©2014 Epsilon. Private & Confidential

Open enrollment wrap up

Your guide to learning from your open

enrollment campaign and making the most

of next season

healthcare

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Understanding what worked and what didn’t is critical for

successful planning for your next open enrollment period.

But in an increasingly complex healthcare marketing world,

there are many things to consider.

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Use this as your guide to getting the full picture of your

open enrollment campaign. Then take these insights and

apply them to the coming planning cycle to get the biggest

bang for your efforts.

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Open enrollment

campaign performance

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Looking at the performance of your open enrollment

campaigns is the first step to having a successful

campaign in the coming season.

Doing what you’ve always done may lead to failure. The

healthcare world is continually changing, and if you can’t

evolve with it, you’ll be left behind.

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Channel performance

Examine each marketing channel used in your open enrollment campaign for both

individual and Medicare lines of business. Compare your goals against what really

happened. If you missed any of your goals, why do you think that happened? It’s important

to be very honest about why you think you missed your goals, because this will lead you to

better results in your next effort.

For instance, direct mail data may have been pulled incorrectly, or there was something

wrong at the printer/fulfillment center, or maybe there was an issue at the call center.

These things can all impact sales.

It's not enough to just look at the obvious factors such as whether your campaign went out

on time, the frequency of touch points and the performance to your projected goal. Go

deeper. Was it the right targeting? Was something amiss with the copy? Being able to

identify the issues provides the ability to fix these things in the future.

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Channel performance

If you overachieved, what factors contributed to your success?

It’s great if you exceeded your expectations—congratulations! But

know that you still need to understand why you surpassed your goals.

You don’t want to inadvertently overestimate your next campaign. Get

into the details to understand why things happened the way they did.

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Overall performance

Now that you’ve examined your channel

performance, take a look at the details. Determine

which leads came from each marketing campaign.

Try to determine what worked and what didn’t.

If you see leads or enrollments that weren’t direct

conversions from a marketing campaign, can you

attribute them to a campaign? Measuring leads and

sales with direct attribution is a vital part of this

analysis—but so is attributing the influence your

marketing campaign had on sales in general.

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Overall performance

Did your campaign go above and beyond your

expected projections? If so, you need to determine if

that response should become your new benchmark. If

you didn’t see the responses you planned for, ask some

questions to determine the reason. Was your product

competitive? What can you do to improve for next

season?

Two performance factors to analyze:

1. What can you directly attribute to your

marketing efforts?

2. Which conversions did you indirectly influence?

Did you generate awareness or influence sales in

some way?

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Other factors to

consider in your analysis

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When analyzing the success of your open

enrollment period, don’t forget about the following…

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Timing is everything

The timing of your campaign touches relates to both

channel and performance. What was your cadence in your

attempts to engage your prospects? When did you make

initial contact and how many touch points were included in

the campaign? Through what channels?

Did you find better performance with less or more touch

points? Did your strategy work based on what you thought

would happen?

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Analyze your conversion rate by service area

Every service area is nuanced. In different areas, you’ll

likely have different adoption rates by product. Take a look

at each of them by area and try to understand what is

driving the trends (e.g., perhaps a primary provider

is out of network and that is negatively affecting an

area’s enrollments).

Gathering this information will help you to plan for the

future, as well as understand the service area

performance, and opportunities that may be area specific.

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Identify obstacles to compliance

Did you encounter any

compliance issues in

your enrollment

campaign?

If a mistake was made, notify the

appropriate internal compliance groups

and identify how to rectify the problem.

Think about how communication could

be improved moving forward. You

should also create a game plan for

future campaigns to avoid such

incidents and determine how to respond

when they do occur so that your

campaign isn’t stalled indefinitely.

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In all campaigns, you should have test plans lined up. What is the test,

and what is the control for it? If your test outperformed the control,

are you confident that you can expand it into other areas and see

similar results?

Think about testing your creative, timing and cadence of communication.

Test your message or offer, and see if that results in a higher

conversion rate.

Because the enrollment period is relatively short, it’s important to have a

plan for testing and have it ready to go as soon as the campaign starts—

otherwise you’re going to miss your window to test, learn and improve.

Testing, testing, 1 2 3

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The importance

of attribution

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Never before have so many opportunities existed to communicate and engage with

customers and prospects.

However, in a multichannel environment that allows you to interact with your target

audience through a variety of touch points, it can be challenging to determine which

channels contributed to a policy.

How do you measure where your marketing dollars are most effective?

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Understand the halo effect

Do you have any general media (e.g., TV, radio) campaigns that may

have benefitted your open enrollment campaign overall? Be sure to factor

these in to your test plans and channel analysis.

Typically, general media tends to be an awareness driver—and leads

generated directly from this channel cannot usually substantiate the cost of

television advertising alone. However, if you show the lift that it gives your

other channels, it can usually be cost effective.

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Take a look at specialty programs such as seminars

o Seminars can be one of your best performing channels,

but you have to measure/compare them across the

board against how your other channels are performing.

How did your incentive perform? Were your seats filled?

If so, at what percent of capacity?

o If you had a seminar as part of your open enrollment

efforts, did it perform better or worse than your other

channels? Can you track it appropriately?

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What is your relationship between offline and online?

It’s important to understand how people are interacting with your

brand through all channels. Dedication of phone numbers and vanity

URLs can help you understand how people

are responding to different touch points of a campaign through

various channels.

o Are they receiving their messages in one channel and then responding through another?

o What is their path to purchase?

o Is there a point they’re getting stuck?

o Is there a way to make it easier for them?

