Modern Marketing Transformation How Five Tenets of Modern Marketing Can Help Health Insurance Marketplaces Successfully Meet Their Enrollment Objectives
HOW WILL YOU CONVERT HEALTH CARE APPLICATIONS TO ENROLLMENTS? The five tenets of Modern Marketing and what do they mean for your HIX marketing and outreach strategy? Executive Overview In order to successfully meet enrollment goals, objectives and revenue targets of state-based health insurance marketplaces, health insurance marketplace corporations are encouraged to take a serious look at commercial insurance and financial services market best practices that enlist modern marketing automation social relationship management (SRM) and customer relationship management (CRM) concepts such as sales force automation and partner relationship management (e.g. brokers, navigators and assisters) for driving applications into completed enrollments. One of the six core business processes The Centers of Medicaid and Medicare Services (CMS) have outlined for health insurance marketplaces is the Communications and Outreach function. One of the biggest challenges early on in the technology procurement cycle for state-based marketplaces was that CMS had not clearly defined the specific business processes to be followed in order to maximize enrollments by way of communications and outreach. Inevitably this led to many state-based marketplaces procuring technology that did not incorporate modern marketing automation or traditional CRM tools in their core architecture. Rather, most marketplaces focused initially on plan management, eligibility and enrollment, financial management, performance management, and customer service. These 2 www.eloqua.com
business functions are absolutely critical to the core business processes of any health insurance marketplace, however, the one constant every marketplace needs is to identify, nurture and convert each eligible participant into an actual paid enrollment. This is especially important as the Federal money used to augment health insurance marketplace corporation operations in years one and two draws to an end and each marketplace must become a self-sufficient operation. As of December 2013, the proof of this lies in the thousands and thousands of individuals, families and small business operators across the country that are registering and completing applications on state-based marketplaces but do not actually complete the plan selection and enrollment process. Therefore, the importance of modern marketing automation, sales force automation, and partner relationship management become even more critical to the business in order to meet enrollment objectives on an ongoing basis. The five tenets of Modern Marketing create a path from which health insurance marketplace marketing professionals and executive leadership can navigate this new environment with the new tools and capabilities needed to succeed in the digital age. These five tenets targeting, engagement, conversion, analytics, and marketing technology together create the basis for Modern Marketing best practices. The Five Tenets of Modern Marketing Are: Targeting Engagement Conversion Analytics Marketing Technology 3 www.eloqua.com
APPLYING THE FIVE TENETS 5 You should know that you already have a marketer s dream: your target customers must buy a health plan or face a penalty. It s your job to make sure those people who want health care coverage can purchase a plan through your site. Through your mass media, social media and community event awareness campaigns individuals and families are registering on your marketplace with a gold mine of information. Prospective enrollees provide their personal demographics, income, address, preferred language, preferred method of communication and some additional information to help determine eligibility for subsidies and advanced premium tax credits. Now, what happens when they register and apply but do not complete their enrollment? What happens if they come to the health insurance marketplace site and only browse anonymously? Can you capture, target, nurture, and communicate to each individual with a personalized, relevant message in the right language? Can you segment and distribute leads to your broker and partner community in order for them to follow-up? Can you monitor whether or not those leads are being progressed in the sales cycle? Can you properly forecast your revenue? Do you perform proactive outbound telesales calls or just respond to inbound customer service calls? If you have said no to any of these questions, you know you probably need to do things differently. Your potential customers are approaching the buying process in new ways, and you need fresh strategies that will help you keep up. You want to be a Modern Marketer, taking advantage of new tools and potential customer insight to determine your conversion strategy. But how do you go about it? How do you convert a potential customer into a new business relationship in today s marketing environment? Looking to find out exactly that, BtoB Research Services and Crain Communications surveyed hundreds of marketers to define the Modern Marketer and find out what new capabilities they need to succeed in today s digital setting. Their findings, outlined in the paper Defining the Modern Marketer: From Real to Ideal, identified five tenets of Modern Marketing: targeting, engagement, conversion, analytics, and marketing technology. 5 Tenets of Modern Marketing 4 www.eloqua.com
