How do direct mail marketers identify the number of open rates during the Medicare AEP that can lead volume through direct mail? The best way is to use audience analytics to determine the investment.
Direct mail continues to be a workhorse during AEP (Annual Enrollment Period), the most recent Medicare Shopping and Switching Study by Deft Research showed that 27% of Medicare Advantage members read the direct mail they received.
The healthcare direct mail and it’s low-tech and substantial approach, remove through the digital clutter, builds brand awareness, and leads to accountable action.
Moreover, 83% of Americans born between 1925-1945 are most likely to trust direct mail information when they make decision of purchase.
The best practice is to use predictive models for healthcare audience because there’s a mechanism which increases the chances that a prospect with connect with your brand as a result to marketing strategies. These models can be built to predict response or convert leads, enabling marketers to optimise investment by choosing the correct mail depth to meet their goals.
However, the compressed marketing window of AEP demands that health insurers approach targeting in a compliant way that ensures all eligible people to receive equal information, so health insurance providers can meet this requirement with the use of model-based performance for healthcare direct marketing.
There is a relationship between the model depth (probability of getting response) and number of touches a potential receives during AEP.
Let’s understand it with few examples:
Baseline
This is a common scenario for businesses in which a four touch strategy is deployed across the target prospects universe during AEP. This is an investment that brings unimaginable return, due to least common performance across the targeting model spectrum.
Scenario 1
Matching your number of contacts to the model depth would yield a 38% reduction is marketing marketing spend, and 11% percent reduction in lead volume with a 30% increase in CPL efficiency.
Scenario 2
In this example, you can use the budget savings for more productive model cells. During Medicare AEP, you may want to maximize the lead funnel to drive sales. Namely, you may increase touches in the middle score which provides a positive lift and better overall performance.
Scenario 3
This scenario reduces the overall budget by 23%, with a reduction in lead volume of just under 3%. The efficiency of CPL increases by 20% above baseline. This allows the savings to be reorganized into various programs such as digitally accessible media to enhance direct mail and lead-nurturing efforts.
Medicare marketers who provide medical mailing services have target audience models and an undifferentiated contact measure and should begin to test the relationship between these models and touches. This will help direct mail marketers understand each interaction and inform future AEP direct mail campaigns.
Ways you can leverage analytics in Medicare AEP Direct Mail Campaign
Healthcare marketers should take a fresh look at their data. As our first step, define your distant and near business goals:
- Longer term: Identify the questions or problems that you want to solve that will help you define an analytics solution.
- Shorter term: Ask yourself, what decisions can be made off of the reports you want, and what metrics will have the highest impact at the lowest cost.
When looking to answer these questions, here are the following ways you can leverage actionable data to outrank competitors:
- Marketing and Reporting to Make an Impact
With so much data available to gather and report, it can be resource-intensive and hard to decode what is truly meaningful and insightful, compared to having served numbers that have minimal impact. Establishing meaningful KPIs and goals prior to the launch of any campaign will allow healthcare direct marketing firms to track and develop actionable reports effectively in order to make decisions and improve later results.
- Segmentation-Yielding Results
Diving deep into your member files will allow you to develop insights beyond simple demographic clusters, and understand actual customer behavior and preferences well. This insight then drives the development of segregated creative, media plans, and enhanced direct mail score models. This increased understanding of your customer can boost the percentage of leads and conversions while demanding less overall cost and CPL.
- Response Modeling for Tailored Touchpoints
Each person’s healthcare direct mail marketing touchpoints provide a unique purpose through the AEP timeframe. Instead of looking for a model that goes for all strategies, leverage your analytics to tailor each individual touchpoint in order to maximize all relevant response rate metrics such as kit requests, calls, website visits, etc.
- Terminate Member Predictive Model to Reduce Attrition
A multi-year review of the member data will help to inform which members might be at risk of desertion. This analytics will enable you to communicate the benefits of staying with the current plan proactively and appropriately while reducing attrition.
- Media Mix Optimisation for Maximum ROI
Ensure that the media channels and marketing budget work as efficiently as possible. Integrating the marketing cost and campaign performance data allows for a set of minor productivity curves to be developed for each channel.
The direct mail campaign companies can identify even the break-even point at different budget levels (for instance, forecast leads and sales production at several budget proposals). Finally, linear programming will help in identifying the optimal issuance across marketing channels for a given budget.
Smart Analytics can help you succeed in changing the Medicare Landscape
The Medicare landscape is changing just like other industries and using the data effectively can be what differentiates you from your competitors. Knowing who your audience is and how they respond will allow you to increase new members successfully while retaining the base.
Remember that in order to leverage analytics, you must think about the KPIs ahead of time and ensure that the proper tracking is set up to track unique experiences through vanity URLs, source codes, tag management systems, and unique contact numbers. This will help in ensuring successful campaigns and key opportunities for future improvement.
