The Future Of Modern Medicare Marketing Chapter 8- We’ve utilized the incredible power of data intelligence tools to model data, increasing our ability to target those with the greatest propensity to enroll in our plans. Those who are great practitioners of direct mail marketing, and if you’re in Medicare marketing, the assumption is that you are very familiar with all that is direct mail marketing since it is the workhorse of our industry; will immediately see the benefit of having all of this data intelligence to improve the performance of our mail. However, this is the digital age. Our Medicare-eligible audience has shifted from “The Greatest Generation” to “Leading Edge Baby Boomers” to the upcoming “Trailing Edge Baby Boomers” and the latter 2 of these generational groups are digitally proficient and are internet users. The lead generation and lead nurturing practices of Medicare marketers in the future are going to be very different than those of today. We’re back to the future of Medicare Marketing now, discussing the lead management process.

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The Future of
Modern Medicare
Marketing
Chapter 8- Technology-
Enabled Medicare Marketing
(Marketing Technology)

2. Technology-Enabled Medicare Marketing
(Marketing Technology)
Part 8 of "The Future Of Modern Medicare Marketing
Series
Let’s get back to where we were prior to the large definitions of data related marketing technology.
Ah yes, we were using our new Data Visualization software product to develop beautiful, easy-to-comprehend data
visualizations of our newest marketing reports, which are literally “off the charts” fantastic.
A few months ago, when the Change Agent was selling all of this modern marketing up into the C-Suite, we assessed
various forms of marketing technology, and we decided to follow the strategy that employs an IMM (Integrated
Marketing Management) tool. “IMM is the process of merging and streamlining internal and external marketing
functions, including data, processes, people, channels and technologies” according to Wiley Publishing in Definitions
for the Real World of Big Data Marketing. Having this tool as the centerpiece of our marketing operations “Center
of Excellence,” has enabled us to create a “control center” of marketing operations.
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3. IMM (Integrated Marketing Management)
According to Gartner: “Integrated marketing management (IMM) represents the marketing strategy, process automation and
technologies required to integrate people, processes, campaigns, channels, resources and technologies across the marketing
ecosystem.
IMM supports closed-loop marketing by integrating operational, executional and analytical marketing processes. The closed-
loop process starts at the concept/idea and goes through to planning to resource allocation to creation/project management
to piloting to full-scale execution to, ultimately, evaluation and analysis that feeds back into and helps optimize ideas and
planning.”
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Chapter 2: The Future of Modern Medicare Marketing © 2017 KERN Health, An Omnicom AgencyChapter 8: The Future of Modern Medicare Marketing © 2018 KERN Health, An Omnicom Agency
This is the digital age. Our Medicare-eligible audience has shifted from “The
Greatest Generation” to “Leading Edge Baby Boomers” to the upcoming
“Trailing Edge Baby Boomers” and the latter 2 of these generational groups are
digitally proficient and are internet users.
IMM allows for improvement in organizations across 9 specific areas, which are: Planning, Performance management,
Financial management, People, Channels/campaigns, Processes, Content, Data and Analysis and Procurement. Unlike other
types of technology, vendors often consider IMM a solution set, rather than a specific product solution, therefore,
consideration of purchase of a set of solutions from a vendor that are built to integrate with each other to form the
Integrated Marketing Management solution.
IMM allows for MCCM (Multi-Channel Campaign Management,) which again, is a set of solutions rather than a single
software solution.
IMM solutions include IBM, Adobe Campaign as part of the Adobe Marketing Cloud solution, SAP solution sets, Oracle
Solution Sets, as well as other marketing automation solutions that are used in tandem with data warehouse solutions such
as Eloqua or Marketo, can also be considered IMM’s.
Now that we’ve set up the control center, we’re ready to add-on pieces to our Modern Medicare Marketing Technology
Stack.
Let’s recap our progress thus far. We’ve utilized the incredible power of data intelligence tools to model data, increasing our
ability to target those with the greatest propensity to enroll in our plans.
Those who are great practitioners of direct mail marketing, and if you’re in Medicare marketing, the assumption is that you
are very familiar with all that is direct mail marketing since it is the workhorse of our industry; will immediately see the
benefit of having all of this data intelligence to improve the performance of our mail.
However, this is the digital age. Our Medicare-eligible audience has shifted from “The Greatest Generation” to “Leading Edge
Baby Boomers” to the upcoming “Trailing Edge Baby Boomers” and the latter 2 of these generational groups are digitally
proficient and are internet users.
The lead generation and lead nurturing practices of Medicare marketers in the future are going to be very different than
those of today.
We’re back to the future of Medicare Marketing now, discussing the lead management process.
All of our tactics will have a call to action that enables us to capture email addresses. Why? Because we are dealing with
digital users now, and the preferred method of contact is email. Email is less intrusive than SMS and voicemail, and many
recent studies indicate that as of today, it is the preferred method of contact as reported by consumers.
In order to automate our email communications with our prospective and current members, we are using Marketing
Automation technology.

