Link Leads Blog · September 1, 2026
A closed deal from an aged list pays a commission on day one and, depending on the product, keeps paying for years after. Most ROI math never gets past day one. Here's how to fold the rest in.
The standard illustration looks like this: 10,000 aged leads at $150, texting the whole list for roughly $120, and closing just 2 deals at a $750 average commission — $1,500 back on $270 spent, about a 6x return. It's a fair, honest way to show that aged data doesn't need a high close rate to pay for itself. It's also, by design, a first-commission number. It stops counting the moment the policy is bound, and for most of what an aged list is good for — auto, home, term life, ACA health, mortgage protection — the commission doesn't stop there.
Insurance commission structures vary by carrier, state, and product, and none of the numbers below are Link Leads figures — they're the general shape of how the industry pays, and worth confirming against your own contracts before you use them:
Take the same two closed deals from the illustration above. If one is an auto policy carrying a modest renewal commission for three more years, and the other is an ACA plan paying a small per-member amount for as long as the member stays enrolled, the $1,500 first-year return isn't the ceiling — it's the floor. Even a conservative renewal assumption, applied across a policyholder base that mostly stays in force past year one, turns a "6x on day one" campaign into something closer to double or triple that once you count three years of renewals instead of one bound policy. The exact multiplier depends entirely on your contracts and your vertical mix — the point isn't a precise number, it's that the number you're using today is very likely too low.
If a chunk of your return shows up in year two and year three, a single large one-time order stops being the whole strategy — it's a one-time injection into a book that needs restocking to keep compounding. That's the same logic behind sizing an order off a revenue goal instead of a budget, as covered in how many aged insurance leads you need for a $10,000 month, and it's a big part of why a steady monthly cadence often beats a single bulk buy for an agent who's actually building a renewing book rather than chasing one payday — the tradeoffs are laid out in monthly plan vs. one-time order. A renewing book rewards showing up every month more than it rewards one big list.
None of this matters if you can't tie a renewal three years out back to the $60 order it came from. Tag every closed deal with the batch it originated from — state, age band, purchase date — the same way you'd already track cost per contact. When a renewal check lands, credit it back to that same batch. After a year or two of this, you'll have a real, batch-by-batch lifetime-value number instead of a first-commission guess, and that's the number that should actually decide which states and verticals you keep buying.
This is a framework for thinking about the number, not a projection of what any specific list will return. Commission structures, persistency, and close rates vary by carrier, state, contract, and agent, and nothing here is a guarantee of renewal income. Run the math against your own commission schedule before you change how you size an order.
Link Leads sells SMS and email lead lists at a flat $0.012 per lead, minimum order 5,000 leads ($60), filterable by state and age band, deduped and delivered as an instant CSV — or a monthly plan starting at $500/month if a renewing book is the goal. Build an order in the order builder, or pull a free 100-row sample before you commit to a batch.