Life insurance is a competitive industry. If you are looking to proactively find final expense leads, there is a lot of competition to top. Final expense can be a tough sell: most consumers do not want to think about their death, and life insurance does not have the same sense of immediate value as other insurance products.

However, final expense sales can be very profitable if you use the right strategies to generate leads. After all, the baby boomers are getting old, and that is a large target demographic with a respectable amount of money…

With the right range of final expense lead generation methods set up for your business, you can build up enough final expense leads to convert into profitable, valuable sales. With these strategies, you can ensure a reliable flow of final expense leads and long-term success. Below, we will take a look at these key paths to success for new agents.

Read on for advice on how to get more final expense leads.

What Is Final Expense Life Insurance?

Final expense life insurance, sometimes known as burial insurance, is a newer form of insurance for seniors. It pays a death benefit (money) to their beneficiaries, intended to cover expenses like funeral arrangements.

For insurance agents, the simplest way to explain final expense insurance sales is to see it as a life insurance option with a small benefit paid upon death. Some in the insurance industry may refer to it as burial insurance or funeral insurance.

Most seniors who previously had life insurance as part of a larger deal provided by their employer will find that once they retire, they no longer have that key benefit. Also, they may not have sufficient savings to leave behind to cover the high cost of a funeral.

Final expense life insurance provides clients with peace of mind that their families will not need to worry about the costs of death when they are already struggling with its emotional challenges.

Who Needs Final Expense Insurance?

Clients well suited to final expense coverage tend to be older or dealing with health conditions that preclude any other type of life insurance policy. Those who formerly had life insurance through their employers but, due to retirement, no longer have it are also good potential clients for final expense insurance.

Final expense life insurance comes at a relatively low cost, lower than a typical term life insurance policy, because of its lower coverage amounts. This makes it an affordable option for baby boomers or other existing customers who do not have the savings to cover all the steady flow of expenses that rush in when someone dies.

Top Tips for How to Generate Final expense leads

In the insurance business, generating live transfer leads is an essential part of your sales pipeline. Here are our top 10 tips for finding new final expense insurance leads generated by you or your partners.

  1. Building a Sales Funnel

One of the biggest requirements for effective lead generation in any business, not just for insurance agents, is having a good sales funnel set up.

A sales funnel acts to attract prospects to you, then guide your live transfer leads towards making a purchase through you as their insurance agent.

To work properly, your funnel needs to cater to the journey of your final expense prospects. The journey for your leads is made up of three separate stages:

  • Awareness: the buyer becomes aware they have a need.
  • Consideration: the buyer compares various products.
  • Decision: the buyer decides on an option to pursue.

To create a sales funnel to attract more business, you will need to target prospects at each one of these three stages in a manner appropriate to that stage. Cold calling potential leads at an early stage to hard sell final expense coverage is not going to work well, and you need to tailor your approaches to the stages at which leads may be.

If you keep your communications and direct mail campaigns appropriate, then you can ensure that they remember you and like you. When potential clients find themselves ready to make a buying decision in the final expense business, you will stick out in their minds as the right vendor for their needs.

  1. Purchasing Telemarketing Final Expense Leads

As well as setting up a targeted sales funnel, you should also consider purchasing final expense leads in the telemarketing field. Purchasing telemarketing leads is one of the best options available to any tech-savvy agents who want to buy leads. 

Organic lead generation methods, such as Facebook leads and other types of social media marketing, are a part of growing your business that you should not overlook, but these strategies all take time. Buying telemarketing leads is a simple, easy way to generate other leads quickly.

Paid insurance leads are a core tactic for many successful final expense agents because this tactic allows you to quickly build up your revenue stream, giving you a source of income while you wait for your other, more organic lead generation tactics to mature.

  1. Social Media

Social media marketing is possibly the single most powerful way to generate leads at the moment. It can win trust, boost your reach, establish you more firmly in the market, and feed free leads towards the beginning of your sales funnel.

Social media also helps you to build relationships and establish yourself ahead of other agents as a reliable authority for anything related to final expense leads.

A good first step in social media marketing is to establish which platforms you want to target. Consider Facebook leads as a good starting point. Facebook is one of the best platforms for generating final expense leads as it has an older user base, ideal for more aged leads that can be converted to sales more quickly. Facebook leads can be very profitable!

