HIA Scaled New Customer Enrollments with Performance Advertising

Cole worked at Fuego Leads full-time from 2020 to 2022. Health Insurance Alliance was a client of Fuego Leads and not Scalable Marketing, but the results outlined in this case study represent Cole’s individual contribution and expected results from working with Cole as a Scalable Marketing client.

Customer Analytics: Cole tracked which leads turned into qualified calls and high-value health policies, and which states had the most profitable customers on average.

‍Data-Driven Performance Campaigns: Cole optimized Google and Microsoft search campaigns for qualified calls and enrolled policies, hitting record new customers per month while decreasing costs.

‍Conversion Rate Optimization: Cole built a call-routing engine that prioritized routing high-intent calls to internal agents first, then third-party partners. He paired that with a network of over 25 health insurance agency and independent agent partners that bid in a private marketplace for overflow qualified calls that internal agents could not take, maximizing revenue from traffic generated from advertising campaigns.

Cole started working with Health Insurance Alliance in 2020 during his time at Fuego Leads. At the time, Health Insurance Alliance was a growing private insurance agency with an internal qualification department and several licensed agents in Florida.

HIA’s goals were to increase the number of new health plans enrolled per month, reduce acquisition costs, and improve cashflow to allow for additional scale. HIA had successful marketing campaigns and were generating a few hundred new policies each month, but were paying their maximum allowable cost-per-policy and were limited by manual reporting and optimization. They also saw sub-optimal response rates after customers would submit lead forms, further driving up acquisition costs.

Cole worked with a small team of 20 at HIA with the goal of establishing marketing, sales, and tech systems that would unlock a new level of scale for the company.

After an initial audit, Cole identified significant opportunity for additional scale in HIA’s existing paid search campaigns as well as their third-party lead campaigns.

Smarter Conversion Tracking and Campaign Optimization

Cole started by leveraging offline conversion tracking and Smart Bidding in HIA’s paid search campaigns. He began tracking which clicks and calls from paid search campaigns turned into qualified calls and policy enrollments, passing that data back to Google and Microsoft to track actual business revenue down to the individual user level. With this data, HIA could leverage Smart Bidding and optimize their campaigns for specific ROAS (return on ad spend) goals per campaign and plan type.

Additionally, Cole developed pricing models for HIA’s third-party lead campaigns to bid for leads based on vendor, source, state, and customer information like age, marital status, family size, and more.

These optimizations ultimately lead to a 4x increase in new monthly policy enrollments with a 60% lower cost per customer from paid search and third-party lead campaigns.

Overflow Traffic Monetization & Conversion Rate Optimization

As HIA reduced costs and increased profitability and marketing budget, they began producing more qualified calls than their licensed sales agents were able to take in a given day. Cole worked with HIA to set up a marketplace for these calls where other health insurance agencies/independent agents could bid for these calls. Additionally he developed a call routing engine that would prioritize routing calls with the highest likelihood of conversion and profitability to HIA’s internal agents first, and sending the remainder of overflow calls to the third-party marketplace. These efforts resulted in a 20x increase in non-policy revenue as call buyers paid 40% more on average for calls due to live bidding and increased quality from media optimizations.

By 2022, HIA scaled their monthly new policy enrollments by over 4x, cut their acquisition costs by over 60%, and dramatically increased their non-policy revenue by selling qualified calls to partner agencies/agents in a private marketplace. These actions have allowed them to write several months worth of businesses where non-policy revenue exceeded marketing campaign budgets resulting in negative acquisition costs.

Want to explore how your business can run the same hyper-profitable performance advertising campaigns? Click below to schedule a free discovery call.