Prior to becoming an insurance agent, Mike Paffhausen lived another life as a civil engineer working in water resources and environmental services. However, with a family full of agents, he couldn’t shake the feeling that the insurance industry was his calling.
Flashforward, Mike is a captive agent with six years under his belt at his Butte, Montana agency. Throughout his years in the industry, Mike has counted himself lucky to be able to go to his dad, father-in-law and brother-in-law for advice. But, when it came to the ever-evolving world of insurance marketing, he felt he could use a little extra support.
We caught up with Mike to pick his brain about insurance marketing and what it takes to grow a local business.
ML: What has your experience marketing your agency been like? Have you done the work in-house or have you always worked with an insurance marketing agency?
Mike: I have worked with some other vendors that were more globally adopted amongst the agents. My concern working with them is that it felt very pre-packaged. It didn’t feel very customized. I didn’t receive any level of in-person support and coaching on their performance. It always bothered me to pay somebody that didn’t report back to me on their performance. I look at our marketing partners as an extension of our team. They had a one-size-fits-all package and I wanted it to do more than that.
ML: Yikes! So, what were you hoping to find in a new insurance marketing agency?
Mike: The first thing was the ability to customize it based on what I wanted. I wanted to have live lead calls in the daytime. So, when an ad is being delivered during the daytime and we’re here covering our phones, those leads aren’t being sent to a landing page. They’re being prompted to click to call so we can field the phone call right then and there. Outside of our business hours, I really wanted to have ad campaigns that would funnel leads to a landing page where we could propagate information that we could get overnight.
ML: What have been the notable differences between us and the other guys?
Mike: The techs at Melon Local were able to set up my ads how I wanted them. It was in my control how much budget I wanted to expend. That was a big deal. The flat rate fee from some of the other insurance marketing agencies was not allowing us to do SEM to the scale necessary for us to be successful in a rural marketplace.
Another thing that was captivating to me was our monthly standing calls with our Melon Local reps. That’s really where they’re telling me about their performance and what they’re doing well and what’s not working. What could possibly be changed. It felt like a partnership call trying to figure out how to make it work the best and most functionally to get the best results. And that’s just something we didn’t get with those other folks.
ML: Can you tell us a bit about Melon Local’s customer service?
Mike: It’s been fantastic. I have my reps phone number and we text back and forth all day. If I need her, she answers the phone. If I email, I get an email back very promptly. It’s very exceptional based on every known metric I know about customer service. I feel very pleased knowing that they’re there to answer my questions.
ML: What kind of results are you seeing from our efforts?
Mike: When I first started, our internal leads were probably about 10-15 a month. Over a six-month window working with Melon, we’ve quadrupled the number of leads. We’re now getting 40-60 a month. And so that by itself justifies the entire service.
ML: Leads are great, but we know there’s more to the sales process than that. Has the quality of leads improved since working with Melon? How has that impacted sales?
Mike: When these leads come in, they’re not asking for an insurance quote. They’re asking for our insurance quote. They’ve already chosen our carrier and us as the agent. So, we don’t have to do an extraordinary amount of effort to sell our company or ourselves. We have a far higher closing ratio. It’s probably six times higher.
ML: What is your favorite part of working with Melon Local?
Mike: I guess when I did my happy dance is when we started to see our lead volumes increase. That’s what they said they could do and when they did what they said they could do, that was the most rewarding experience. They gave me exactly what I expected and quite a bit more. I wasn’t expecting to quadruple the number of internally propagated leads. And it wasn’t a one hit wonder. We’ve had those results for five months in a row now.
ML: What’s your advice to other agents looking to generate more leads and grow their business?
Mike: It depends on where they’re at in the maturity of their agency. If they need better internal processes to close leads, then I’d say, hey, you need to work on that before you spend money getting more leads that you’re not going to close. Let’s get the process on how you’re closing leads and writing new business in place. Then once that’s in place, just add to the funnel.
Thanks for chatting with us, Mike!