Humana partners with TrueVoice on digital marketing

Humana has partnered with TrueVoice Growth Marketing on a new growth marketing approach that uses real-time behavioral metadata from agents, brokers and third-party administrators to guide acquisition and retention campaigns.

The digital initiatives have nearly doubled lead volume and increased email conversion rates, according to Humana. 

Carmyn Wethington, commercial integrated marketing lead for employer group marketing at Humana, says the pilot program with TrueVoice is bringing awareness around what is driving acquisitions and retention efforts with agents.

“The way that it has transformed our digital program is tough to speak to because it’s almost entirely,” says Wethington. “The most important driver of that transformation starts with the understanding of our audience. … So, all of this, the entire pilot and the program we have built around it that scales the pilot was founded from narrative analysis and content modeling. We told TrueVoice this is our target audience that we want to understand and then they went out and listened.”

Kurt Genden, co-founder and managing partner of TrueVoice, says the audience-first approach works to include an understanding of how agents and brokers can inform a multi-touch integrated campaign journey designed to improve agent engagement and conversion.

Genden says using TrueVoice’s AI and ML stacks, the company was able to analyze nearly 1.2 million pieces of live behavioral metadata from agents, brokers and third-party administrators that was hosted in more than 350 million outlets and sources like narratives on social media and how agents engage with content online.

“All of this great metadata really helped us to paint a very deep picture of what agents and brokers wanted and needed,” says Genden. “Forget about Humana for a second, even outside of Humana, what did they want, need and need to achieve themselves? And then what we were able to do is really look at that and say, okay … Where can we add the most value? And with that understanding that really allowed us to take a new look and see how we innovate targeting, and the ways we reach them, how does that change the way we develop content to really speak to and respond to their needs? How do we align our operations and our department, so that we’re really delivering an experience that aligns with the journey versus trying to draw them into what exactly we want them to do, rather fit into the way they’re already behaving.”

The strategy is understanding, at a whole different level, the audience and what they need and want. Then designing programs to respond to that in a responsible way that delivers value at every point of the journey, as they consider the insurers that they can sell and obviously the clients that they need to serve and what they’re trying to achieve, adds Genden.

Wethington says she thought of this as a roadmap to understand who Humana’s best targets were, and not just who but if the company can target them. 

“The objective of this campaign was actually re-engaging agents that were either low producing, which means that they haven’t sold a lot or not producing, which means they haven’t sold anything,” adds Wethington. “The objective was to re-engage them … and what we saw on that is that our approach proved effective. So, essentially they were responding and produced more than five and a half times the volume of re-engagement than we had originally projected.” 

By having more relevant communications and content based on what the agents’ needs were, engagement increased tenfold versus past levels, says Wethington.

“I think that brokers have always been recognized as a really core component of our sales relationships and our relationship with the business,” she says. “So, it’s more of a refocus, it’s really the kind of operational alignment that this pilot brought about with digital marketing and sales, all getting behind the objective of serving the broker.”