For health and Medicare insurance advertisers, the beginning of the year is a pivotal time. After busy Open and Annual Enrollment Periods, the new year presents a great opportunity to take a breather, review last year’s performance, and begin making a plan to improve on your customer acquisition results next time around.
Indeed, it’s never too early to learn from your past experience and start optimizing for the future. Here are seven questions health and Medicare advertisers can ask themselves as they begin preparing for the year ahead.
1. Did we miss, meet, or exceed our customer acquisition goals? Why?
Any good strategy for the future starts with an honest assessment of the past. That’s why we always recommend beginning the year with a review of how your actual performance stacked up against your customer acquisition goals. From there, you can start deciding what to do to close the gap, or adjust your goals if they were too ambitious or not ambitious enough.
2. What are the challenges that are preventing us from achieving stronger results moving forward?
Next, you’ll want to take a look at the roadblocks that tripped you up this past year, as well as the ones that might be coming down the pike next year. What can you do to avoid them? Are there new technology tools you can implement? Different kinds of customers you should be targeting? These are the questions you should be asking when assessing last year’s challenges and anticipating this year’s.
3. Did anything surprise us about our customer acquisition efforts last year?
Sometimes, things happen that we can’t predict. Thinking critically about surprise developments can help us better understand why things went right or wrong, and what we can do to stay ahead of the curve next time.
4. Were there any channels that under- or over-performed for us this year?
Measuring your 2022 performance by channel can help you invest more intelligently in 2023. If a publisher or referring channel is generating a strong return on investment, it makes sense to devote a larger budget to it this year. If a channel is underperforming, it might be time to cut back.
5. Are there any legal or compliance changes that impacted our business this year? How will the regulatory environment shift next year?
The regulatory environment for health and Medicare policy sales is always changing, and if you’re not on top of things, you could be caught behind. Make sure to schedule a meeting with your company’s legal department to get a sense of what to expect in the coming year—then adjust your customer acquisition plans accordingly.
6. How much feedback did we give our partners? How did they respond to that feedback?
Having a productive relationship with your media-buying partners is a key aspect to successful customer acquisition. And all business relationships work best when both parties commit to regular, honest feedback. To this end, you’ll want to think about the feedback you gave your partners this past year.
Did you provide enough input to help them support you in the ways you needed to be supported? When you gave them feedback, did they follow through how you needed them to? These questions will help you communicate more effectively, forge stronger relationships, and enjoy better performance in the months to come.
7. What customer acquisition goals are you hoping to achieve in 2023? What additional resources do we need to achieve our goals in 2023?
Once you’ve scrutinized your performance over the past year, you can set your customer acquisition goals for this one. Think critically about what you need to take your performance to the next level. Are you using the right metrics—like customer lifetime value—to measure your results? If so, are you using the best practices for implementing your lifetime value model? Are you buying carrier website traffic for best results? These questions will help you get where you need to go in 2023.
Have more questions as you plan out the new year? We’d love to hear from you.
We hope this checklist will help you get off on the right foot in 2023. If you have any additional questions about how to get the most out of your digital media buying this year, our team of health and Medicare customer acquisition experts would be more than happy to provide assistance. Just set up a meeting with your account manager. Or, if you’re not already a MediaAlpha client, you can schedule time to speak with us on our website.