot. They're top quality leads ready to buy. You're going to sell probably 50% of them. You've now sold 1.5 policies.

Now take the same 100 visitors. 75% of them will immediately leave when they see your name and phone request. (again, my point. So What?). Amazingly, 25% of them will actually fill out a form – sometimes more! That's 25 leads from the same 100 visitors. Now however these leads are much weaker. Lets say you close 20% of them. That translates into 5 sales.

App request, 1.5 sales. Quote request, 5 sales. QED. Use quote requests.

Note: I openly admit I fought this idea for two years. I failed to believe that anyone would fill out a quote request. Yet the numbers do work out. Twenty to thirty percent of people will do so. I was wrong; benefit from my experience :).

Final Note:
The intent of this ebook is to help you convert your traffic into leads. That'd be step 2; step one of course is figuring out how to get traffic. If you're looking at optimizing your site for the search engines, we recommend you read our ebook "Glenn's Little Black Book of White Hat Search Engine Optimization".

This document is © 2005 and may not be duplicated or distributed without permission.
Glenn Cooke
Insurance Squared Inc.
www.insurancesquared.com
1-866-662-5433