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Planning for the

seasons to come

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It’s your time to shine. After all of this looking back and careful

analysis, you have the information you need to be successful in the

next season.

Now for the fun part—creating engaging, targeted campaigns

centered around the customer experience that will help you to blow

last year’s campaign out of the water.

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Know the playing field.

What is your competitive advantage? When planning for your next open enrollment period,

you need to analyze your benefit structure against that of your competitors. There are many

factors that could give you an advantage or disadvantage against other plans offered in the area.

The in-network options and

specific benefits offered in

an area could work for or

against you. Understand these

and know how to market them

to their full potential.

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Craft your messaging

Get information on what audience or segment typically purchases a certain product.

Then market to others who are similar. You can pick more targeted, personalized product

messages for the right segment so that you aren’t overwhelming them.

Analytics are your friend here. In your past campaign, you’ll want to see if the segment

purchased what you thought they would. Use that insight to determine whether

messaging needs to change. Have a strategy of what you think you want to

say, and then test against it to confirm your theory.

In crafting your message for the coming open enrollment period, you need

to keep who you want to attract top of mind. It’s all about using data to

profile and understand propensity. Then make your message match.

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Get the most from your modeling

Modeling can help you to determine who to market to in a given area. In your

last campaign, you should evaluate your model’s performance to see if your

model worked. Look at who actually responded or converted. Was it who

you thought would? Is the model performing as expected? Or does it

need to be revised and rebuilt?

This type of analysis is essential to getting the most

for your money in data modeling. If you’re not continually

looking at your model and updating it, it will degrade over time.

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Establish a producer strategy

Producers are integral to your success, although they can be more costly

to your overall acquisition strategy.

Do you know where your policies are coming from?

What portion is coming through government programs and exchanges?

What portion is coming through the producer channel?

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Establish a producer strategy

How do you balance acquisitions that are coming in through various channels? You should

have an idea of the breakdown of acquisitions by channel. If a predominant number are coming

from producers, can you redirect some to a less costly channel (e.g., call center) to help overall cost

savings. It’s all about balance.

Knowing how important the producers are to your success, consider

whether there is anything you can do to help them be successful.

Can you create education programs? Incentives? This can be an

important channel in achieving your goals, so it’s important to

know how this channel is working for you and to determine what

your strategy is in helping the overall effectiveness of your

future open enrollment campaign.

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Evaluate your

customer experience

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Health insurers are looking to understand a more complete picture of how they are

interacting with their current and prospective members—all while being pressed for

measurable ROI with continually constrained resources.

This is compounded by the fact that most consumers today have a “you should know

me by now” mentality. Where healthcare brands are just delving into the world of

customer experience (CX), others have been focused on CX for years now.

Consumers expect brands to know how they want to be communicated with, what is

happening in their lives, the channels they prefer and how to build a relationship with

them that will result in their loyalty.

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Begin with the most important consumer touch point: The call center

o Your call center is critically important to overall enrollment performance—it’s often the lynch pin and

primary call to action.

o In fact, many health insurers marketing Medicare products see the majority of their direct marketing

enrollments through this channel. Let’s face it—insurance can be complicated and people need one-

on-one guidance when making enrollment choices.

many health insurers marketing

Medicare products see

the majority of direct marketing

enrollments through this channel

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Begin with a critical consumer touch point: The call center

Actively testing and participating in the call center

operations is vital for health insurance marketers.

When it comes to your call center, you can’t make any

assumptions that things are going as they should.

You need to see for yourself so you can understand

what is happening when people are calling in and how

they are progressing.

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Begin with a critical consumer touch point: The call center

Test your call center and pay

close attention to the

customer experience.

During the enrollment period, we

recommend having a member of

the marketing team on site at the

call center—not only to ensure that

things are operating as expected,

but also to listen to the voice of the

customer and the questions that

are being asked to see if script

modifications are needed.

Is your call center performing at the level you anticipated?

Test your numbers. Are they all working?

Do your CSRs have the right script?

Is everything operating correctly?

What are your customers asking about when they call in?

Are the CSRs trained to field these questions?

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Understand your online enrollment process

Scenario BScenario A Scenario C

For the same reasons you test your call center, you should also be testing your online

enrollment process. Walk through each step as though you are your prospect.

Are there any stumbling blocks?

Test different scenarios (e.g., both under and over age 65).

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Understand your online enrollment process

As with the call center, you should have a strong idea of what you want the customer

experience to be from the beginning. How do you want the customer to be treated?

How can you make their experience easier?

When you are testing, always have the audience in mind. For example, if

your site is targeted to Medicare enrollment, you may want to make the call

to action graphics larger and be sure that the text is crystal clear.

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Understand your online enrollment process

Keep in mind that your potential customers may visit your site and start the enrollment

process, but are likely to initially abandon it because of the amount of information

required to enroll in a plan.

As you go through the process, think about how you can help to address such

concerns as they may happen—or even how you could redirect the customer to

the call center for more information if questions come up—to better improve the

customer experience and reduce your site abandonment rate.

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Wrapping it up

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As an insurance marketer, you manage a lot to get everything prepped

and ready for your next open enrollment campaign—and you only have

one shot to get it right.

There’s very little time to course correct, so you have to do your due

diligence in the wrap up analysis of your open enrollment campaign.

Remember, it’s not just understanding what worked and what didn’t—

these are the conversations that will be the starting point for the coming

open enrollment period.

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Learning from your past open enrollment period and planning for your next one is

vital to your business. Let us help!

At Epsilon, we understand the complexities that healthcare marketers face—and we

can help you not only overcome them, but evolve your marketing and grow lasting

bonds with your current and prospective members.