Health Insurance businesses have seen rapid development in recent years. Studies have shown that 91.4% of people had either full or partial health insurance in 2020 in the US alone, and the global health insurance market, currently valued at $1.98 trillion in 2020, is projected to reach $4.15 trillion by 2028.
The incredible rate at which the health insurance sector is growing has created a need for companies to improve their marketing strategies to expand their reach and meet the growing demands of customers while maintaining service quality. Marketing Automation is the only way for any health insurance company to meet those needs.
As already mentioned, the health insurance sector is showing no signs of slowing down. Eventually, marketing automation will become essential for any health insurance business that wants to remain competitive in the ever-expanding market.
This article will elaborate on how any health insurance business can leverage marketing automation to improve many aspects of the business, including;
- Work processes optimization.
- Customer acquisition and retention.
- Client data integration and enrichment.
- Cross-sell automation.
What Is Marketing Automation?
Marketing automation involves using automation software and technologies to make multi-channel marketing more effective and automate many repetitive tasks throughout a marketing campaign.
The objectives of marketing automation processes are to define, segment, schedule, and track the progress of marketing campaigns.
What Does Marketing Automation Offer Your Business?
The most significant advantage marketing automation offers is that all the routine marketing tasks are done completely by programmed software without human involvement, making it far more efficient and effective. The software automates workflows like SMS marketing, Lead follow-ups, behavioral targeting, lead prioritization, personalized advertising, and many more.
But Marketing Automation is not just beneficial for the sake of efficiency on the part of your health insurance company; it is also great for customer experience as it provides a more personalized experience for each of your customers.
Companies that use Marketing Automation in their campaigns do far better than those that don’t in areas like Lead Generation, Lead Nurturing, Lead Scoring and Retention, Segmentation, Relationship marketing, Cross-sell and upsell, among others.
How Can Your Company Leverage Marketing Automation For Better Performance?
1. Understand Your Customers Better.
For insurers, a comprehensive understanding of their customers is essential. This understanding will help improve lead generation, customer retention, and overall customer satisfaction.
A health insurance firm must understand its customers to tailor its marketing campaign to meet their needs if it doesn’t want to lose its clients in an environment where market competition is constantly expanding and customer demands are rising quickly.
The major hindrance to customer understanding has data silos with a little amount of useful information on customers for insurers to use in personalizing their experience.
And this is where automation comes in.
Marketing Automation software will start by addressing data issues connecting separate data systems and customer databases, such as CRMs, ERPs, and ESPs, making it possible for insurers to group all their data and develop a more comprehensive database of their customers with relevant and useful information like demographic, behavioural, and purchase data and even reports on ROI generated.
Such a comprehensive database will improve customer understanding, enabling a more personalized, relevant marketing campaign.
2. Boost Customer Acquisition.
Competition from other insurers, FinTech companies and InsurTech startups has made customer acquisition even more difficult than it ever was.
Health Insurers who want to remain competitive in the market might have to abandon their old lead generation and acquisition strategies and develop newer tactics to build a more extensive customer base. As if that’s not hard enough, we all know the cost challenges that insurers have faced recently. Challenges that have made their acquisition budget decrease.
This, however, is further incentive to introduce marketing automation into your business. It is a no less resource-intensive option after the initial upfront time and costs required are settled.
This leaves your business with enough resources to fund your customer acquisition strategy. With automation, you can generate and send out streams of automated and personalized email and website communications to improve acquisition.
There are numerous automation options and features that help increase acquisition rates. For example, targeted offers and discounts based on gathered behavioural data are sure to attract new leads or fluid cross-channel experiences that will ensure omnichannel communication via each customer’s preferred channels.
3. Improve Renewal Rates.
Renewal time is crucial to insurers since it’s a decision-making period for customers. Research has shown that out of the 84% of consumers who are usually active around renewal times, only 31% change to other companies with better deals.
To retain your customers, you need to engage more with them and give them a reason to stay, and marketing automation can help you with that. There are a whole lot of marketing automation tactics that can help you retain most of your customers when it’s renewal time.
Firstly, you would want to build a healthy and solid relationship with your customer even before its renewal. This is easily achieved with automation, as you can initiate communication campaigns early to establish a positive brand sentiment in your customer’s minds.
After establishing positive brand sentiment, you can roll out a clear and straightforward renewal campaign.
The renewal campaign can also be automated. For example, an automated renewal email announcing that it’s renewal time or maybe a discount to encourage quick renewal. Or if you offer auto-renewal, a confirmation email of their health insurance renewal.
4. Improving Customer And Prospect Engagement.
Health insurance brands with higher engagement rates have higher retention rates. It’s a simple, logical truth. The size of the company isn’t even an important factor. Smaller brands with higher customer engagement will likely do better than their larger counterparts with less customer engagement.
We have already established that a personalised, targeted campaign is necessary for better customer engagement and, in the long run, customer retention. Automation can help with all of these.
Health Insurers can make a marketing plan that is highly customer targeted with the data they have gathered from continuous interaction with their customers. This approach is efficient for stable customer retention and building positive brand sentiment.
Conclusion
Health insurance is growing rapidly, and it’s difficult for insurers to keep up with the growth and increasing customer demands while maintaining service quality and simultaneously managing competition. Automating marketing will invariably help any health insurance business thrive and remain competitive in the fast-paced world health insurance has become.
To grow your business, choose a marketing automation solution that will help you in all the ways we have discussed. Looking to learn more about how marketing automation can help your insurance business, then schedule your meeting now with our experts or reach us back at help@flowup.com and get ready to rock your health insurance business in 2023.