Cole started working at Fuego Leads in 2020 to help scale their health insurance lead generation efforts. Fuego was a small team of 6 operating private health insurance shopping sites and building tools to improve the process of finding private health insurance coverage.
Fuego’s goal was to reduce their cost per lead and increase lead revenue from existing and new lead generation campaigns. Lower costs and higher revenues would allow Fuego to reinvest in their advertising campaigns and contact technology, creating significant opportunities for scale in the health insurance industry.
By 2022, Fuego significantly increased their contact and engagement rates by leveraging semi-automated, personalized customer outreach and creating better customer experiences optimized for conversion.
Personalized Outreach: We set up organic hybrid nurture journeys that automated initial customer outreach with natural-language messaging and enabled licensed insurance agents to seamlessly take over the conversation with customers via phone, SMS, and/or email.
Conversion Rate Optimization: We created a fully-automated virtual qualification agent that customers could use to begin the quoting process while waiting for a licensed agent to become available.
Cole identified a few key areas of improvement within Fuego’s outreach strategy to customers that had requested health insurance quotes.
Lead Engagement
After analyzing which advertising campaigns generated the highest-converting and highest-value customers, Cole discovered that some calls from these customers were going unanswered and other calls to customers that requested quotes could be delayed by up to 20 minutes. Cole developed a prioritization algorithm within Fuego’s phone system that ensured the highest value calls experienced the lowest wait times/delays possible.
Cole then set up hybrid SMS journeys to customers that were unable to speak with a licensed agent via phone. These journeys automated initial outreach on behalf of the agents with organic, natural-sounding language and allowed the agents to take over the conversation seamlessly via phone, SMS, or email when a customer was available to speak. As a result of these two efforts, Fuego saw a 3.7x increase in contact and engagement rates from leads generated by their advertising campaigns, significantly reducing their cost per lead.
Automation
As lead engagement rates increased, contact volume quickly outpaced the number of calls that Fuego’s agents were able to field. To solve for this, Cole created a virtual qualification agent that customers could speak with while waiting for a licensed health insurance agent to become available. This virtual agent successfully ingested customer information and notes into Fuego’s proprietary agent interface, increasing qualified leads by over 40% and enabling licensed agents to quote faster, take more calls, and ultimately write more policies.
