When It Comes to Member Retention, First Impressions Are Everything

Popular as ever, Medicare Advantage (MA) plans remain a hot priority for healthcare marketing execs. Months of planning and millions of dollars each year are devoted to wooing new members. And with MA enrollment growing at an annual rate of 8% and expected to include 60% of the eligible population by 2030, there’s no shortage of potential new members to court.

While there’s no harm in celebrating the swelling ranks of customers, it’s essential that the effort to keep them continues year-round. Here’s why:

• The cost of gaining a new member has always and will always exceed that of retaining one.
• Any return on investment payers earn from investing in preventive care and population health programs disappears as soon as members churn.  
• Switching plans often disrupts members’ continuity of care, increasing the risk of worse health outcomes and higher associated costs.

Add sweeping regulatory changes and mounting financial pressures, and it’s no surprise that retention — not simply acquisition — is firing up conversations across the payer space.

Here’s the thing though: MA customers are being marketed to more than ever, and their expectations are evolving at an eye-popping pace. The time to convince them to stick around is not when they’re already inching toward the door or considering other options.

The best time to prevent disenrollment is right from the start: the days, weeks, and months after someone becomes a member. You want to be the plan that wows with a killer first impression and fulfills every expectation — not the catfishy type that talks a great game but fails to deliver.

Forging that immediate, lasting bond does take effort. But it’s probably easier than you realize. Here’s how to get started:

1. Go ahead and start the conversation

You probably wouldn’t linger too long with someone who favors looking at their phone over looking at your face — and MA members are no different in their desire for attention and connection. And when that desire isn’t fulfilled, it’s hard to fault them for wanting to bounce.

For instance, people with Medicare Advantage point to supplemental benefits as a main reason they chose the MA program over traditional Medicare, a 2024 Commonwealth Fund survey found. Yet one of the biggest reasons members say they’re dissatisfied with their plan is that they don’t understand how to access and use their benefits. Three in 10 members didn’t use any supplemental benefits in the past year, often because they didn’t know which ones their plan offered.

Sure, plan benefits might have been clearly highlighted in your acquisition materials, but that hardly means the conversation is complete. Steady proactive outreach to educate and engage members can be incredibly impactful, both in driving better health outcomes and in cultivating brand loyalty.

The goal is to guide them to the priority actions that can be most impactful for their health, with messages that feel supportive and trustworthy, and with language they can understand and learn from. (That last part is especially crucial given that nearly 90% of U.S. adults struggle with health literacy and research suggests that those who report having the worst health also have the most limited health literacy skills.)

When you start engaging your members from day 1 — or even a bit before — you maximize the time you have to build a lasting connection. Once April 1 rolls around, avoid the temptation to pull back. If your campaigns during Open Enrollment Period were successful, members will be expecting to hear from you, and hopefully even looking forward to it. (More on this below!)

2. Find out what your members like — then deliver

Maybe your tween niece loves texting you funny gifs, while your widowed neighbor is hungry for in-person chats. Writing either person a handwritten note would likely be a conversation killer, so you intuitively meet them where they’re at — picking the platform, topics, and timing that aligns with their preferences and natural habits.

Conversing with MA members should be no different. Cookie-cutter messages that get blasted out to everyone might feel like the epitome of marketing speed and efficiency, but we’d wager that the bulk of those communications fall flat or are ignored entirely. By contrast, segmenting your MA population into different cohorts with varied points of view allows you to figure out best-fit channels, strengthen brand trust, and stoke overall engagement and satisfaction.

Some plans take a swipe at this by relying on demographic stereotypes — sending only print materials to their oldest members, say, even though it’s long been established that digitally savvy seniors are in fact the norm. (Most people over age 65 spend six-plus hours a day online and roughly half say they’re no stranger to social media.)

Here’s what delivering what members want means to us:

• Providing robust omnichannel content campaigns, threaded throughout with QR codes, links to learn more, and dynamic calls to action
• Creating a no-friction experience so that members can engage with content that’s relevant to them
• Using data analytics and tracking to continuously improve results

When you can pinpoint exactly what’s working and what’s not, you’re able to double down on the successes and optimize the challenges in a more precise way, leading to stronger results. Even better, it means that your members feel like the longer they stick with you, the better the experience gets.

3. Stay in touch

Millions of conversations have been devoted to timing the perfect follow up. Reach out too soon, and you risk looking overeager or even annoying. Wait too long, and you signal that you’re uninterested.

Healthcare marketers must make similar calculations when they seek to turn a member’s great first impression into ongoing brand loyalty. How many emails, SMS messages, and print materials should members receive in the first days, weeks, and months of enrollment? How can these early and ongoing messages help members immediately feel supported, to both seed brand trust and fan nascent engagement?

The answers are anything but one-size-fits-all. But with a clear understanding of a payer’s marketing goals and its MA population, it’s possible to build a tailored, intentional content strategy that ensures the warm-and-fuzzy feelings a member felt when they first selected their plan continue long after the label “new member” wears off.

Supercharge your retention program right from the start with Linkwell Health. Get in touch to learn how we can help.