The best insurance lead source for most independent agencies is the book they already have, followed by a T65 campaign started early. Bought leads are the fastest to switch on and the hardest to make pay. Seminars and reactivating old leads sit in between, and both depend on follow-up.
Which one fits you depends on your agents, your budget and how much time you can wait for a return. Below we compare five insurance lead sources side by side, show the math on each, and finish with which one to start with based on where your agency is today.
How the five insurance lead sources compare
We run all five of these for independent agencies, mostly in the Medicare, annuity and life space.
| Bought leads | T65 direct mail | Seminars | Cross-selling your book | Reactivating old leads | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Cost model | Pay per lead, up front, whether it converts or not | Postage, print and list per contact, every month, for 9+ months | Fixed cost per event (venue, invites, mailers) | No media spend. Analysis, campaign build and setter hours | No media spend. Caller hours and messaging |
| Time to first appointment | Same day, if someone calls fast | First contact within 90 days, appointment around month 5 | At the event, or within the 14 days after | Days, once the list is vetted and the first message goes out | Inside a 14-day call window |
| Effort from agents | High and immediate: dialing morning and afternoon | Steady: hand-addressed mail, soft calls, monthly tasks | Presenting, then two weeks of calls | Low for the closer if a setter books the meetings | Calling hours, sized to the list |
| What makes it work | Calling within minutes, then again and again | Starting early, education-first content, calls on top of mail | A follow-up system for attendees and no-shows | An agent-vetted list and a pre-built campaign | A clear script, a fixed end date and consent |
| Where it fails | One or two attempts, then the lead goes cold | Mail with no calls, or quitting before month 9 | Agents try once or twice and give up | Lists handed to agents with no campaign attached | Hammering old numbers until they get blocked |
Kevin's general view on channels: the closer a channel gets you to the sale, the more expensive and riskier it is. Bought leads sit at that end. Your own book sits at the other.
Bought leads: fast to start, hard to make pay
Bought leads are the quickest lead source to switch on. You pay a vendor, and names start landing in your CRM the same day. That speed is also the trap, because the leads arrive on the vendor's schedule, not yours.
When Kevin's team tested bought leads that went straight to call centres to convert and set appointments, the return on ad spend came back low and lead quality was poor. His rule of thumb for a new paid ad campaign is a return of about 1x to 1.2x out of the gate. At that level the media barely pays for itself, and the agent's follow-up decides whether you make money.
The follow-up is where most agencies lose it. A lead who doesn't pick up today hasn't said no. They were at work or didn't recognise the number.
"Because if you buy 30 leads, she needs to exhaust that list until they scream no at her, right? So how do we make sure the number of touch points is adequate?" — Kevin Beeftink, founder of Kevlex Digital
What makes bought leads work:
- A speed to lead target, measured from lead arrival to first outreach attempt
- Intake paced to what your licensed agents can work. If a vendor sends leads faster than your agents can call them, switch off that state or source
- Agent hours matched to the lead time zones
- Calls morning and afternoon, varied times, until the lead gives you a clear no
- Someone ready to pick up when a lead calls back, because that callback is the warmest that lead will ever be
There's a retention issue too. An agency principal we spoke with said clients who convert off a cold call often switch again when the next agent calls them. Bought leads can fill a calendar, but the clients they produce tend to leave faster than clients who came to you through trust.
If you buy leads, check your TCPA consent records with the vendor before anyone dials or texts. The FCC's guidance on robocalls and texts explains what consumers can complain about, and complaints land on the agency that called. For the full follow-up playbook, read our post on speed to lead for insurance agencies.
T65 direct mail: slow, cheap per client, and it compounds
Turning 65 marketing is a monthly pull of people approaching 65 in your area, followed by a long education sequence. The list is ice cold. These people have never heard of you. The campaign's job is to make them know and trust you before Medicare becomes urgent.
"our most successful campaigns are still T65 campaigns, but we start early." — Kevin Beeftink, founder of Kevlex Digital
"Early" means the first letter goes out about 12 months before the birthday. Medicare's Initial Enrollment Period is a seven-month window around the 65th birthday (see Medicare.gov on when coverage starts). Starting a year out puts you in the mailbox months before most other agents show up.
The cadence Kevin uses:
- Pull a new batch of contacts every month, about 12 months before they turn 65.
- Send one education piece a month, from Medicare basics through Part B penalties and Part D savings, ending with "Medicare is around the corner." Kevin calls each one "a blog post in an envelope."
- Have the agent hand-address and sign the envelope, with their photo and a QR code to a short video of them.
- Start calling about seven days after the first letter. Keep the first call soft: introduce yourself, say information is on its way, offer help.
- Stay in calling mode for at least three months, aiming for first contact within 90 days.
- Set a follow-up appointment around month five, depending on the birthday.
- Make sure every contact also lands in your AEP campaign, or the year of nurture goes to waste.
The effort stacks. Each monthly batch runs its own sequence, so at 40 new contacts a month Kevin counts around 240 mailer tasks by month six. Budget the envelope work before you start. And pull bounced addresses out right away, or they will haunt you for six months.
Where T65 fails: agents send the letter and wait. Mail alone doesn't convert. Mail plus calls plus door knocking is what moves the numbers. The other failure is quitting at month four because nothing has closed yet. Agents who run it with us commit to at least nine months before judging it.
The step-by-step version, with the monthly topic list, is in our T65 campaign walkthrough.
Seminars: the room is the cost, the follow-up is the return
A Medicare seminar puts you in front of a room of people who chose to show up. That's a strong signal. But the seminar itself is a cost centre. You pay for the venue, the invitations and the time, and the money comes from the two weeks after.
