Stop Buying Your Own Clients Back

A shorter take from The Onyx Operator, our newsletter for insurance agency owners and leaders.

Your policyholders see everyone else's ads too. When they call a number from a TV spot or a mailer, they can enter the lead market again, even though they already have an agent.

We looked at a few weeks of paid inbound traffic at one large FMO hierarchy on Onyx. About 16 percent of roughly 50,000 calls matched phone numbers on its protected list. Around 8,000 calls involved people the group already knew.

The agency buying a call may have no idea that the caller belongs to a partner's book in the same hierarchy. The original agent may never know the client started shopping.

Protect the book together

The useful move is to recognize those calls before they reach another sales floor, then decide how they should be handled.

Onyx's Policy Protector lets a hierarchy maintain a protected list of policyholder phone numbers and extend that protection to its downline agencies. Downlines receive the protection without seeing the underlying list, and each agency chooses how to handle a matching call.

For an independent agency, the same idea can work with trusted partners: coordinate protection rather than each defending a book in isolation.

Recognizing an existing relationship gives the agency a chance to direct that call appropriately and offer the existing client the best-possible experience.

Before increasing lead spend, ask how much of it is bringing back people your group already serves. Talk to us about protecting the book you have built.