Medicare Marketing Ideas: Why Personalization Is Key to Success

Every day, 10,000 people in the U.S. turn 65 and become eligible for Medicare. With the number of older adults set to more than double over the next several decades, Medicare insurance agents are practically guaranteed to see their market base balloon.

However, a big market base doesn’t mean much if you can’t reach your target customers and convert them into leads.

Personalization is one of the secrets to Medicare insurance marketing success. Personalizing your insurance marketing strategies can help you cut costs, generate higher returns on your marketing spend, and better serve your clients.

Hungry for personalized Medicare marketing ideas? In this guide, we break down why personalization is pivotal to success, and some examples of how to implement it to sell more Medicare insurance. 

Personalization Is a Powerful Way to Boost Conversions

Increasing your conversion rate is one of the best ways to leverage low-hanging fruit in your sales funnel. How many leads are you losing at the last minute?

Imagine if you could tip the scales so that every lead who backed out at the final hour stayed in your pipeline.

This could equate to thousands of dollars in commissions and residuals.

Personalization has the power to significantly optimize your conversion rate. The more tailored and targeted your marketing is to the recipient, the more resonance it will have. 

Why? Because it actually means something to them.

Instead of bland, catch-all marketing messages that make prospects’ eyes glaze over, personalization allows you to speak directly to the person who’s viewing your ad or reading your email.

You can directly address their unique pain points, questions, and needs. This is incredibly powerful. 

Here’s an example of just how potent personalization can be. Stats show that simply incorporating a recipient’s name into an email subject line can up open rates by more than 20% compared to generic subject lines.

Personalized Marketing Builds Buyer Confidence and Connection

Boosting conversion rates is the holy grail for most marketers. But it shouldn’t be the only thing you focus on in your insurance marketing campaigns.

Trust is a hot commodity in insurance sales. It’s especially important in health insurance. The more pre-established trust you can instill in leads, the greater chance of them converting.

Here’s how personalized Medicare insurance marketing can trigger trust.

Personalized messaging gives you the opportunity to show leads you identify with their needs and struggles. 

If you sense that a company or salesperson truly understands what you need, this does a couple of things. First, it makes you feel like you’re dealing with a team of real people, not a faceless brand that just wants to profit from you.

It also instills confidence. If this agent really “gets” you, surely they’ll be able to offer the ideal solution.

Personalized marketing is a powerful way to emotionally connect with leads. Think of the last time you spoke to someone who was going through similar challenges to you. You probably registered a feeling of relief and instant connection to that person.

You might have thought, “Here’s someone who understands my situation. I’m not alone!” You can trigger the same feelings in leads by implementing personalized online insurance marketing strategies.

Most Medicare shoppers feel overwhelmed by the options available. This gives you, as the insurance agent, the perfect opportunity to step in as a guiding savior. But, you have to communicate this in your marketing messaging.

Personalization Can Help Put an End to Friction

How many hoops do your leads have to jump through before they convert? Friction is a conversion killer, and it can tank your marketing ROI.

If you lose a lead because they have to repeatedly fill out online forms, you’ve just wasted all the marketing spend that went into attracting them.

Personalization can help you eliminate pesky friction points in your processes. For instance, if your site can save users’ information from form fields, you can use this to repopulate further forms.

By tracking user behavior, you can also offer:

• Personalized product recommendations
• Tailored content offerings
• Relevant promotions
• Targeted emails

Instead of making leads work to find the info they need, you can create a seamless journey. 

Personalization Is Pure Gold for Email Marketing

Email marketing is a core strategy for Medicare agents, as 84% of seniors use email. Although lower than millennial usage, this is still exceptionally high.

Seniors also tend to take emails seriously. But you still need to find ways to make your emails claim attention.

In today’s age of online marketing, people get bombarded by emails. Personalization is the secret to making your emails stand out in a cluttered inbox.

If you’re blasting out generic emails, you’re likely to a) get ignored, and b) waste money. Recipients might even flag your emails as spam, which is never a good thing. 

You’re far more likely to spark action if you tailor the topic, timing, and content of your email campaigns to recipients. By segmenting your email list, you can increase engagement, send a lower volume of emails, save money on your email marketing campaigns, and enjoy more fruitful results. 

It’s Also Essential for Effective Lead Nurturing

Lead nurturing is all about tailoring the experience to match the buyer’s journey. Personalization helps you take basic Medicare lead nurturing a step further.

Not only can you offer leads appropriate content and offers at each stage of the buyer journey, but you can also uniquely match offerings to their profile and behavior.

If a lead interacts with certain pages on your site or opens specific emails and not others, this can give you insight into their needs. Here are some examples of lead behavior you can track:

• Ad clicks
• Email opens
• Website visits
• Time spent on specific pages
• Social media engagement
• Registrations
• Content downloads

If you track this data and score your leads, you can get a good idea of where they are in your sales funnel and what they need. Once you know this, you’ll be positioned to serve them perfectly personalized content and offerings.

For instance, you might be able to identify a segment of leads that are primarily looking for Medicare Supplement insurance with a vast network of providers. You can send these leads offers for Medicare Supplement plans that have this as a perk.

And you can drill down even further. Maybe, there’s a segment of leads that seem particularly interested in Advantage plans with a large dental network specifically. If you can provide them with content and offerings that micro-target this need, you’ll have a much higher chance of success than if you blasted them with emails promoting plans with restricted dental networks. 

Personalized Insurance Marketing Strategies Can Slash Acquisition Costs

Insurance has some of the highest customer acquisition costs of any industry. In 2019, independent agents paid an average of $900 to acquire a customer.

