There are hundreds of millions of eyeballs on social media, but where are they all looking? Your audience is hidden somewhere in the flakey, wandering eyes that endlessly doomscroll, swipe left and right, and dance right next to influencers who tout the latest trend that will be ...

"You've got mail!" AOL's iconic greeting literally brought Americans online and into their email inboxes. This timeless call to action foreshadowed the Pavlovian swipe notifications that we’re inundated with today. It signaled a global system of interconnection. An email campaign ...

The primary goal of any company is keeping your customers happy and engaged. Understanding their concerns, problems, and behavior requires empathy. Empathy is the ability to understand and share the feelings of another. "Walk a mile in my shoes" is a common saying used to illustrate ...

The pandemic has given us all the time to literally go inside and reevaluate our own values, personal mission, and what's vitally important. In parallel, businesses have had to pivot quickly and lean into their mission statements as the world at large navigates our new normal ...

Once upon a time, the ancient Greeks carved their stories, gods and myths into giant stone slabs. In essence, they were creating advertisements that alluded to a particular human condition. Fast-forward to the present day, and the goals of storytelling still hold true ...

If you don't act now, you'll be missing out on something! FOMO (fear of missing out) is real. Marketer's FOMO, in particular, happens when marketers fear that they'll miss out on key opportunities to connect with their audiences, given their data and access to personal information ...

Consumer preferences have changed drastically since the Covid-19 pandemic, led by the twin culprits of convenience and availability. The unprecedented act of quarantining, temporarily confining ourselves to our homes for weeks on end, didn’t stop people from shopping ...

Most people's perceptions of their insurers are set during the first 30 to 90 days of their coverage experience. So collect and use your customer data to shape your approach to members. Since a big pain point for health consumers is confusion about industry terms and jargon, it's ...

With millions of marketing dollars at stake for one Super Bowl commercial, modern marketing methods can mitigate the risk of failure while maximizing creative output to package a commercial product that's both persuasive and entertaining and meets marketing goals. KERN recently used marketing techniques rooted in neuroscience to break down six of 2022's Super Bowl commercials into winners and losers ...

As the world slowly comes out of the pandemic, many aspects of life have forever changed. Hybrid work models, remote learning, healthier eating habits and a renewed appreciation for family and nature are just a few of the societal shifts that will likely last in the years to come. For those ...

According to a recent survey, 80% of health plans consider member engagement to be a top priority. This percentage is an indication that most health plans recognize the increasingly competitive nature of the insurance marketplace. Especially when it comes to Medicare, today’s consumers know that ...

Not the Same Holiday Shopping Season: How Neuroscience Increased Sales. COVID-19 continues to upend our lives in new ways. Though the virus disrupted its second holiday shopping season, retailers once again showed their resilience with U.S. retail sales growth of 8.5% year-over-year this holiday season ...

Why Marketing Assessments Are Critical to Launching a Personalized Continuous Revenue Marketing Strategy. Where are you with your personalized Continuous Revenue Marketing strategy? If you’re not sure, you’re far from alone. Marketing organizations on both the client side and agency side have a mixture of ...

The Seven Components of Superior Personalized Continuous Revenue Marketing. Consumers have changed. They no longer buy in the same ways. They no longer decide what to buy in the same ways. And, more importantly, they no longer hold the same expectations of a brand that they held even yesterday. In fact ...

Now Is the Time to Move to a Personalized Continuous Revenue Marketing Approach. With the recent, rapid changes in shopping habits and media diets, and as customer expectations and values take on a multitude of new forms, Chief Marketing Officers (CMOs) are finding themselves ...

Personalized Marketing has long been one of the biggest challenges for marketers — using data to reach the right person with the right message at the right moment, automated at scale — but now it’s experiencing renewed urgency and focus.

I’m not going to bury the lead. The answer is “yes,” you would sell your data, and in fact you already do. The more difficult and nuanced questions to answer are: Exactly how much is it worth, and do you have a choice? In the U.S., this topic is being argued among big tech, consumer advocacy groups, the federal government ...

Will COVID-19 Help the Grinch Steal Christmas This Year? COVID-19 has completely reshaped the world, and those effects will continue to be felt this holiday season. With financial turmoil and fears of social interaction, it’s a holiday stage even the Grinch himself couldn’t have imagined. Both consumers and retailers will rely heavily on technology to pivot effectively and retain some ...

There are approximately 79 million baby boomers in the U.S., and it’s a pretty even split between men and women. From now until 2030, roughly 10,000 of them will age into Medicare every day. Normally, when we market Medicare to this audience, we imply that retirement is a golden age. We play up to their inherent optimism and suggest that ...

