The Comprehensive Medicare Marketers Digital Marketing Handbook Chapter 10: Email and Other Digital Channels It seems rather pedestrian to include email as a digital tactic, but, really, what else could it be? Email is vital to the marketing success of Medicare organizations. Email is a means to communicate with members, deliver digital assets like or through the delivery of a link within the email message, acknowledge membership, send eNewsletters and accomplish almost any communications need.

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The Comprehensive
Medicare Marketers
Digital Marketing Handbook
Chapter 10- Email and
Other Digital Channels
2nd Edition © 2018 KERN, An Omnicom Agency

2. KERN HEALTH
CHAPTER 10
Email and Other Digital
Channels
It seems rather pedestrian to include email as a
digital tactic, but, really, what else could it be?
Email is vital to the marketing success of
Medicare organizations. Email is a means to
communicate with members, deliverdigital
assets like or through the delivery of a link within
the email message, acknowledge membership, send
eNewsletters and accomplish almost any
communications need. Email is an important topic
but is too large to cover here in its entirety.
How your organization orchestrates email is of
vital importance to the perception of your
brand, your products and yourmembers.
Over-communication is often as or even more,
damaging than not enoughcommunication.
It is imperative thatMedicare marketers dial in
the correct amount of contacts and the
intervals between contacts through email
communications.
Other digital channels include classifieds and
directories, SMS(text messages) or other forms of
mobile marketing, such as application (app)
development and digitalpublishing.
As you can see from the screen shot from the
Apple®
App Store on the next page,many health
insurers arenow offering apps to their
members and prospective members. Apps often
integrate with an insurer’s back-end CRM and EHR
systems, and they are often mistakenly developed
without marketing’s input ordirection.
Digital publishingis often consider to be a missed
opportunity for Medicaremarketers.

3. KERN HEALTH
Products such as Adobe®
Digital PublishingSuite enable
the creation of onlineapp-like magazines or publications.
These can be used to deliver the informative and
educational content that many Medicare organizations
have already invested in, through a new interactive
digitalformat thatis familiar toleading-edgeBoomers.
Classifieds and directories are not specificallyrelevant
for Medicare insurance marketing. For those Medicare
organizations that are provider-sponsored, the
directories and classifieds are ideal for listing those
provider services.
SMS (Simple Message Service), which requires
double opt-in, and MMS (Multimedia Message
Service), which allows for sending photos, video
and audio content, are not applicable for most
Medicare marketing. Now, this doesn’t mean that
SMS and MMS can’t be used, since some innovative
Medicare marketers have found ways to utilize
these channels. However, the need for innovative
creativity while dealing with double opt-ins is a
barrier for most.
Medicare marketers often don’t have the technical
resources of their counterparts in more competitive
marketing industries, which include having a
dedicated department of people to operate and
facilitate all of the marketing technology. This
department is usually called marketing operations
and is often housed within a centralized location,
called a marketing center of excellence.
The marketing “technology stack” isgenerally
comprised of:
• Some type ofCRM (Customer Relationship
Management) software
• Business software
• A DMP (Data Management Platform) that enables
the collection, aggregation and analysis of datafrom
cross-platform sources, including off-line sources
• A MAP (Marketing Automation Platform) that
enables automatic email message delivery in an
“intelligent,” complex, lead-nurture trackdeployment
sending the right messages to prospects based on
their previous behaviors
• Analytics technology to capture, track, analyze and
optimize performance across the entire spectrumof
marketing operations
As Boomers continue to age-in, and the propensity of
adopting modern marketing technology increases for
Medicare organizations, we can all expect to see the
same adoption of marketing operations by Medicare
marketers as we’ve seen in other industries,specifically
in B2B high-technology verticals. It should come as no
surprise that we’ll be helping clients with marketing
automation and building their technology stacks for
Medicare marketing in the very near future.
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