Personalized digital marketing for insurance can help curb these costs significantly. In other industries, McKinsey reports that personalization practices can cut acquisition costs by 50%. They can also increase marketing returns by a factor of five to ten.

Personalized insurance marketing strategies can help you reduce customer acquisition costs in two ways:

• Optimized marketing spend
• Increased results

Through targeted online ads you can choose to only advertise to specific customers who are most likely to convert. You don’t have to waste money showing ads to irrelevant prospects.

With tailored messaging, you can resonate with customers, speak directly to their needs, and address their pain points. This can drive up engagement and spark higher conversion rates.

Personalized Medicare insurance marketing can also help trigger referrals. If done right, personalization will result in happier clients. The happier your clients are, the more likely they’ll be to refer their friends and family.

Looking for a way to control acquisition costs while you wait for your personalized insurance marketing strategies to bear fruit? Buying leads allows you to pay a set, predictable cost per lead. You don’t have to devote time to generating them and calculating the ROI on purchased leads is very simple. 

Consumers Expect Personalization

Personalized experiences aren’t just a clever marketing strategy. They’re also expected by a lot of customers. As consumers get used to personalized content and suggestions, they’re more likely to feel spammed by marketing that’s untargeted and generic.

According to reports, 71% of consumers expect companies to deliver personalized interactions. If you don’t, this can trigger frustration in 76% of consumers. 

Personalized Medicare Marketing Ideas and Tips

How can you start benefiting from the power of personalization as a Medicare insurance agent? How can you implement personalized insurance marketing techniques? 

Here are a few personalized Medicare marketing ideas to get you started.

Identify Your Target Customer

If you haven’t done so already, now is the time to zero in on your target customer. Who are the people you’re trying to reach? For Medicare insurance, you’ll be targeting consumers who’re turning 65 or older, as well as younger individuals who have certain health conditions or disabilities that make them eligible.

Geographic location and language are also important targeting factors, as well as:

• Income level
• Health status
• Family health histories
• Lifestyle

You can refine things further by identifying target customers for specific Medicare plans. For example, ideal prospects for Medigap and Medicare Advantage plans may fall into higher income brackets. For Medicare Part D plans, you might want to target prospects looking to solve health issues that require medication. 

Segment Your Client Base

Besides identifying your target market, you should also segment your existing client base. This will allow you to serve them tailored content and offerings.

Begin by gathering as much relevant data as you can, including:

• Age
• Location
• Health condition
• Current plan type
• Policy status (new customers vs. renewals)
• Premium range

The next step is to analyze the data and identify any recurring trends or patterns, such as popular plans, prevalent health issues, most common premium ranges, etc.

Client segmentation can also help you identify effective marketing channels. If you’re able to track where clients are coming from and how they’re finding your services, you can hone in on the most popular sources. For instance, if a lot of clients are finding you via your blog, you might want to devote more resources to content marketing.

If a large portion is coming to you from Facebook, you can increase your Facebook ad spend.

Customize Your Content

Once you know who you’re targeting, you can start to customize your content. Besides tailoring it to your target audience, you should also consider your sales funnel. What type of content do leads need as they progress through the buyer journey?

In the early stages, they’ll require content on the basics of Medicare, such as blog posts on the different parts. Social media posts with bite-sized facts and tips are also ideal.

During the consideration stage, leads are usually looking for comparisons and more in-depth content, such as explainer videos. During the decision stage, they’re most likely to be interested in things like personalized plan recommendations, testimonials, and reviews.

Personalize Your Email Campaigns

Personalizing your emails can help you reduce email marketing costs while increasing your open and click-through rates.

Here are a couple of email marketing personalization tips:

• Use the recipient’s name in the subject line
• Greet the recipient by their first name in the email
• Send personalized offers based on market segmentation data
• Send special offers based on past behavior (i.e. if a lead has shown interest in dental plans on your site, offer a limited-time promotion on a dental plan)
• Use dynamic CTAs that are relevant to leads’ prior actions
• Pre-populate form fields on landing pages with the recipient’s information

Keep in mind that promotions must be beneficiary-centric, as per the CMS marketing guidelines.

Master the Art of Targeted Ads

Targeted ads are a pivotal part of the personalized marketing pie. With search ads, you can target things like:

• Keywords
• Geographic location
• Audience type
• Demographic factors (including age, gender, and household income)

Social media ads also allow you to target interests, behaviors, and life events.

With retargeted ads, you can reach leads who have already shown interest and draw them back into your sales funnel.

Correctly targeted ads result in better quality leads and a higher ROI on your ad spend. But fully mastering the art of targeted online ads can take time.

If you don’t currently have the spare time (and budget) to devote to this learning process, you can also generate targeted leads via our LeadStream Lead Portal program. 

This is a self-service platform designed for insurance agents like you to fill their pipeline with high-purchase intent, exclusive leads in real time. 

Are You in Need of Leads?

Personalized insurance marketing strategies can increase conversion rates, reduce acquisition costs, and help you better nurture leads and serve your clients.

But implementing the right personalized insurance marketing techniques isn’t something you can do overnight.

If you need leads to work while you wait for your personalized Medicare marketing ideas to bear fruit, TR King can help.

With our Leadstream Lead Portal program, you can start and stop your lead flow with a couple of clicks. All of our leads are reviewed for full TCP and CMS compliance. They are all thoroughly pre-filtered, and you can choose between live transfers, real-time, and aged lead options. 

Want to try out Leadstream Lead Portal for yourself? Create an account to get started.