How to Use Open Enrollment Season as Your Marketing Laboratory

It’s open enrollment season and if you’re like most marketers in the payor space, you’re heads-down in execution mode. But while you push send and triage member cases, don’t forget to take advantage of the opportunity to use what you learn this year for 2020.

Here are three things to pay attention to this year to help plan for your next open enrollment campaign.

1. How do you attract new customers?

If you’re like most insurers, you’re heavily invested in digital ads and this is likely your busiest season. So, use this time to think about how ads are performing and make the necessary adjustments for next year.

Are you using your current member profiles to model the next ideal member? Creating look-a-like audiences based on first-party data can have a massive impact on ad spend.

Do you have a single view of your customers? On average, most marketers use 15 different data sources, yet only 47% of marketers say they have a unified view of their customers.

Are you targeting the right people for programs you want to expand? Don’t miss out on reaching your key employer customers because you didn’t set up the right audiences.>

Connecting databases with a DMP can help you quickly identify customers and prospects and personalize content for each audience. Sixty-six percent of customers say instant on-demand engagement is very important. This unified view will also help you understand who has already seen your content, so you can maximize your ad budget by making sure they don’t see it again.

2. How are your journeys performing?

Now is also the perfect time to evaluate your metrics and understand how your journeys are performing. Take an objective look at your strategy and identify opportunities to maximize value for members and prospective members. 

Customers expect more from you than just transactional emails, they expect a great brand experience. According to the State of the Connected Customer, 54% of customers believe brands need to transform their approach to customer engagement.

New member onboarding is a great place to start and open enrollment provides a great laboratory to understand what works and what doesn’t. Maximize your new member’s time to value by helping them understand both traditional and supplemental benefits and what you have to offer.

Your new members will also likely have questions about your offerings and helping them through onboarding can ensure they will be happy enough to stay with you next season. The bottom line is establishing trust in these early experiences will help customers build a relationship with your brand in the future. 

Don’t stop with onboarding. This is a great opportunity to reengage existing members with your offerings — check to make sure they clearly understand program changes and can easily confirm they’re in the right plans. You’ll want to give them educational content to make their health care journey even more personal and productive. 

Customer experience is everything. Eighty-four percent of customers say the experience a company provides is as important as its products and services. That’s why it’s imperative you make sure your experience differentiates you from competitors.

3. How do you know what you know?

Most marketers juggle between multiple sources of data, derived from disparate sources, and are often unclear about industry, or internal benchmarks. Developing benchmarks for each type of product or service journey can help you identify performance gaps.

Knowing where gaps exist helps you focus on strengthening those aspects of your operations and ensure productivity remains high. Lack of insight and having teams bounce between applications means lost productivity and opportunity to align across marketing efforts.

Having a reliable single view of how your marketing performs means you’ll have a better understanding of your business and be able to react and adjust in real time. Combine all your channels into an integrated, actionable system to more reliably predict outcomes and even surface trends you didn’t realize existed. 

This is your season too. Make the most of it. To learn more about strategies to acquire and foster member relationships during open enrollment and beyond, Marketing Cloud for Healthcare Payers.