How to Sell More Insurance During Open Enrollment

The health insurance industry certainly never sleeps, but there’s no time quite like the Open Enrollment Period (OEP). With so much of your annual success riding on the results of this critical season, how do you plan to?improve your Open Enrollment sales?this year?

To help you plan Open Enrollment consider these marketing ideas and strategies, with tips and technologies that will take your team’s performance to new heights and generate more policyholders—and profits—than ever before.

[This article was originally published on the Convoso blog and updated October 2023]

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Get More Policyholders During Open Enrollment

Open Enrollment Marketing Ideas and Strategies

Choose the Right Time to Upgrade Technology

Having your most successful Open Enrollment season yet is all about how you prepare. And that preparation starts with a thorough, honest look at your previous year’s performance.??

To drive growth at the end of the year, your team needs to retool and make improvements ahead of time. Most importantly, earlier months of the year are the opportune time to begin making any upgrades to your technology—including the linchpin of your outreach strategy, your dialer software.

The last thing you need when Open Enrollment season rolls around is a team that lacks competence (and confidence) in a new-and-improved solution. So, start early by learning what to look for in a dialer, making a checklist based on your team’s particular needs, and trying out new options side-by-side with your existing software.

After making the upgrade to a new dialer, you can get to work optimizing your call center performance. By the time Open Enrollment rolls around, your agents will be firing on all cylinders and set to make an impact.

Make the Most of All Your Channels

To sell more health insurance during the next OEP, your Open Enrollment marketing strategy should be in full swing well before the actual season gets underway.?

In the lead-up to the big season, build a steady pipeline of SEO-friendly support content that builds awareness for Open Enrollment dates and processes, answers common questions, addresses customer pain points, and ultimately generates leads.?

Meanwhile, for those leads you have consent to contact,?automated email marketing?and?SMS drip campaigns?can be used to remind potential policyholders of upcoming enrollment dates and smooth out the sales process when the time comes. The logic behind employing an omnichannel approach to marketing and sales is simple: the more channels you offer, the more opportunities your leads will have to engage. And in the end, that will add up to more sales.

Whether it’s during OEP or not, all of your marketing channels should work in tandem with your dialer. In the current environment,?omnichannel call center software solutions?can help outbound sales and lead gen teams lower their call volume, improve their caller ID reputation, and?avoid call blocking and flagging—all of which will translate to more enrollments during the open season and year-round.

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Optimize Your Lead Forms

Whether on product pages, blogs, or elsewhere on your website, lead forms can make it simple for potential customers to request more information. Make sure lead forms are optimized so customers can opt-in with ease—and you can gather info that helps your business deliver better marketing and customer experience. Follow these best practices to boost conversions:

• Keep forms “above the fold.”?Ensure visitors can find lead forms easily by placing them at the top of a page, without having to scroll.
• Minimize the number of fields, whenever possible.?There’s a delicate balance to creating fields on your forms. The more fields you add, the more qualified leads you’ll generate. However, you will also likely lower your overall conversion rate with each field you add. When creating a form, consider which fields of user info are absolutely necessary and which should be required to opt in.
• Test to see what’s best.?Run A/B tests outside of Open Enrollment to experiment with lead form design and learn what works best. When OEP rolls back around, you can trot out your best-converting design.

Of course, for insurance teams generating leads, designing the right form isn’t just about marketing. If you’re going to be dialing leads that opt-in through these forms, then it’s also about?TCPA compliance. Our friend and expert compliance attorney Eric Troutman of TCPAWorld.com recently discussed a court ruling that underlined?the importance of disclosure form compliance. To help avoid TCPA violations and litigation, lead forms’

• Font?cannot be too small or too light, although the exact standard for these is unclear.
• Their?button?must clearly advise that by clicking it terms are being accepted.
• Hyperlinks?contained in form text are okay, as long as they are clearly marked.?

The permission to contact earned by these opt-ins form the foundation of a?consent-based approach to marketing?during Open Enrollment. However, webforms are only one way to capture permission to contact. Other avenues include apps and webportals, recorded phone calls, and text messages.

