As we approach the second open enrollment for insurance exchanges, one thing is clear: purchasing individual health insurance will continue to be a complicated experience that involves multiple touch points and channels with payers and federal or state marketplaces.
Let's look at the facts from the first open enrollment. When it was all said and done, there were over 98.3 million visits to federal or state-based marketplace websites along with 33.3 million calls to state or federal call centers. The majority of consumer impressions (44%) are being shaped and driven by media channels. After the first year, consumers prefer email, online content, and direct mail as their preferred methods of learning about health insurance plans on the Exchange.
Given these initial trends and consumers' increased willingness to engage with multiple channels, healthcare marketers have an opportunity to drive long term sustainable competitive advantage. We should leverage our baseline data and insights from the 2014 open to improve targeting and conversion, but to do so we must first increase our focus on both the context and content of the experience we are delivering.
Addressable experiences are targeted, personalized customer experiences, built on advances in precision media and technology. To deliver an addressable customer experience, healthcare marketers must increase their understanding of user context, develop multiple variations of content, and ultimately connect it all together.
Starting with context, this is everything that we can know about the consumer. A complete view of the consumer must take into consideration their situation and location (both physical and digital), identity, segment, their stage in the marketing funnel, and their behaviors and motivations along with their overall value to the organization. Much of this context can already be derived from your existing 1st party data and site analytics, but there is a wealth of additional data that can leveraged via 3rd party audience platforms where you can continue to enrich a user's context with information like interests, page likes, cross-device identity tracking, search locations, keywords, and more.
Addressable experiences don't happen without content. Content is the stories, advice, and the offers we make that are rich and differentiating and delivered within the context of the consumer. Needless to say, most health plans today are not content shops, but addressability will increase the need for content variety and rules-driven management. Marketers must be prepared with multiple variations of the right content, so they can target and deliver regardless of where the consumer is within the purchase funnel. For those of us that took the journey during the first Open Enrollment Period we all know about the importance of having content ready and approved to address the ongoing legislation and deadline changes that were commonplace with ACA.
Through media and channels marketers need to bring these two elements together. Connectivity represents how we integrate the targeting and tracking capabilities of the addressable platforms to bring context and content together at the right time and place and through the right channel.
Addressability is changing the game and creating new opportunities for healthcare marketers. As consumers' media consumption patterns change and purchasing behaviors evolve, we have the ability to create new experiences that can drive more targeted and timely interactions and expand your marketing funnel.
Dan Brostek is vice president in Merkle's Insurance and Wealth Management practice.