Why should carriers adopt EDE with HealthSherpa?

A generation ago, having a consumer product largely meant relying upon retail outlets to sell your products and services. The Walmarts, Best Buys, and Barnes & Nobles of the world were king, and it was up to you to do everything you could to get customers to notice your products above all others.

While that hustle to get noticed is still central to any consumer sales and marketing strategy, shopping itself has become far more multidirectional. Amazon is the retail king, and it provides its sellers with myriad tools to promote their products on Amazon.com. Likewise, companies like Harry’s and Glossier have worked backwards, establishing an enviable mail-order business before moving into the traditional retail outlets.

Well, the hustle has come to the ACA market, which means it’s more important than ever for carriers to have the sales and marketing tools at their disposal to attract and retain customers as competition heats up. Enhanced Direct Enrollment (EDE) helps you meet your retail challenges by streamlining ACA enrollments—and HealthSherpa enhances EDE by providing you with a full suite of marketing, sales and support tools to empower carriers to do what they do best.

EDE gives you an end-to-end member experience with a direct link to your marketing funnel, telesales and broker/agent sales channels—all in a way that streamlines the enrollment process and enables you to scale your individual market business. As more carriers enter or reenter the ACA market, EDE has become table stakes in protecting and growing your market share.

From Funnel to Effectuation

A great deal of cost and effort goes into getting prospects into your sales funnel. And the risk of losing them increases if you’re handing off those prospects to HealthCare.gov to enroll, where they are exposed to competitor plans, as you have to do if you’re still working with the Federally Facilitated Marketplace (FFM) standards. With EDE, you place prospects directly into your own branded experience and keep them there all the way through enrollment and effectuation. There are no redirects for the customer—they stay with you all the way through yet are still checked for eligibility, presented with their subsidy amount and ultimately enrolled in your compliant ACA plans.

Plus, EDE with HealthSherpa means you have access to data and analytics throughout the user journey, which means you can see where you’re doing well in converting prospects to members as well as being able to address, in real-time, the parts of the enrollment process where you can improve your conversion rate. You’re able to reach out to consumers stuck in the enrollment process and give them personalized support to help them through. You can also track campaign performance in real time and make adjustments as needed.

Telesales and Broker/Agent Sales

A significant part of improving your conversion rate is knowing when is the right time to connect a potential member with a person. EDE with HealthSherpa makes this task easy in several ways:

• Frequent reminders to save their progress means you know exactly where a user is in the enrollment process and you can message or reach out to them accordingly without making them start over.
• Access to demographic data can help you further understand and refine any patterns in enrollment dropoff and target your efforts better.
• Likewise, HealthSherpa’s lead targeting and high-quality CRM tools get you to high-quality leads sooner, so that your internal sales team can focus on those customers most likely to convert into members.
• Renewals prepopulated with your members’ information make it easy to keep customers once you are past the initial enrollment, cutting way back on your customer retention costs.
• These tools are all available to brokers and agents as well, so you can incentivize them to promote your products with a platform that will increase their own conversion rates while improving their satisfaction scores with their customers.

Scale your business

Of course, getting all of these enabling features comes with additional effort. Luckily, it’s less when you implement EDE with HealthSherpa. As the first marketplace approved for EDE and the prohibitive leader in enrollment volume, HealthSherpa has set up dozens of white-label EDE marketplaces that have driven millions of dollars in premium collected.

EDE with HealthSherpa means you get a near turnkey integration with HealthCare.gov’s eligibility and enrollment APIs, you get full access to customer journey data to help you and your sales partners with conversions, you get full compliance with CMS guidelines for communication with prospects and members alike…and you get it all with much less effort from IT than you might expect from more custom solutions.

As the ACA individual market continues to grow and evolve, data and agility will be the x-factor that will enable some carriers to refine their marketing and sales approaches to attract and retain the most (and best) members. EDE with HealthSherpa is the key to both.

To learn more about EDE, contact us at ede@healthsherpa.com.