The Mission
Millions of Americans shop for health insurance every year, and they have thousands of different plans to choose from. It’s an incredibly complex process that is fraught with risks. Choosing the wrong policy is incredibly common, in fact, as few as 1 in 10 Medicare beneficiaries are enrolled in the optimal plan based on their prescription drug needs.
The mission at eHealth is to change this and make it as easy as possible for people to choose the right health insurance policy. And they do this by putting their customers at the center of everything that they do. “We’re evolving our experience from the website to the phone and the only way to do this is to put customers first,” said Will Guimont, VP Analytics and Reporting at eHealth. “It’s easy to say, but it’s hard to do.”
In order to accomplish this, eHealth needs to be there for its customers, no matter how they choose to connect with the company. Most insurance customers, even seniors, tend to do their shopping and research online and many of them purchase a policy over the phone. In fact, seniors purchasing Medicare policies make up 90% of eHealth’s business, and nearly 80% of these policies are ultimately purchased on the phone. This means that it is incredibly important to create a blended online-offline journey that provides both an excellent web experience and the right kind of human touch at the right times.
We’re evolving our experience from the website to the phone and the only way to do this is to put customers first.
Will Guimont, VP Analytics and Reporting at eHealth
The Challenge
The company advertises through multiple channels including direct mail, direct response TV, search, display, and affiliate advertising. It drives online traffic to more than five websites and phone calls to four owned and up to seven outsourced call centers. “For the most part, our customers have some sort of blended experience,” said Guimont. In order to provide the best possible customer experience and optimize marketing efficiency, eHealth had a lot of dots to connect in a customer journey that frequently twists and turns from online to offline and back again.
Before implementing Invoca, eHealth could, at best, get session-level attribution for calls originating from paid search or their website. “We operated a messy and administratively burdensome system with thousands of static phone numbers connected to campaign IDs.”
When our click-to-call ads converted, we had limited visibility into conversions at a meaningful level, making it extremely difficult to scale. When we implemented Invoca for these campaigns, we were able to drive down CPAs by upwards of 60%.
The Resolution
eHealth implemented Invoca and integrated it with Adobe Analytics to connect the dots between marketing and demand generation efforts and website and phone experiences. The result is a more complete, effective view into customers’ experiences for use throughout the organization across marketing, product, and sales.
Reduced Cost Per Acquisition and Increased Conversion Rates
“One of the great things about Invoca is that it acts as a hub for us,” said Guimont. “A lot of data goes into Invoca and we’re able to connect it to Adobe Analytics, Google, Bing, Facebook, SA360 and more.” eHealth has used these integrations with Invoca to optimize their paid media against events that are happening on the phone, resulting in a 20% decrease in CPA and a 20% increase in conversion rates — just by feeding Invoca data to Google’s Smart Bidding algorithm. They were also able to realize up to 60% reductions in cost of acquisition for click-to-call campaigns.
“At the end of the day, Invoca is an integral part of our tech stack that gives us the 360-degree view of the customer that allows us to deliver the experiences our customers want.”
Integrated Analytics with Invoca and Adobe
Delivering compelling experiences across digital and offline channels is one of the things that gives eHealth a competitive edge. In order to do this, it needs to measure and influence various points of the customer journey, both online and offline. Of course, for eHealth, this heavily depends on phone calls, so it was critical that they integrated their Invoca data with Adobe Analytics.
In order to get the most out of the integration, eHealth looked to the analytics strategy experts at Evolytics for help. “Customers often ask me how to integrate call and voice data with digital data, and it’s frequently a missing component in their analytics strategy,” said Jim Bradley, Digital MarTech Architect at Evolytics. “Through the combination of Adobe Analytics and Invoca conversational analytics, eHealth bridged that digital divide by connecting all of their digital touch points to phone conversations that are being driven by their marketing campaigns and marketing dollars.”
First, Evolytics worked with eHealth to understand what they wanted to know about this online-offline customer interaction, like who bounced, who switched to the phone, what pages are driving calls, what is influencing conversions, and the difference between conversions that happen online and on the phone. To answer these questions, Evolytics added Invoca call information to eHealth’s Adobe Analytics data. Evolytics set up the APIs and webhooks that pass information between Invoca, Adobe Analytics, and eHealth’s back-office systems to give them a complete picture of the customer journey.
Through the integration, eHealth was able to discover web experiences that were better handled on the phone, as well as paths to making those web experiences better.
Bradley added, “Without the Invoca and Adobe Analytics integration, eHealth’s conversion rate would be understated by several percentage points. By setting up this integration, they are able to understand their true CPA, ROI, and tell the complete story.”
Reinvested Cost Savings Into Campaigns
Particularly during open enrollment when eHealth’s call volumes almost triple, it spends a considerable portion of its budget on phone call buys from its affiliates. Many of the affiliates it works with are also using the Invoca platform for their businesses, which makes it simple for eHealth to set up the affiliates in Invoca to track and payout their call buys. By using Invoca, eHealth was able to realize over $2 million in savings on call buys in a single 8-week open enrollment period.
eHealth also has to purchase additional true-800 numbers during open enrollment to account for the extra traffic coming from digital advertising. They found that purchasing the numbers through Invoca was much less expensive than acquiring them through carriers, saving an additional $1 million during the same open enrollment period.
“We are able to reinvest these cost savings into campaigns that we know are working, driving even more high-quality traffic to our web properties and the right calls to our call centers.”
Results
- $3 million+ in cost savings
- 60% reduction in click-to-call CPA
- 20% reduction in CPA
- 20% increase in conversion rate
Invoca is an integral part of our tech stack that gives us the 360-degree view of the customer that allows us to deliver the experiences our customers want.
Will Guimont, VP Analytics and Reporting at eHealth
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