Successful Medicare Advantage Lead Generation

MEDICAREADVANTAGE
Written By Ted Grigg

Marketing strategies are critical for any business. One important strategy is managing the prospect database, which involves more than just keeping the list clean by updating addresses, removing duplicates, and excluding deceased individuals and current members.

To manage the prospect database effectively, it's crucial to segment the list based on past monthly performance. This entails creating a response propensity profile to determine your mailings' depth, timing, and frequency. Remember, mailing closer to the enrollment deadline often yields better responses. It's also essential to mail the best-responding groups more frequently than the lower-responding ones. Regular testing can boost these decisions, a key aspect of refining your marketing strategies.

Based on my experience, allocating 75% of the direct mail budget within five months before the enrollment deadline is optimal for delivering the maximum CPA and sales volume requirements. This strategy involves gradually increasing the rollout database quantity as the enrollment deadline approaches, starting with low-penetration mailings. Other channels, such as DRTV and non-direct mail channels, should be utilized 9-10 months before enrollment to create demand and position your product against the competition.

In addition to direct mail, most plans run DRTV and print advertising to support their direct mail campaigns. These activities will positively impact your direct mail response rates while generating additional new business within these added channels.

Your direct mail should be personalized for existing members and potential new members. Existing members should receive a special package directed at them, while new prospects should receive a personalized package that speaks to them as potential new members.

In summary, to develop effective testing strategies, focus on database segmentation, drop frequency, creating executions, time of year, and channel support such as DRTV, digital overlays, radio, and newspaper inserts.

Ted Grigg

Ted Grigg is a direct response strategist who helps growth-focused companies reduce risk by identifying weak assumptions before they become costly mistakes.

Over the course of his career, Ted has evaluated several hundred million dollars in direct response testing across direct mail, digital, print, television, telephone, and other channels. His work combines direct response strategy, acquisition economics, customer analysis, creative evaluation, offer development, and disciplined testing.

Ted has worked on both the client and agency sides of the business. That experience gives him a practical understanding of the pressures facing executives, marketing teams, agencies, and service providers—and of the problems that arise when activity, media volume, or creative preference replaces a clear economic objective.

His consulting work helps organizations examine such questions as:

  • Are acquisition goals economically realistic?

  • Is the allowable Cost Per Sale supported by customer value?

  • Are targeting, offers, creative, media, and response paths working together?

  • Are tests structured to produce reliable business decisions?

  • Are unproven assumptions being treated as facts?

  • Is the organization measuring sales outcomes rather than convenient proxies?

Ted’s experience includes the development of direct mail and multichannel acquisition programs for insurance, healthcare, financial services, technology, nonprofit, manufacturing, retail, transportation, communications, government, and business-to-business organizations.

For a national direct-to-consumer insurance company, he developed a direct mail format that defeated established controls and helped expand the productive use of compiled prospect lists from less than 10 percent to more than 30 percent of total direct mail circulation within one year. He also planned Medicare lead-generation programs for more than 60 regional and national HMO and PPO organizations, with some programs exceeding sales projections by as much as 60 percent.

Ted founded Wyse Direct, a direct marketing division of Wyse Advertising in Cleveland, where he developed acquisition programs and helped launch a new technology product for Seiko Instruments by generating a predictable flow of qualified sales leads for its national sales organization. As vice president of new business development for the Grizzard Agency, he helped broaden the agency’s strategic capabilities and pursue new commercial and fundraising opportunities.

He is the author of The HMO/PPO Marketing Plan—A Step-by-Step Guide, published by Executive Enterprises, and has written numerous articles and conducted webinars on direct response strategy, testing, creative development, and marketing economics.

Ted earned a Bachelor of Arts degree from Abilene Christian University and completed two years of graduate study at Texas Tech University. He is the founder of DMCG, LLC.

http://www.dmcgresults.com
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