What a PPACA exchange learned about digital marketing

For health insurance agents and brokers, one possible benefit from the existence of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (PPACA) may be the vast sums of federal grant money on market research.

In some cases, the people and firms that received the outreach grants may have blown the money. In other cases, market researchers in states like California, Colorado and Maryland may have used the money to test ideas of interest to the commercial health insurance community.

See also: 4 marketing lessons from the new ‘Obamacare’ commercial

Some of those researchers have made their work available to the public, through documents included in exchange board meeting packets. In theory, in some cases, the results might be helpful to other organizations that are trying to reach moderate-income consumers and young consumers.

In Maryland, for example, a team of four managers at the Maryland Health Benefit Exchange, the agency that runs the state-based Maryland Health Connection Exchange, gave board members a taste of what they’ve learned from past marketing efforts in a presentation on marketing services procurement.

For a look at what the managers said, read on.

1. Courting non-buyers dramatically increased the odds that those prospects would return to the exchange enrollment site.

Maryland exchange managers say the emphasized “digital retargeting”: efforts to reach out to Web users who visited the exchange site but failed to fill out an application.