  1. Set Up a Referral Program

Another good method of lead generation that many insurance agents overlook is referrals, which are an excellent and affordable way to generate organic leads.

A referral lead is usually great quality. These real-time leads tend to be at a later stage in their customer journey and come with an inbuilt level of trust. They are also much easier to set up than things like a lead mailer program and do not have the same costs as a mail house or business reply card mailers!

If you are just looking for free leads, you could simply ask your existing clients to recommend you to their friends. Alternatively, you could set up a referral program with some sort of fixed-price discount on organic leads who reach you through referrals. That will cost you a bit, but it should pay for itself quickly!

  1. Creating Content Around Clients’ Needs

Content marketing is a reliable method for final expense lead generation. However, before you start creating your new content, make sure that you know what your clients’ most urgent needs actually are. This takes a bit of market research, but it is easier than seminar marketing and will pay off in the long term.

If you ensure that you can address your prospects’ needs and urgent questions in your content (and optimize for search), you will be much better equipped to attract real-time leads who have urgent needs related to final expense insurance – the ideal demographic for selling final expense insurance.

If they find the answers on your website, they will see you as more of an authority. What is more, you can use this as an entry to your funnel and encourage them to sign up for your direct mail list.

  1. Carry Out Email Marketing

A lot of insurance agents spend a lot of time manually contacting and following up with final expense leads. However, email marketing can be a much easier way to approach insurance sales, contacting an entire list of potential final expense insurance customers through direct mail very quickly.

By sending out your emails at an appropriate frequency, you can remind each lead of your offerings, convince them of your expertise, and tell them about possible offers. It is much easier than personalized direct mail and, in most cases, just as effective. You do not need to send individual direct mail to each possible lead: you can just send a massed direct mail blast to an entire email list on a regular basis instead.

  1. Storytelling

Do not underestimate the power of storytelling for connecting with final expense leads and leading them into your sales funnel. There are several ways to leverage storytelling for selling final expense insurance; what matters is creating an emotional connection.

For example, you could create a page for case studies on your website, where you tell stories of how final expense insurance protected the peace of mind of your clients and financially protected their loved ones from the impact of death costs.

  1. Drawing Leads To Sign Up for Emails

Email marketing is an excellent lead generation method. However, to generate leads through email marketing, you are going to need to have people on your email list. That means you are going to need to motivate your leads to sign up for emails, usually by offering something known as a “lead magnet.” This is a reward for signing up, which could be anything from free ebooks and guides to death checklists or many other possible tools.

If you just rely on people signing up for no reason, your email list will not grow fast at all. A lead magnet incentivizes people to sign up for your marketing emails and will help your list to grow much faster.

  1. Video Marketing

In the modern world, many people like to learn about a new business through video content. Because video allows a potential lead to see your face and hear your voice, they will usually be more likely to trust you. That human content is essential for anything as emotionally charged as final expense insurance.

Of course, other types of content are easier to create than video. However, it is worth putting in the extra work to make video content, given how impactful video content can be for generating new leads.

  1. Enhance Your Exposure

In order to maximize your lead generation, you will want to get your business in front of as many people as possible. That means maximizing your exposure. Go to events! Appear on podcasts! Do guest posts on the blogs of other agents in the industry! While you might not directly gain as many leads from these activities as you do from buying leads directly, all of these approaches add up and pay dividends in the long term.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is a Final expense lead?

A final expense lead is someone who is a potential customer for final expense insurance. Funeral expenses are enormous, but nobody wants to think about that cost. That means it is important to start people on your sales funnel as early as possible so that when the time comes, they think of you first when trying to buy final expense insurance.

Is Final Expense Hard To Sell?

Final expense insurance is a tough sell. Because nobody wants to think about their own death, sending direct mail for marketing may not go well. That means you must approach it tactfully and carefully while still being prepared to sell things quickly when the time comes.

Conclusion

Selling final expense insurance can be a lot of work, but the profits can be enormous in this field. As such, you should work to generate and mature your leads as early as possible. It is a slow process, but if you stick with it, the long-term value can be huge.

Useful Guides

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