Remember trick-or-treating when you were a kid? Going house-to-house in a costume and a mask, with the neighbors trying to guess who you were? We never thought we’d be wearing masks around the neighborhood today (and we have to admit it’s not as fun as we remember). The COVID-19 crisis is raising new questions about identity and privacy. Now that ...

Consumers already have a lot to consider in 2020, what with a global pandemic and social unrest. So, adding who will be our next commander in chief will carry a lot of weight for most. More than ever, brands must be timely and relevant to ensure their messages are heard and considered. Is Your Marketing Plan Ready? As we gear ...

Access deeper insights into your Medicare audience for more effective communications. It seems like once a person hits 65, they’re lumped into one stodgy category: SENIORS. It’s a most unflattering term, and one this group dislikes, by the way. The Medicare audience isn’t one big homogenous group of mature adults. There are different segments that are influenced by backgrounds, education ...

Privacy. Tax loopholes. Monopolies. Hacking. Fake news. What do they all have in common? Big Tech and its influence on current consumer mindsets, the economy and state of the media. The big question here is—do Americans care enough to do something to take away that influence? The short answer is yes. Nearly 7 in 10 Americans say it’s time to ...

Say hello to Xoomers, born between 1956 and 1964, who are breaking the mold for what over-50 looks like. Making up over 38% of the over-50 population, Xoomers are a not-so-micro-generation you can’t afford to miss. Not only are they a hefty share of the U.S. older adult population, they’re also responsible for almost a quarter of consumer spending in ...

What's your plan for marketing to people working past 65? As Medicare marketers, we generally target three groups of people. The first, called the “Age-In Group,” is made up of people who are 64 and about to turn 65. The second group is everyone currently enrolled in Medicare. During the Annual Election Period, we try to sway the 10% of ...

Social listening has a variety of applications to help businesses meet their business and marketing goals. It provides marketers with the ability to monitor awareness levels, the competitive landscape, consumer segments, product features and brand sentiment. Social listening also provides marketers with access to near real-time online discussions and posts to quickly address reputation or crisis management issues. As marketers, ...

The decision to buy, and how a brand might influence that choice, is a code we are constantly trying to crack for our clients. Lately we’ve been exploring triggered communications based on actions a prospect might take and all the factors that go into a successful triggers campaign. Today I’ll share a few trigger ideas for auto dealerships looking to ...

Things are happening, and our strategy team would like to share two main cultural and socioeconomic events that are, or may soon be, affecting consumers’ buying habits. I think it’s important to frame what a consumer may think and feel with what’s happening around them outside of the market transaction of goods. After all, there are many factors that contribute ...

In the age of the empowered consumer, buying journeys are rarely linear. This means that the traditional purchase funnel isn’t aligned with the modern customer experience, and it’s time marketers adapted their view to drive conversions.

Everyone has heard of the 80/20 rule, also known as the Pareto Principle—80% of your revenue comes from 20% of your customers—but RFM is the best way to determine the actual makeup of your customer base and gain insights to help improve your targeting, messaging and marketing ROI. RFM analysis is the first step in helping you define customer segments ...

Triggered emails are outperforming standard direct marketing emails but make up only 7% of marketing emails delivered. These vastly underutilized campaigns boast an average of more than 50% compared to the 20% cross-industry average open rate. They can also drive two to five times more revenue than standard emails. While the results speak for themselves, setting up a trigger campaign ...

20+ years ago, B. Joseph Pine II wrote about our entry into the experience economy—an economy in which growth strategies including the orchestration of events and experiences drive product value beyond the functional value of the product itself. But what is it about experiences that enable a company to attract and retain customers over time? This question is particularly important ...

We all know that personalization increases customer engagement, loyalty and sales because people naturally connect with brands that create relevant experiences which address their wants and needs, but it’s not always easy to get it right. Here are 5 tips to help you improve customer communications that lead to stronger relationships. Think of your customers as individuals. Start by determining ...

The cost of acquiring new customers is 5 to 25 times higher than retaining existing customers. If you want loyal customers, you have to do more than sell. You need to provide them with highly relevant experiences. If consumers can’t find added value through your brand, they’ll go somewhere else. Knowing where your customers are on the ladder will help ...

Marketer, meet Generation Z. Not just a Millennial spinoff, this generation born 2001 and on is a new breed of consumer, and it’s vital that marketers give them the attention they need, and want, to drive conversions. Download your free whitepaper and gain email marketing insights and tips to help catch the attention of this up-and-coming generation.

At KERN, we periodically ask ourselves, “what’s next?” Summer 2017, there was a heavy focus on what we could do with technology partners and APIs. We spoke to partners like Movable Ink, Iterable and Foursquare to bring together new ways to market our client’s products and services. As we continue these conversations and create innovative solutions for our clients, it’s ...

Factors to Consider when Placing Email CTA Buttons The CTA button is a critical part of your email—if you’re not getting clicks, you’re not getting conversions. Best practices can vary by both industry and target audience, and the best way to determine what works is to test, test, test. We have identified three main factors to consider in determining the ...

