Commentary

Digital Is The Promised Land for Healthy, Active Millennials

With the ever-changing landscape and complexity of the healthcare industry, it is crucial that marketers educate today’s uber healthy and active Millennials with the right amount of information on the right devices and platforms.

Let’s take the recent Obamacare reform that was recently enacted. According to Millward Brown Digital, 56.8 million people visited the HealthCare.gov website within its first week of going live. Of that group, 3.72 million tried to register and only 1.01 million completed actual registrations. You do the math – that’s not a very high conversion rate for completes.

Despite the bandwidth issues, conversion rates could have been much higher if the digital experience did an effective job of educating today’s “always on, always connected” Millennials with messages and content that were more than just text-heavy blocks of information. Here are a few ways I envision digital becoming the promised land for engaging the growing population of health and lifestyle-obsessed Gen Yers.

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Online/mobile videos will act as human teachers.

What Gen Yers expect from “education” is the same whether they’re sitting in a classroom environment and learning about the latest digital marketing techniques, or if they’re tapping and swiping away on a health and lifestyle website. Tell them something they don’t already know, show them in a way that gets them thinking and asking more questions, and, most importantly, get rid of all the fluff and hyperbole and just be real and honest. 

When an online or mobile user comes to a health brand’s home page and the first CTA is “Get a quote,” chances are they don’t know where else to go or what else to do. Online and mobile videos are great tools to educate, so use them and show people why you know your stuff, how you’ll make their lives better and easier, and trust me, you’ll see them come back more and going through to the end of the funnel to “Buy Now” or “Sign Up.”

Don’t just push them somewhere because you’re desperate to get them to the end. They’ll catch onto that phoniness and leave pretty quickly. Instead, take them to a product page where you’ll do more than just blind them with irrelevant offers and impersonal messages. 

Mobile banner/SMS messages will spark live human interactions.

Although Millennials typically want to get things done quickly and are joined at the hip to their smartphones and tablets, they usually still have questions that can’t always be answered on their mobile device. And they won’t be as willing to wait for several days to get that additional information. So tailoring a mobile banner or SMS message to give users the information they really want (in a separate phone call) will go a long way to making them feel like you care about them.

That will get them to interact with your brand not just on the mobile channel, but also in-store, on their desktops, on social networks and even in email. It’s a win-win because it has that perfect blend of mobile convenience and person-to-person human interaction that we all still crave today.

Digital experiences will be dressed up with the same care as a Neiman Marcus window display.

Let’s be honest, the health insurance or health product shopping experience can sometimes be dry and intimidating. You’ve got product names you can barely pronounce, legislation that goes above your non-legal head and you can’t make heads or tails of anything you’re seeing. But people looking for health-related products, services or information are the same folks who rush into Neiman Marcus on Black Friday to shop ’til they drop.

When things are displayed in a beautiful, cool and fresh way, it gets them to stop (and stare) and put them into their shopping carts. I expect a lot of health brands will step outside their traditional boxes and get creative with how they present themselves in every channel – be it in a brick-and-mortar location, online, mobile, social or email. If they do it right, they’ll use graphs, charts, icons, videos and a variety of bold and fresh images to make the digital experience “stickier.”

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