4. Marketing Automation
Marketing Automation technology enables organizations to automate their marketing communications while tracking user
behavior on websites, through emails, or other content assets that are “tagged” with the specific marketing automation
vendor’s codes. Marketing automation systems range from basic to complex. Those that are at the basic level providing little
more than automatic email sending capabilities and the most complex offering insights into user behavior based on explicit
and implicit actions with abilities to track assets that are not native to the company’s IP. Some of the more popular marketing
automation vendors include Marketo, Pardot, Eloqua, Act-On and many others.
And while the pure definition of marketing automation is verbose, the real beauty of the system is easier to understand when
some context is provided.
Let’s talk about leads. Chances are that anyone that responds to Medicare marketing communications today is defined as a
lead. This won’t be true in the future. Medicare marketers will need to become familiar with a whole new lexicon in lead
land. Those who have never responded to any marketing communication will be defined as “suspects” and those who have
responded will be referred to as “prospects” and when prospects have shown a desire through a mechanism called “digital
body language” then, and only then will they be deemed a “lead.”
Organizations will set a criteria for prospects to achieve lead status and that criteria is defined as a lead score. How do
prospects achieve a lead score? By doing a behavior. Let’s say a suspect receives your Medicare Advantage direct mail piece
and responds via your landing page where you capture the suspect’s email address. The marketing automation system
immediately registers that email address and by the way of tracking code on each of your digital assets, the suspect can be
tracked as they visit your website, visit specific pages or marketing assets, and the recency and frequency of website visits can
also be tracked.
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Chapter 2: The Future of Modern Medicare Marketing © 2017 KERN Health, An Omnicom AgencyChapter 8: The Future of Modern Medicare Marketing © 2018 KERN Health, An Omnicom Agency

5. What if the suspect doesn’t register on your marketing automation enabled website or landing page? Depending on which
marketing automation vendor that you have selected, certain marketing automation systems have in place technology that
can track anonymous users by their IP or machine address, and as soon as those users register for something, the system is
able to back-identify the suspect and match the IP or machine identification to the newly entered email address, thus ensuring
that all digital activity is captured whether the suspect is registered or not.
If that suspect visits your web page more than once, then that can increase their lead score. If that suspect reads or
downloads a marketing asset; that can also increase their lead score. If the suspect comes back to your web page more than
once; that can also increase the lead score. The score applied to each behavior is determined by your organization. When a
suspect achieves a cumulative score that you have set as the criteria to be deemed a “lead” then, and only then, does the lead
get passed to sales.
Marketing Automation makes this all possible. In addition, marketing automation does, in fact as its name suggests; automate
email marketing. Based on the behavior of a suspect or prospect or lead, specific email communications can be served to
them through automated method.
Let’s say that that a suspect has been visiting your site, and today, they decide to register on one of your forms for a marketing
content asset. Now that you have registered their email address and they have moved from being a suspect to a prospect, you
have the capability to communicating with them via email. Your marketing automation system can be programmed to send
them one or a series of email communications. The first, usually being, a thank you, or acknowledgement of the asset
download.
If the prospect follows the call to action of the email by clicking on a link, another email message will be in the que to be sent
to them. If they don’t click the link on the call to action, a different email message will be sent to them. We call this a
responder and non-responder track and the flow looks something like this.
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Chapter 2: The Future of Modern Medicare Marketing © 2017 KERN Health, An Omnicom AgencyChapter 8: The Future of Modern Medicare Marketing © 2018 KERN Health, An Omnicom Agency
Once a prospect is in the system, the marketing automation technology will continue to send communications in an intelligent
and complex way as designed. The result is that when the prospect has done the behaviors deemed necessary to meet the
criteria that qualifies it as a “lead” the lead is then passed on to sales to contact.

6. Using marketing automation and a lead scoring system enables Medicare insurance organizations to only send qualified leads
to sales, reducing unnecessary sales contacts. Imagine the increased conversion rate that your sales and broker teams would
have using this system, and now that we’re in the future- you don’t need to imagine- this system has increased conversion by
double digits!
Of course, there are regular email communications that don’t require marketing automation systems, and for those, marketing
organizations utilize an ESP (Email Service Provider.) And of course, sending emails is a basic skill, but optimizing the emails
based on better subject lines, content, art direction, color, photographs, and format will require you to bolt on an Email
Optimization program onto your technology stack.
Let’s define those 2 pieces of technology here.
Email Service Providers (ESP)
Depending on an organization’s needs and volume of email deployment, there are several email service providers (ESP) that
integrate into the marketing technology stack. ESP’s provide robust deliverability across major ISP’s, and the back end tracking
capability that marketers must have in order to understand open rates, CTR (Click-thru rates) length of email open
engagement, spam testing and avoidance of spam filter trapping, and the ability to dynamically assemble emails from
templates and data for segmentation or personalization. Major ESP’s include Responsys, Silverpop, Constant Contact, Epsilon,
Yesmail, Experian.
Email Optimization
Email Optimization software, which is usually a SaaS enablement, allows marketers to measure the effectiveness of their email
campaigns to optimize and customize email communications including trigger based deployment of email. This technology
also allows for testing of email messaging, design and format. Technology solutions for email optimization include Rapleaf,
Adstack and ReturnPath, Test & Target from Adobe’s Marketing Cloud (formally Omniture.)
Communicating to your Medicare-eligible audience through direct mail, and email are important and integral parts of your
marketing. The call to action in direct mail usually is a phone call, or the listing of a URL for the suspect to visit a landing page
or website. The call to action in an email is almost always to visit a landing page or URL. In the next chapter we will discuss
how technology can aid in creating, running and optimizing landing pages and websites.
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Chapter 2: The Future of Modern Medicare Marketing © 2017 KERN Health, An Omnicom AgencyChapter 8: The Future of Modern Medicare Marketing © 2018 KERN Health, An Omnicom Agency