Humana, Inc., Louisville, KY: Humana’s Lead Generation team

Company: Humana, Inc., Louisville, KY
Company Description: Humana Inc., is one of the nation’s largest publicly traded health and supplemental benefits companies, with approximately 10.2 million medical members, 7.1 million specialty members. Humana is a full-service benefits and well-being solutions company, offering health, pharmacy and supplemental benefits for employer groups, government programs and individ
Nomination Category: Support Categories
Nomination Sub Category: Support Team of the Year
Nomination Title: Humana’s Lead Generation team

1. Which will you submit for your nomination in this category, a video of up to five (5) minutes in length about the nominated support team's achievements since the beginning of 2020, OR an essay of up to 650 words? (Choose one):
   
   An essay of up to 650 words
    
2. If you are submitting a video of up to five (5) minutes in length, provide the URL of the nominated video here, OR attach it to your entry via the "Add Attachments, Videos, or Links to This Entry" link above, through which you may also upload a copy of your video:
    
3. If you are providing an essay of up to 650 words, place it in the following space:

   Total 647 words used.

   Humana’s Lead Generation team drives profitable sales growth for Humana through best in class, large scale direct mail and email campaigns. They make it easy for prospective Medicare and Dental members to access tools during their shopping phase to identify the best plan for them. This is accomplished through multi-million-dollar nationwide marketing campaigns. The team produces materials that solicit a response to enroll in a Humana plan, while also nurturing streamlined production processes and relationships that benefit Humana. Lead Generation focused on having consistent lessons learned meetings to adapt and change. They constantly thought about how to improve and better execute their direct mail process and implement improvements in real time. Lead Generation worked closely to support the Retail team to execute Humana's largest direct mail campaign for the Annual Enrollment Period (AEP). The following are high-level stats of that endeavor:

   • 13 Test Packages
   • 21 Control Packages
   • 4 Rounds of Internal Proofing Review, which was 136 total rounds of proofing across 6 team members
   • 100% compliant / match to final filed

   • Final AEP pieces mailed: 63,576,366
   • Final AEP distinct customers mailed: 16,786,052
     • This campaign saved $517,423 on postage by leveraging the combined discounts of United States Postal Service (USPS) Informed Delivery and Intelligent Mail Barcode. They partnered with Quad, our paper vendor, and USPS to utilize these discounts on all 275 USPS mail statements during the campaign.   

   During AEP, the team launched its first Email Responder Campaign which sent a follow-up to someone who had called in from any of our lead generation media (DRTV, digital, or direct mail) during AEP. They received this follow-up as a final enrollment effort and partnered with the agency, Persado, to create another email version to do an A/B test to see what language customers preferred. The Persado predictive variant had a 6.62% open rate and 7.06% click rate which were both higher than the Control Responder email.

   The team worked with the Specialty Strategy team focusing on a niche audience that had never been mailed before - Optional Supplemental Benefit (OSB) audience. The goal was to upsell current eligible Medicare members who could receive OSB plans to get more coverage and benefits. They were targeted by sending new direct mail to 500K customers in June, July, August, and September. The creative encompassed a strong, direct call to action for members to call a licensed sales agent to gain additional dental benefits. This became the best performing dental mailing in 2021 and will continue into 2022. This saw a 1.49% response rate and an average net app rate of 0.0135%.

   The team became Lean certified, and utilized tactics learned through Lean to identify waste in email production and find opportunities to eliminate it. They developed a new process that includes the infrastructure to support increased email volume.

   • Identified solutions to these email process waste: motion, waiting, overproduction, and excess processing.
   • Clarified and reassigned responsibilities between team members based on individual strengths, subject matter expertise, and lessons learned from past seasons
   • Estimated cost-savings of $324,500 because of efficiency gains and expanding capabilities to send more emails instead of direct mail.

   Lead generation worked on creating a defined Dental State Filing Process ensuring clear steps to mitigate back and forth communication with the Dental State filers in efforts to remain 100% compliant in all 50 states.

   Lead Generation experienced Humana's corporate review process taking longer than outlined. Legal feedback was a week or two late, and they received inconsistent feedback across reviewers. To improve the process for future corporate reviews, they aligned with all legal reviewers to establish a better understanding of their process to work more efficiently together to meet deadlines. They made the following internal adjustments:

   • Added five days to the original corporate review timeline
   • Included production deadlines in submission notes to capture urgency of review and alert reviewers of production timelines

4. In bullet-list form, provide a brief summary (up to 150 words) of up to ten (10) of the chief accomplishments of the nominated support team since the beginning of 2020:

   Total 115 words used.

   • Final AEP pieces mailed: 63,576,366
   • Final AEP distinct customers mailed: 16,786,052
     • This campaign saved $517,423 on postage by leveraging the combined discounts of United States Postal Service (USPS) Informed Delivery and Intelligent Mail Barcode. They partnered with Quad, our paper vendor, and USPS to utilize these discounts on all 275 USPS mail statements during the campaign.   
   • Created Humana’s best performing dental mailing in 2021 which will continue into 2022. This saw a 1.49% response rate and an average net app rate of 0.0135%.
   • Completed a Lean project with estimated cost-savings of $324,500 because of efficiency gains and expanding capabilities to send more emails instead of direct mail.

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