From these five tenets, Modern Marketing best practices can be established that set the tone for your new marketing efforts, while maximizing your marketplace website, social media strategy, and marketing technology. They will help you move away from manual processes to improve the output of your marketing department, measuring your marketing Return On Investment (ROI) to ensure future success, all with the ultimate aim of maximizing health plan enrollments, revenue growth and decreasing the time line of the sales cycle. 1 Targeting Targeting, the first tenet of Modern Marketing, means developing a clear picture of your potential customers: knowing who is involved in the buying process, what their key demographics are and their exact health plan needs require. It involves using dynamic profiling in order to properly communicate relevant and personalized information to each potential customer and it means creating the proper strategies for data collection and lead management. Tip 1: Know Who You re Targeting For a health insurance marketplace organization, the first step in targeting is determining who it is you re trying to target. Your organization may be looking to target certain demographics in a certain region, age range, language or ethnic population. Once your audience is identified, your organization can understand how they prefer to hear from you, as well as their preferred method of communication. The more you know, the better you ll be able to reach them with personalized, relevant messaging. Tip 2: Get to Know Their Digital Body Language Digital Body Language will provide you with advanced information on your potential customers as they work their way through the health plan enrollment process, measuring their online habits as they interact with the digital information on the pages on your marketplace s website. Modern Marketers can use Digital Body Language to better see what those customers are looking for, ascertaining their value and determining where these potential consumers are in the buying cycle in order to ultimately convert them from an interested eligible individual into a completed enrollment. As your potential customers work through the buying process, their Digital Body Language is revealed, unveiling their habits as they interact with the digital assets on your website: seeking, receiving, using, and responding to it. You can use that information to better focus the message they receive. 5 www.eloqua.com
Tip 3: Put a Plan of Action in Place Regardless of who you are targeting, you should have a plan of action in place to help interact with your communication and enrollment channels. Put together strategies that will help you better target using all of the tools at your disposal including: social media, email, call centers, navigators, assisters and brokers, and your marketplace s website. Put a time line together that will get potential customers interested and help them gather the details they need and build on the information they collect to fuel that interest further. If you re targeting two separate groups Latino s in southern California or tribal communities in eastern Oregon for instance you should break those down and approach them at different stages, perhaps creating separate relevant communications with unique branding in place. 2 Engagement Modern buyers want more value from their interactions, including information delivery that will help fuel the decision-making process and provide assistance in navigating complex health insurance marketplace enrollment details. Engagement is about reaching the right people at the right time, but it s more than that too it s also about reaching them in the right way. It s all about delivering the proper content via the right medium, and using an appropriate mix of activities, including PR, website, social media, blogging, events, and demand generation. Tip 1: Learn How to Use Social Media Learning how best to leverage social media, including Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter, will help Modern Marketers find the best ways to reach the audience of their choice, and provide them with new tools to do so. The public has learned to become social in both their personal and business lives, warming to these sites and using them as part of their day-to-day existence. This new form of interaction has created a trickle-down effect, changing the way they want to do business and how they want to interact with the organizations they do business with. That means that using social media has become important in keeping up the conversation in today s business world, even for government services organizations and health insurance marketplace corporations that were perhaps slow to accept it at first. Tip 2: Jump the Sales Channel Hurdles Engaging with the right people means understanding and putting the right sales channels in place. Because of this, the health insurance marketplace sector can learn from the modern marketing best practices of the commercial insurance and financial services industries. While sales channels vary depending on the subvertical and company itself, sometimes channels can be siloed between representatives, each with their own proprietary list of potential customers, making marketing initiatives more complex. At other times, marketing can t communicate with the potential consumer at all, but instead must speak to a third-party entity that acts as an intermediary between. Finally, compliance concerns can also make a difference, regulating that specific communications must come from specific sources. Knowing what these obstacles are and the dynamics that drive the sales channels from the start can help Modern Marketers take better control of their initiatives and get what they need out of their customer engagement efforts. 6 www.eloqua.com
