Open enrollment wrap up: Your guide to learning from your open enrollment campaign and making the most of next season

©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

©2014EpsilonDataManagement,LLC.Private&Confidential
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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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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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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.

Open enrollment wrap up: Your guide to learning from your open enrollment campaign and making the most of next season

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Open enrollment wrap up: Your guide to learning from your open enrollment campaign and making the most of next season