Create a Compliance Checklist

During a recent ActiveProspect dialer software, a group of experts discussed the essential components of any compliance checklist. The best practices they recommend following include:

• Identify TCPA and Medicare marketing risk within your organization. Audit your practice and partners—everything from consumer outreach procedures and vendors, to agents and third-party marketing organizations—to evaluate risks.
• Implement policies and procedures—and training—around Do Not Call rules and consent. Regulations mandate the maintenance of an internal Do Not Call list. Analyze and improve your internal DNC practice, and ensure all agents and partners are up to speed.
• Rely on vendors with compliance solutions, including DNC.com and ActiveProspect, which can be integrated with your dialer software.
• Manage your vendors. Especially under the new Center for Medicare Service guidelines, it’s essential to know who you’re working with. With their latest Medicare Communications and Marketing Guidelines, CMS is clearly increasing its compliance oversight of Medicare-related sales and marketing activities.
• Evaluate contract terms. Talk to your partners about reasonable terms that ensure you both have the same standards in place and that liability obligations are understood.
• Manage claims and serial litigators. Utilize litigator scrubbing tools—such as the one from DNC.com—and have a process in place to deal with (the often-fraudulent) claims that arise from litigators.

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Reach Your Leads Faster—and Keep Them Alive for Longer

During the Open Enrollment Period, leads come in fast. Without the right tech and tools on your side, you might just wind up losing those leads even faster. After all, we don’t need to tell you twice that health insurance is a flooded, highly competitive space. If you don’t wind up with a given policyholder—and quickly—it’s likely one of your closest competitors did.

In this environment,?speed to lead?is absolutely paramount to driving more sales during the rapid-fire Open Enrollment season. When a warm lead enters your sales pipeline, your?insurance dialer?should have the ability to automatically enter it into a custom workflow and make sure that that lead is contacted not in days, or even hours, but minutes.

Speed, while critical, is ultimately only part of the equation for enrollment season success. Your dialer also needs to be equipped to drive conversations over the long-term, too. If a lead doesn’t pick up straight away, don’t dial harder—dial smarter. With?workflow automation software, you can ensure that leads are rested for longer periods and tried at different times to increase your chances of success. Costly leads won’t go to waste and, best of all, your dialer will do all of the dirty work for you.

Say the Right Things

With the right tech, your dialer will get more leads on the phone—but that doesn’t mean they’re going to convert automatically. To turn leads into policyholders, your agents need to know what to say—they need to know how to sell health insurance to individuals, not phone numbers in a list.?

That’s where?dynamic scripting software?comes in. Working hand in hand with your dialer, dynamic scripting auto-populates your best, most well-tailored health insurance sales scripts with personalized info for each lead that’s on the phone. Plus, agents can navigate the?call flow script?and find the best replies to customer responses in real time.?

Your teams will be able to better keep up with complex state-by-state compliance rules and close more sales. Meanwhile, managers can collect feedback and easily update script contents with easy drag-and-drop software to drive consistent improvement.

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Keep an Eye on the Right KPIs

At Convoso, we’re data-driven people. Why? Because if you can’t measure something, you can’t make it better. The same goes for selling health insurance during the Open Enrollment Period: without access to?real-time reporting and data analytics, how are managers supposed to make the decisions that will drive more insurance sales?

Robust reporting is crucial to maintaining (and improving) profitability, especially during busy—and even downright hectic—periods of business like Open Enrollment. Decision-makers need?customizable dashboards?that deliver complete transparency around key performance metrics like true?cost-per-acquisition, contact rate, agent talk time, and more. In addition, they need granularity that gives them access to these metrics at the individual list level, so they can see which sources are delivering and which need to be turned off.

Paired with a powerful?predictive dialer?and the right Open Enrollment marketing strategies, advanced reporting solutions will help health insurance sales teams play more and more to their strengths, fine-tuning their approach to enroll more and more policyholders during the next OEP.

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The Importance of Technology During Health Insurance Enrollment Season

During a recent?panel at the Medicarians 2022 conference, a group of experts discussed the reluctance of many in the health?insurance sales?space to adopt game-changing technologies. What they all agreed on, though, is that those that don’t adopt the right technologies will soon be left behind.

Brendan M. ?of?Enrollment123?said that the industry was approaching a “tipping point,” where automation technologies are becoming a must-have.? John Fallot , President of?Senior Enrollment Solutions, echoed this sentiment and underscored the urgency of the situation for those in health insurance sales:

“It’s the time to do any due diligence that you can to see whether [a technology] is going to save you time or make you more efficient during the upcoming enrollment period.”

Upgrading your dialer to a leading software like Convoso won’t just save you time and make you more efficient—it will?drive more conversations, more conversions, and more profits.?

Learn more about how Convoso can help you generate more policyholders this year and sign up for a?free demo?today.