Tip 3: Avoid Over-Engagement When sales channels are splintered, and each sales person is working with a different list of prospects and contacts, there s the danger that a single inquiry will show up in more than one database. Where problems emerge is when the same potential customer is inundated with multiple emails from different sales and marketing partners, all coming from the marketplace. The result can be exhausting and annoying for the potential customer, sometimes turning them away completely. Keeping a tight rein on your communications, to ensure that engagement is clearly contained, will help keep the process moving forward smoothly. 3 Conversion In today s health insurance marketplace marketing environment, the purchasing decision for eligible customers is already made: they are required by law to purchase a plan or face a penalty. However, the process of converting an eligible customer into an enrolled member is dependent on the outreach, marketing and sales efforts you put in place. You must be willing to adopt commercial sales principles for managing and monitoring the qualified leads your marketing efforts generate and be proactive in moving those leads through the sales cycle to completion from prospect to enrolled member. In addition, concerted efforts to improve the customer self-service experience on the marketplace website as customers learn about the marketplace and its offerings will lead to more conversions through the less-costly self-service channel. This allows you to focus your brokers, navigators, assisters and contact center staff to focus on the more complex transactions that require human intervention. Tip 1: Understand the Buying Journey What are the steps your potential clients take on the path to becoming actual enrolled members? Do they visit the website first, and if so what pages do they look at? Do they use the contact information provided to find out more? Knowing the steps each inquiring potential customer takes on the path to conversion will give you the knowledge you need to make that process run more smoothly. If the marketplace website is integral, does it have the information they will need to stay engaged, or will it leave them frustrated and still unclear? If they re looking for contact information, is that information easy to find and will it provide them with the results they want: a single person that s easy to get in touch with who they can ask their questions of, instead of frustrating runaround that sends them from one person to another, or a bombardment of emails from different sources within the same organization. Having the right process in place is more important than ever for today s Modern Marketers. Tip 2: Integrate Marketing and Sales Any strategy that leads a potential customer smoothly through the sales process, from first contact to becoming an enrolled member, will need to involve both marketing and sales. Has your state-based marketplace adopted traditional CRM or sales force automation processes? Is there a VP of Sales or Executive Director driving sales strategy? Can you accurately forecast sales? Do you have a dedicated set of telesales representatives in your call center? Can you automate the assignment of leads to brokers, navigators and assisters? Can you monitor the status of the assigned leads to ensure they are being worked in a timely manner? In some organizations, marketing and sales act separately, in such dichotomous ways that the two never quite meet, putting a huge chasm in the middle of the conversion cycle. When marketing and sales activities work together, though, the lifecycle from inquiry to enrolled member becomes more streamlined. 7 www.eloqua.com
4 Analytics Data analytics and reporting have as much a place in Modern Marketing as community events and campaigns. In fact, measuring the results of the marketing process is one of the most important differentiators of the Modern Marketer. Understanding your return on marketing investment, and measuring marketing s contribution to revenue as a whole, will help solidify marketing s part in the big picture, and give you the knowledge you need to determine which actions are successful and which are not. Tip 1: Pinpoint Your Efforts Relationship scoring helps hone your list of potential business relationships, to give you the information you need to know who to approach next. Rather than calling everyone on a list of 1,000, each relationship is rated, to determine who s most likely to convert, providing you with the most effective starting point. Throw enough things at the wall and something will surely stick but think of all the resources you ll have wasted in the process. In today s marketing environment, where resources are scarce and budgets are tight, that s not the best strategy for success. Knowing which actions have been successful and which have not been and having the tools to measure that success will allow for more educated efforts in the future, leading to incremental changes that fuel your marketing efforts and create a path of repeatable performance improvement. Relationship scoring for example, meanwhile, helps hone the list of potential customer relationships you ll want to approach next; rather than tackling a list of 1,000 potential customers, and calling them all, you ll be able to rate each of those relationships to determine which are most likely to convert, for a more solid and effective starting point. Tip 2: Set Goals Measuring what works and what doesn t can do more than help create efficiencies within the organization. With the results of your efforts clear to see, it s easy to create goals for your next marketing endeavor. Whether you want to improve your enrollment conversion rate in the next open enrollment period, or segment and refer Medicaid-eligible s, having accurate analytics can give you the momentum you need to achieve those goals. Having a closer view of your website usage knowing who completed the initial eligibility calculator or when someone registered for an account or when someone completed their initial application will also help make those goals more clear. 8 www.eloqua.com
