Four Primers to Help You Become an AEP Data Expert

More and more, Medicare Advantage health plans are turning inward to find answers to their marketing issues. By closely scrutinizing both your current member roster and your AEP prospect list, you can begin to find patterns and really pin down your ideal consumer.

At TRAFFIK Health, we call this taking the AEP “data dive,” and have used it to yield priceless marketing information that you can’t get anywhere else. For those that prefer dipping their toes into the pool before diving in, here are four high-level questions to get your dive started:

Do you have a model of your perfect consumer?
Your search starts here: who you’re looking for. If you haven’t already, create a composite of your plan’s perfect consumer in your mind. How old are they? How educated? What is their socioeconomic status? How healthy are they? Knowing who you really want to target will give you a basic platform for moving forward.

Who are your current members really?
Health plans often have an idea of who their members are, but have you run the numbers lately? Are they actually who you think they are? Once you’ve run the numbers on your current members, you can begin to compare them with your ideal consumer. You may find areas that overlap, or you may find that you need to adjust your target to fit the profile that is already buying (and therefore likely to buy in the future).

Have you communicated this to your marketing team?
If not, why not? Getting your marketing team aligned with your agenda lets them know where to buy media, what kind of materials are most likely to work (e.g. direct mail, radio, digital, etc.) and what sort of messaging to craft.

How are you scoring your data?
If you haven’t developed a way to score your prospect list data, now would be a good time. Create a sliding scale that evaluates prospects according to their likelihood to buy your plan. Use this model to rank the people in your list and adjust your marketing accordingly.

Crunch your demographics, really narrow down who you’re serving—the people you have are the people who buy your plan. Find commonalities; build profiles. It’s not an easy task, but it’s worthwhile.

And if you’re unsure how to do the dive, get an experienced team on your side to do the heavy lifting for you. TRAFFIK Health has over 10 years of experience in the healthcare sector helping Medicare Advantage Plans analyze their data and refine their marketing efforts. Remember: AEP may seem far away, but it will be here again in no time. Let’s dive!