Webinars
Medicare Webinar: How To Have a Successful AEP
Expert insights on medicare marketing from Michael B. Paich (Carida Insurance), Marc DeSimone (Clearview), and Bas Offers (PX) on game-changing...
How to Get the Highest ROI During Open Enrollment
Maximize your ROI this open enrollment with our 12-point checklist. Learn how to boost acquisition, improve retention, and reduce rapid disenrollment effectively.
PX
Feb 17, 2025
Do you want to get the highest possible ROI this open enrollment? Our 12-point checklist can help you improve your acquisition efforts as well as improve retention and rapid disenrollment. We’ll share the tactics from the best-performing agencies to optimize ROI during this (and future) open enrollment.
Maximizing your ROI while achieving your volume targets during AEP is probably the biggest challenge out there. We are all focused on making the most out of our budget. We know CPA, cost per call/lead, and conversion rates are all key, but some important variables affecting these KPIs are easily overlooked. Let’s take the numerous ways you can route calls, for example, or the bidding strategy you’re using based on the performance of individual agents or traffic sources. We are happy to share the 12 points we identified among industry leaders as important variables impacting ROI.
1. Do not drop calls:
This seems obvious. Unfortunately, we see that some agencies have an answer rate of less than 60%! This is a big waste of your budget. When buying calls always use some technology that checks the availability of your agents. Otherwise, calls will queue up and, eventually, hang up the phone. When checking the availability of your agents, make sure you look at whether the available agent is licensed in the state of the call. Otherwise, he won’t be able to pick up, and the call will still be queued.
2. Route your calls to the best available agent at any moment:
Besides checking if there are any agents available, you should also look at the quality of the agents that are available to take a call. Let’s say 20 agents are available. When buying a call, this should be automatically routed to the best-performing agent. Most of the time, these are internal agents, but always base your routing on agent performance.
3. Adjust your lead bids according to the quality difference of your agents:
All agents have different conversion rates. Based on the conversion rate of a specific agent and your target CPA, you can adjust the bid to make sure you pay the right price in order to achieve your ROI goals. To simplify, you can also create multiple campaigns for different agent quality tiers. The first campaign is focused on high-quality agents. Your bids are higher to make sure they are always calling, working on the highest quality leads. The other campaign is focused on lower-quality agents and lower-quality leads. This way, they can train without unnecessarily wasting high quality leads and your budget.
4. Bid differently on calls for your best-performing traffic sources and measure your CPA based on traffic source:
There are a lot of different publishers to choose from, and every publisher has traffic from multiple sources. Make sure to not only measure your conversion on the publisher level but also on the traffic source level. Unfortunately, 40% of the agencies do not have a complete insight into the performance per source. Based on the conversion rate of a specific traffic source and your target CPA, you can adjust the bid to make sure you pay the right price in order to achieve your ROI goals. Agencies that have full control to manage campaigns proactively tend to have a 20% higher ROI.
5. Diversify your lead sources (you need a lot):
Like stated under 4 there can be a huge difference in performance. Not only on the publisher level but even on the source level. Ideally, all these different options should be constantly tested to see what works best for your ROI. Agencies that manage more than 40 sources tend to have a CPA that is 12% lower than those that manage fewer sources. Having the flexibility to mitigate source performance volatility is critical.
6. Qualify calls fast (within 60-90 seconds) by getting enough data on the ping post for transfers:
The more personal data you get on the ping post, the faster you can qualify for a transfer. It seems a small difference, but if you, for example, already know someone’s name and address before you pick up the call, this might save you the first 30 seconds. This enables you to disqualify faster and means that you are wasting less of your budget on calls with people who have no intention to buy.
7. Call leads fast or don’t buy them at all:
If you are buying both leads and calls, make sure to call your leads asap. This seems obvious, but there is a huge ROI difference when you call your lead within the first half hour in comparison to longer. Again, you can use some technology that checks the availability of your agents. If the pre-dialer is filled up already, don’t waste your budget on new leads.
8. Create an automated callback flow for leads that do not answer the phone:
Way too often, a lead is only called once. When it doesn’t pick up the phone the first time, the lead and, therefore, the budget is wasted. Make sure you create an automated workflow where non-answering leads are put back in the predialer until they answer the phone.
9. Follow up with your new placements to increase placement rate and decrease rapid disenrollment:
Have a retention team in place to follow up multiple times within the first weeks. Make sure they understand the plan and the benefits. Some rapid disenrollments occur because of carriers’ outbound education and verification (OEV) calls. The new policyholder may decide to disenroll from their new plan during this call because they’re confused in some way. If you don’t have a retention team in place to follow up, at least create an automated email flow that reminds them of your agency and their new plan.
10. Route inbound calls from newly issued and existing policies to customer service instead of the sales team:
Your existing policyholders, as well as your new placements, often have questions and, therefore, call your agency. Make sure you have some technology in place to detect if an inbound telephone number is an existing member. If yes, route this call to your retention/customer service team. A lot of agencies do not have a way to detect if an inbound call is an existing customer. The call is then simply forwarded to the sales team, and sales tries to resell them instead of answering their question. The latter doesn’t work, leading to frustration and disenrollment. Getting this right made a big difference for one of the biggest agencies in the industry!
11. Pro-actively reach out to your existing policyholders with the largest premium increase:
Based on the Annual Notice of Change (ANOC) you can determine which of your policyholders are getting the highest increase in premium. A premium increase of more than $20 leads to a switching rate that is up to 300% higher.
12. Use third-party technology to identify your existing policyholders who are shopping around:
There is third-party technology available that helps you track your policyholders’ shopping behavior. If it detects that your policyholder is shopping around, this means that they are at risk of switching to a different plan. This is the moment you want to reach out to this individual to prevent them from switching. You can also leverage this for your newly issued policies to increase placement rates and improve rapid disenrollment.
Following the above steps can increase ROI by up to 40%. Some are quick wins and relatively easy to implement, others take a bit more effort. PX works with the leading players in medicare marketing to:
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Centralize their lead sources in one platform
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Increasing retention as well as placement rate by tracking shopping behavior
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Get full insight and control on performance per source
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Get access to 15+ million leads from 70+ CMS-approved sources during AEP
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Drastically improve lead routing
Whether you’re looking for more volume or more insights, we are happy to exchange thoughts with you and see if there’s a potential match to work together.