Making Technology Work for You
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An exclusive interview with Nate Purpura, |
Nate Purpura, Director of Communications for eHealth discusses how technology has played a prominent role in eHealth's success.
As an individual insurance market leader, what strategies has eHealth pursued that have proven to be successful?
We always focus on the consumer and what it is they need. We're a very mission-driven company, and our mission has always been to help Americans find quality, affordable health insurance coverage that fits their life, lifestyle and budget. Staying focused on that has helped us maintain our position in the marketplace as the nation's first and largest private online marketplace for health insurance.
From a technology point of view, what suggestions would you have for a broker or agency looking to ramp up their online marketing presence?
When it comes to Internet marketing, everything starts with Google. Most consumers start their purchase journey on the Internet at Google. So, you need to build a plan to be visible on Google when people go online to search for health insurance or related products that you sell. You will face a lot of competition when it comes to paying for traffic on Google, but if you're smart and focus on your local market, you can develop great localized content on a web site or blog that will help you get visits through "natural" search results; the free, unpaid search results that most people use Google for. You should also look at social networks like LinkedIn, and Facebook. These two networks are free to use and provide a great way to connect with your existing customers. If you can get existing customers to subscribe to your pages and if you can share interesting or helpful content with them, and they in turn share to their networks, you can build a network of followers on those channels at no cost.
Given the changing landscape of the health insurance industry, how has the Affordable Care Act affected your day-to-day operations from a marketing perspective?
The Affordable Care Act has created a ton of change in the individual insurance market but there are probably three changes that have had the biggest impact on day-to-day operations. First, the "major medical" business has become much more seasonal. Instead of being a product that people can buy year-round, most individual major medical plans are now sold during the annual open enrollment period. Second, the products have become much more expensive, which has driven most consumers to apply for subsidies to help them cover the cost of the insurance. The subsidy application process is complicated, so our licensed agents and our web site have had to adapt fairly significantly to accommodate this new process. Last year we had refined the subsidy application process that the customer has to deal with down to a very short application that they can complete in as little as five minutes. Finally, the Affordable Care Act has driven a sharp increase in applications for short-term health insurance. Outside of the enrollment period, about 70% of our customers show up wanting a major medical plan, but they don't qualify to enroll until the fall, so they end up buying a short-term health insurance plan to cover them during the gap.
With over 4,000,000 individuals insured, eHealth has some powerful retention strategies in place. If you could give one piece of advice to the brokerage community on retention what would it be?
I'd venture that most of your brokers already know and do this, but staying in business and retaining customers is all about providing value to customers. We help customers with claims, we help them with billing issues, we even help them when a doctor's office rejects their coverage because they think it's "an Obamacare plan." Once you're an eHealth customer, your problems are our problems and we do everything within our power to help you with your health insurance-related problems.
eHealth's website optimization is second to none. Through the process your website and web forms have remained relatively simple. What important principles have you implemented to simplify your approach for the consumers that have produced the largest gains?
It's simple: never settle for "good enough." The reality is that the Internet changes daily and customer shopping habits online change right along with it. Any web site, no matter how successful, will not succeed for long if it never changes. Two years ago, nobody would have tried to sign up for health insurance using a smartphone. Last fall eHealth.com launched a mobile-optimized online application because demand was so high on mobile devices. You have to respond quickly and smartly to changes in behavior. Think of how often Facebook changes its user-interface, or Amazon.com — they're constantly innovating to make their experience faster and easier for the customer. The trick is not to change too much, too fast. Rigorous "multi-variant" testing allows eHealth to test small tweaks and changes to see what improves a customer's interaction with our web site. We have a whole team dedicated to that test and review process to determine what changes most improve performance.