If you type “life insurance leads” into Google, the top results split cleanly into two camps: shops selling aged data (records that already passed through one or more buyers), and shops selling live inbound calls. They price differently, they perform differently, and they demand very different things from your agent floor. This guide is the version we wish someone had handed us before we ever built a media plan for a life or final expense agency.
What “aged leads” actually are
Aged leads are consumer records — usually web form fills — that were generated at some earlier point in time and then resold at a steep discount after the original buyer worked them. A “30-day aged” life insurance lead was, at some point, a real person asking for a quote. The problem is that the person on the other end has either already bought a policy, forgotten they filled out the form, or been called dozens of times by the agents who bought the record before you. Contact rates typically collapse into the single digits, and the conversations that do happen are often defensive rather than curious.
What inbound calls actually are
An inbound call is a live phone call from a consumer who just saw an ad and chose, on their own, to dial the number. In the live-transfer model we run at Leads MKTG, that call gets qualified against your filters — age band, state, coverage type, health screen — and only then warm-transferred to your licensed agent while the consumer is still on the line. Contact rate is 100% by definition. Intent is at its peak, because the consumer is literally saying it out loud on the recording.