An office lead we work with sees the split every year. The agents who keep following up turn a seminar into annuity sales. The agents who try each attendee once or twice get nothing from the same room.
Seminar follow-up needs the same structure as any other lead campaign, with its own script:
- Before the event: invitation, confirmation and reminder messages, written as education with no sales pitch
- On registration: a personal text asking which topic they want covered. If they don't show, that question gives you a reason to call
- After the event: split attendees and no-shows into separate call lists
- Cadence: one list for the morning and one for the afternoon, for 14 days, then stop
- No-show script: you registered, we missed you, here's the next date, can I put your name down?
Plan for most registrants not showing up. The no-show list is people who raised their hand and then got busy, which makes it one of the warmest lists you have.
We break down the confirmation text, the no-show script and the capacity math in seminar follow-up for Medicare agents.
Cross-selling your existing book: the warmest list you own
Your current clients already know your name, already trust you with one policy, and already sit in your CRM. A cross-sell campaign starts from that trust instead of trying to build it.
Ask an agent for three clients with an annuity and no life insurance and they'll name them from memory. Ask for all of them across the agency and nobody can. The opportunities sit in your policy data as filters like these:
- Annuity, no life insurance
- Annuity, no long-term care
- Medicare, no annuity, age 55 to 70
- Medicare, no life or final expense, age 75 and up
- Single-product clients
The list on its own changes nothing. An agency principal we work with summed up the usual result:
"This data is great. This is an awesome tool. I hand it to an agent and they do nothing." — An agency principal we work with
What works is a list the agent vets first, then a pre-built campaign. The agent crosses out names that don't make sense, including clients who hold coverage elsewhere that your system can't see. Then a short sequence goes out: one personal yes/no question by text, follow-up emails, one or two scripted calls and a booking link. Someone answers replies fast. On these campaigns the drop-off after 30 minutes is steep.
Where cross-sell fails is staffing. Agencies that can close still stall when nobody sets the appointments. Kevin's advice: one dedicated setter on the list for hours a day beats five agents doing 30 to 60 minutes each, because otherwise you're training and managing five skill levels.
Read the full method in cross-selling your existing book.
Lead reactivation: leads you already paid for
Lead reactivation means going back to old leads, past seminar invitees and quotes that never closed. You paid to get these people once. Most agencies let them sit.
"We've already spent the money to get their information why not send it to them?" — An agency owner on a client team
That owner found a list of past seminar invitees that nobody had touched in months and sent them the next invitation the day before an event. It cost nothing beyond the email.
Reactivation has two limits. The first is calling time. Kevin's capacity rule of thumb: about 50 dials per agent-hour and 10 attempts per lead per week, which works out to about five leads per agent-hour per week. A 300-lead list at that pace is 3,000 calls a week, or about 60 agent-hours, for two weeks. Size the list to the hours you have.
The second limit is your phone numbers and sending reputation. Run each list for 14 days, twice a day, then stop, so your numbers don't get flagged. If you're emailing a large list that's been quiet for a year, warm up the sending domain first. Kevin's estimate is 14 to 21 days to warm a new domain. Check consent and your Do Not Call list before you dial anyone who asked to be left alone.
How to compare lead sources with your own numbers
You can't compare channels on gut feel. Put each one on the same cost per client, including agent time.
- Tag the source on every opportunity, from a fixed list, so written business traces back to where it started.
- Add up what each source cost last quarter: lead spend, postage, venues, and agent or setter hours at an hourly rate.
- Count the clients each source produced, using issued policies, not appointments.
- Divide cost by clients. That's your cost per client per source.
- Set it against first-year commission per client for the products you sold.
A worked example with made-up numbers. Say you buy 100 leads at $30, so $3,000, and your agent spends 25 hours working them at $25 an hour, another $625. Three become clients. That's about $1,210 per client.
Now say you mail 40 T65 contacts a month for nine months, 360 people, at $1.50 per mailer for six mailers. That's $3,240 in mail, plus half a day a month of envelope work. If 18 of those 360 become clients, you're at about $180 per client before calling time. They also arrive slower, over a year instead of a month.
The cross-sell math looks different again. Say a setter spends 20 hours on a vetted list of 150 clients at $25 an hour, $500 in total, and books 12 reviews that turn into 6 new policies. That's about $83 per client, and every one of them already had a policy with you.
Your real numbers will differ, so run the same five steps on last quarter before you move any budget.
Which lead source should an agency start with?
Pick the source that fits where your agency is today.
- You have a book of a few hundred clients or more and nobody has mined it: start with cross-selling. Put a setter on a vetted list before you spend a dollar on new leads.
- You're a newer agency with a small book and time to build: start a T65 campaign now. It takes nine months to judge, so the earlier you start, the earlier it pays.
- You have old leads, quotes and seminar registrants sitting in the CRM: run a 14-day reactivation before buying anything new.
- You have agents who present well and someone to own the follow-up: add seminars, and build the no-show list into the plan from day one.
- You need appointments this month and have agents with open time who will call fast and often: buy a small batch of leads, measure speed to lead and cost per client, and only scale if both hold.
One agency principal described his order of priority this way: if you wake up with nobody to follow up with, nobody to cross-sell and no appointment on the calendar, you go to your next hottest lead channel.
What to do this week
- Pull last quarter's issued policies and tag each one with its source
- Work out cost per client for each source, including agent hours
- Run the five cross-sell filters on your book and send each agent their list to vet
- Find your oldest untouched leads and seminar registrants and size a 14-day call list
- If you're not running T65 yet, pull a first batch of contacts who turn 65 twelve months from now
If you'd like help choosing where to start, or want us to build and run the campaign while your agents focus on selling, book a 15-minute call with Kevin. We'll look at your book and your current lead spend and tell you which source we'd fix first.
