In our Anatomy of a Solution series, we take a look at some direct challenges and disruptive solutions that Amsive has driven for clients. This week, we tackle modeling augmentation to promote Medicare Advantage plans for a regional client.
The Basics
For this campaign, we engaged a client that offered a variety of direct health care services and health insurance plans. With health centers throughout a handful of northeast states and a membership of over 100,000 members across Medicare plans, we needed to elevate their game because of increased competition[amsive_tooltip term=”direct-competition”] from national players.
That’s where we signed on to augment their acquisition[amsive_tooltip term=”customer-acquisition”] and enrollment skillset for Medicare Advantage plans.
The Challenge
We’ve always tackled acquisition and enrollment projects with a deep understanding of member bases and the prospect market landscape to orchestrate a personalized experience across all channels, strategically designed to deliver the right message at the right time. The client knew this kind of technology and approach existed; they had just never used it before.
This was a matter of enabling Medicare plans to grow and win in the current ultra-competitive environment by taking the member journey[amsive_tooltip term=”customer-journey”] to an entirely new level. Yes, we had to activate, engage, and educate audiences about Medicare and client offerings as we usually do. But in this project, we also had to build a cohesive strategy from a digital program that had previously been running for the client in-house and overlay direct mail[amsive_tooltip term=”direct-mail”] in tandem.
We built a model that allowed the regional Medicare client to be more targeted, and more personal with their approach to communicating to prospects.
The Solution
We initially brought in the client’s member data to understand their current audience, then dug down and utilized our proven in-house data source to gain a 360-degree view of potential consumers. Consolidating this information indicated personalization[amsive_tooltip term=”personalization”] factors such as how potential members fall into health care segments, what were their attitudes around health care, and how we could best communicate to those prospective members.
From there it was a matter of prioritizing a channel[amsive_tooltip term=”media-channel”] mix based on audience strategy throughout the marketing funnel stages. For this bigger, beefier strategy to boost enrollment, the question for us was: How can we smartly layer alongside digital with direct mail — the workhorse of AEP — to build out the funnel[amsive_tooltip term=”marketing-funnel”] to maintain effective potential member communication touchpoints?
To sharpen their general approach in sending out direct mail touchpoints, we established a creative test using two concepts — with separate imagery and tone — that aligned to some key specific personas. We were very specific to just go after a targeted audience that we were mailing to at specific intervals.
This is where true synchronicity came into play. We weren’t taking over for the other agency, we were seamlessly complementing and supporting them, particularly in relation to digital display ad channels. It was there that we made sure direct mail components closely aligned to what was created for digital. This allowed us to augment the current strategy to stay on brand and tied enrollment-leaning information in the initial steps of the customer journey as one cohesive offering.
The Results
By establishing personas[amsive_tooltip term=”buyer-persona”], and hitting personalized messages across channels, we helped the client understand key takeaways, like how and why to target audiences across regions with different preferences. The testing found that paring down and driving into the niche audiences with a more strategic cadence is cost-effective and, simply, effective overall.
We were not only able to determine which touchpoints drove more enrollments, but we were also able to recommend an ongoing strategy going into next year to refine personas to make them work even better. These touchpoints to specific audiences would maximize spend and ultimately drive more enrollment.
The client’s creative team still very much owned topline development, but for us, another win was successfully augmenting the campaign from the in-house team to our agency while communicating the value that we bring to the whole process.
This was a matter of enabling Medicare plans to grow and win in the current ultra-competitive environment by taking the member journey to an entirely new level.
Using our more refined model, the client’s sales goal was nearly met or exceeded in desired markets — which is no small feat due to remote challenges wrought by COVID. Our model campaign helped push the client’s cost-per-acquisition to one of the lowest we’ve ever seen, and about 90 percent of leads generated[amsive_tooltip term=”lead-generation”] by our refined communications converted to enrollment.
We built a model that allowed the regional Medicare client to be more targeted, and more personal with their approach to communicating to prospects. They had a general strategy, but they had not done any type of modeling in the past. Our experience and our models simply provided a better outcome now and for the future.
