Insurance
Life insurance is a category where the cheapest leads are reliably the least insurable. We build acquisition for advisers, brokers and carriers who measure success at policy issue rather than form submission, which means qualifying on the things underwriting will eventually care about, before the lead is ever delivered.
Most protection campaigns fail somewhere between the click and the underwriter, and the failure is invisible in the ad account until it is far too late to do anything about it.
"Get covered from £5 a month" attracts everyone. But life insurance is one of the few consumer products where the applicant can want it, afford it, complete the entire journey and still be declined. Age bands, medical disclosure, occupation, smoking status and BMI all sit between interest and issue. A campaign optimised for form submissions will systematically find the people most motivated to seek cover, and motivation to seek cover correlates uncomfortably well with being difficult to insure.
Then there is the disclosure problem. Protection asks people to answer honest questions about their health and their mortality, and a proportion will stop dead at precisely that point. A lead that converts to an application and stalls at the medical questionnaire has consumed adviser time and produced nothing.
The result is a familiar pattern. Strong lead volume, respectable contact rates, collapsing issue rates, and a CAC nobody can explain from the marketing dashboard.
Protection is a conversation product. That shapes the answer.
Calls are the stronger format for most protection campaigns. Life insurance is genuinely complex: term versus whole of life, level versus decreasing, critical illness bolt-ons, whether to write it in trust. Buyers do not self-serve this well, and the questions they ask are the sale. An inbound caller already pre-qualified on age band and cover type is a long way ahead of a form record.
IVR qualification does real work here. Age band alone removes a large share of unworkable enquiries before an adviser is engaged, because most products have hard issue ages. Confirming whether someone wants life cover, critical illness or income protection routes the call to the right adviser first time, rather than the third time.
Hot-key transfer suits the moment. Protection intent is usually triggered by an event: a mortgage, a new baby, a diagnosis in the family. That window is narrow and emotionally charged. Connecting while the prospect is engaged converts considerably better than a callback once the moment has passed.
Forms still have a role. Comparison-stage buyers who want quotes before conversation, and mortgage-linked protection where the trigger is a property transaction rather than an emotional one, both suit data capture and structured follow-up.
Because calls bill on connected duration past a buffer and leads bill per record, the two need separate economics. A four-minute conversation with someone outside every issue age on your panel costs real money. A filtered call that never reaches your floor costs nothing.
Owned comparison properties. We operate comparison and review properties, so protection demand can be met on our own estate. Someone actively comparing cover has already accepted they need it, which makes them a materially different prospect from someone interrupted mid-scroll. Agencies that rent audience cannot offer this.
Paid search. Captures active intent: "life insurance quotes", "over 50s life cover", "critical illness cover". Intent is high and so is competition. The work is matching query to product. Someone searching decreasing term cover is mortgage-driven. Someone searching over-50s plans is a different buyer with different economics. Treating them as one audience wastes both.
Pay-per-call networks. The primary channel for many protection advertisers, for the reasons above, and where IVR pre-qualification produces the clearest return.
Paid social. Demand generation, strongest against life-event targeting: new mortgage, new child, new job. Requires careful creative governance, because protection is a regulated product and social is where compliance most often slips. Retargeting performs well given the long consideration window.
Native and display. Suits the education stage: what critical illness actually covers, why cover written in trust matters, how underwriting works. Weak for cold acquisition, useful for warming.
Email and consented data. Effective for nurturing quote-stage prospects who did not convert, and for re-engagement at renewal or life-event triggers. Requires clean consent provenance, which is where careless suppliers create regulatory problems that land on their client's desk rather than their own.
That final row deserves attention. Enquiries made on behalf of a relative who does not know about it are common in protection and almost never proceed, because the person being insured has to consent and disclose personally. Spotting this early saves an adviser a genuinely awkward conversation.
Life insurance is a regulated product sold to people thinking about death, illness and the people who depend on them. That deserves care beyond box-ticking.
In the UK, FCA Consumer Duty places obligations on firms to deliver good outcomes and avoid foreseeable harm, and that reaches into how leads are generated, not only how policies are sold. Vulnerable customer considerations apply frequently here, particularly with older applicants and anyone enquiring shortly after a health event. In the US, TCPA consent requirements and DNC scrubbing govern whether a prospect can lawfully be contacted at all, and those standards have tightened.
Our position: no fear-based creative, no implied government schemes, no "guaranteed acceptance" claims where acceptance is not in fact guaranteed, and no consent laundering across sources. Where a prospect shows signs of vulnerability, that should reach the adviser as useful context rather than be quietly stripped out to make the record look tidier.
Enterprise carriers audit their acquisition supply chain and increasingly ask where the consent came from. Being able to answer that question clearly is a commercial asset, not just a compliance one.
Cost per lead is close to meaningless in life insurance, because the distance between a lead and a policy is longer here than in almost any other consumer category.
We report on:
Cost per contacted lead. The first honest figure
Cost per qualified conversation. Contacted, in age band, disclosure-willing, genuine need
Cost per application submitted. Where adviser time has been meaningfully committed
Cost per policy issued. The only number that maps to revenue, and the one to scale against
Application-to-issue rate by source. The diagnostic that exposes a channel quietly delivering uninsurable prospects
Issue outcomes are fed back to the platforms rather than form submissions. This matters more in protection than anywhere else, because without it the algorithm optimises toward the most eager applicants, and eagerness in life insurance has an awkward relationship with insurability.
Calls generally perform better, because protection is a conversation product that buyers struggle to self-serve and IVR can confirm age band and cover type before an adviser engages. Forms suit comparison-stage and mortgage-linked buyers who want quotes first.
Most commonly: outside issue age, unwillingness to complete medical disclosure, affordability, enquiries made on behalf of someone who has not consented, and underwriting decline. Several of these are predictable and can be filtered before delivery.
The wrong metric to optimise against. A cheap protection lead that never reaches application costs more than an expensive one that issues. Cost per policy issued is the figure that maps to revenue.
Vulnerability indicators are passed to the adviser as context rather than stripped from the record. Creative avoids fear-based framing and pressure tactics. Under FCA Consumer Duty this is an obligation rather than a preference.
Yes, though they behave differently from standard term protection: different age bands, different price sensitivity, much heavier call skew. They should run as a separate campaign with separate economics rather than being blended into a general protection buy.
Consent provenance is tracked to source. In the US that means TCPA-compliant one-to-one consent and DNC scrubbing. In the UK, clear opt-in with a documented trail. Suppliers who cannot evidence provenance are creating liability for the advertiser, not for themselves.
Both. Carriers typically need scale, consistency and audit-ready compliance across markets. Brokers need geographic and product fit matched to their panel. The channel mix and qualification criteria differ accordingly.
Quickly. Protection intent is usually event-triggered and the window is narrow. Hot-key transfers remove the delay entirely by connecting the prospect while they are still engaged.
Yes. Routing by product intent at IVR or form stage means advisers receive enquiries matched to what they actually sell, which improves conversion and spares the customer being passed around.
Consumer Genius operates across 11 markets. Protection regulation differs substantially between them, with FCA rules in the UK and TCPA plus state-level requirements in the US, so campaigns are built per market rather than translated.
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