5 Marketing Technology The final piece of the puzzle for Modern Marketers is the right marketing technology: solutions that integrate with customer relationship management (CRM), social relationship management (SRM) and sales force automation (SFA) platforms to provide multiple marketing functions, including workflow and marketing automation, social monitoring, social marketing, social engagement and Business Intelligence (BI). The right marketing automation technology that is operated by your own marketing team will make it easier to navigate through each step of the conversion cycle, keep up with compliance needs, and integrate the other four tenets of Modern Marketing completely. Tip 1: Understand That One Size Does Not Fit All The health insurance marketplace arena is just beginning but it is also very specific in its needs, with unique compliance issues and sales channels to consider. As such, you need a tool that is configurable specifically to your requirements, with email blueprints, best practices, and other specialized functionality. The Oracle Eloqua Marketing Cloud Service technology has custom-designed tools specifically created for the financial services and insurance sectors, developed through experience with over 100 financial services firms. Because of this, the Oracle Eloqua Marketing Cloud service capability translates extremely well to the similar needs of the health insurance marketplace. Additional options help organizations create effective email strategies and make the most of their marketplace websites for more integrated sales and marketing efforts, while live content templates allow marketers to choose the email that will best meet their needs. Tip 2: Know What You Need Most health insurance marketplace organizations have yet to introduce modern marketing automation technology and therefore do not know necessarily what is needed to help execute the goals and objectives for driving successful enrollments. Most marketplaces to this point have focused their efforts on traditional mass media awareness campaigns to drive traffic to their marketplace website, facebook page or 1-800-number. And because of the enrollment goals and challenges currently being experienced, it is time to seriously consider the available technologies available to assist you in your endeavor to provide insurance to the uninsured. The Oracle Eloqua Marketing Cloud Service combined with the Oracle Social Relationship Management (SRM) platform helps Modern Marketers optimize customer communications; allows marketers to collaborate with the critical broker, assister and navigator sales channels; measure marketing campaign results for increased visibility and revenue forecasting, all while maintaining best practices and regulatory compliance. With Oracle Eloqua Marketing Cloud Service technology the result is more successful marketing campaigns designed for today s digital environment, as well as improved ROI that s easy to prove. 9 www.eloqua.com
The Final Words The five tenets of Modern Marketing were created based on today s modern marketing environment. The challenges for marketers in today s health insurance marketplace are clear: find all those who are eligible and make sure they are converted to an enrolled member. Marketers stuck doing things the way they ve always done them will find that their old campaigns and processes don t work the same as they always have, and that new tools and more efficient strategies are required to meet enrollment objectives. These best practices surrounding the five tenets including marketing technology such as Oracle Eloqua Marketing Cloud Service will most assuredly help with these objectives. TAKEAWAYS 1 2 3 4 5 6 Potential marketplace customers are going about the buying process differently than ever before. Knowing the five tenets can help Modern Marketers align themselves with those new habits in today s digital age. Studying the Digital Body Language of potential enrollees can help determine who is considering your offerings, what their needs are, and where they are in the buying process, helping you to target your efforts better. Knowing the proper route to engagement whether it be through social media or by navigating specific sales channels can help create real connections with the right people. Converting a potential customer into an actual one requires both sales and marketing. A cohesive effort sees the best results. Understanding your return on marketing investment, and analyzing marketing s contribution to overall ROI, is increasingly important in today s environment. The right technology can help Modern Marketers better keep up in today s digital environment, ensuring that each stage of the conversion cycle is completed to the organization s best advantage. 10 www.eloqua.com
Modern Marketing Transformation The Five Tenets of Modern Marketing for Health Insurance Marketplaces eloqua.com oracle.com Oracle Eloqua is the leading provider of modern marketing automation and revenue performance management software that helps ensure every component of marketing works harder and more efficiently to drive revenue. Eloqua software is now the centerpiece of the Oracle Marketing Cloud. Companies across a wide range of industries rely on Eloqua s cloud-based software, professional services and education programs to help them automate marketing processes across multiple channels, target and nurture prospects and deliver highly qualified leads at a lower cost to sales teams. For more information, visit www.eloqua.com, subscribe to the It s All About Revenue blog, call 866.327.8764, or email demand@eloqua.com Copyright 2014, Oracle and/or its affiliates. All rights reserved. 11 www.eloqua.com