Today, informed customers know they have choices. If your loyalty program isn’t firing on all cylinders, your customers will find something better. You don’t have to outspend the competition, you just have to outthink them. Download your free white paper.

Today’s consumers are no longer responding to the hard sell the way they have in the past. They now look to brands to be educated about products and services that make their lives easier when making buying decisions. They seek out informative content, and inbound marketing is made to meet this modern buyer’s behavior. The more content you create and ...

Welcome to the Age of the Customer. The fastest-growing companies are focused on improving their customer relationships. With competitors just one click away, it’s essential to build loyalty and trust with every customer interaction. Here are five principles that will help you build better relationships with your customers. Download your free white paper.

From acquisition through loyalty, growth hacking is strategically used throughout the customer journey, with a key focus on rapid and continuous growth. Startups thrive on this practice and have cleverly developed marketing strategies that allow them to make quick decisions and optimize their marketing programs. Many innovative cultures are flourishing from their ability to take strategic risks while rapidly testing and ...

If used effectively, your CRM email program can be one of the most powerful marketing tools you have for building ongoing, profitable growth. Your program can help you stay in touch with a range of customer segments, providing each of them with unique value while strengthening their relationship with your brand. To make your CRM email program more effective, here ...

What’s the point of advertising if your audience can’t see what you’re communicating? One of the biggest challenges in marketing to Boomers and Medicarians is creating materials they can actually read with their aging and low vision issues. And I’m not just talking about people in their 80s. Vision problems can crop up as early as your 50s. Think of ...

As we move through the Modern Buyer’s 10-Stage Journey, we’ve identified not only the consumer’s mind-set but also how brands can combat potential consumer anxieties, and suggested marketing strategy and channels to better reach a target audience. We have followed our subject, Tara, along her buying journey purchasing a new laptop. Tara has had concerns about both the price and ...

They’re short, they’d better be sweet and they can make or break an email. Of course, we’re talking about subject lines. Most of us have found out the hard way that it doesn’t matter how much strategy, creativity and work goes into an email—if it’s not paired with the right subject line, it’s not going to get read. There is ...

Last week, we reviewed stage 2 of the Modern Buyer’s 10-Stage Journey, “Need Recognition.” Our subject, Tara Technology, recognized a need days after she experienced her initial distraction in stage 1 due to monetary concerns. We learned that while in both stage 1 and 2, it was important for brands to target customers through pre-determinded personas to communicate brand benefits ...

There are approximately 79 million baby boomers in the U.S., and it’s a pretty even split between men and women. From now until 2030, roughly 10,000 of them will age into Medicare every day. To ensure your marketing communications are as effective and persuasive as possible, it’s good to understand this target’s backstory and how to write content in a ...

The only time the word Senior has ever had any cachet was when we were all freshmen in high school. Or maybe when we coveted a promotion—as in Senior Management. But for those 65 and older, and especially those aging into Medicare, you might as well address them as old fogey or dinosaur, because that’s what the target audience hears ...

Boomers are my main target. So I did some research into how our vision changes as we get older to make sure the marketing I was creating was as easy to read as possible. It was eye-opening, to say the least. Not to bum you out, but as we age: Our pupils get smaller and our field of vision decreases. ...

We continue our weekly series traveling through KERN’s Modern Buyer’s 10-Stage journey. The 10-stage journey was developed based on rapidly changing human patterns, the accelerated adoption of online searching and sharing, and the proliferation of social networks and always-on communication abilities. Stage 2: Recognize Need After the distraction stage, the consumer recognizes a need which brings them into stage two. ...

A comprehensive look at what CRM leaders across industries experienced in 2017, what they will prioritize and how partners can help them enhance CRM program effectiveness.

KERN developed the Modern Buyer’s 10-Stage Journey based on rapidly changing human patterns, the accelerated adoption of online searching and sharing, and the proliferation of social networks and always-on communication abilities. In this weekly series, we take a deeper look at each of the stages in this journey, what each means for brands and takeaways to act on each stage. ...

The modern consumer is ever-changing. Armed with advancing technology, their mind-set has evolved and no longer fits traditional personas. KERN recognized this problem and sought to develop a solution that would fit modern needs for marketers. Recognizing that the convergence of faster connection speeds on both mobile and home devices, the accelerated adoption of online searching and sharing, and the ...

Tip 1—Know Your Audience As a Medicare marketer, you know how critical it is to meet your membership goals every year. Medicarians are not the easiest group to market to. They are wary of marketing, and their vision issues can render your materials unreadable. In this first of a 5-part series, KERN Health will help you develop a greater understanding ...

We’ve been entertaining the hypothesis that video viewers can and will follow preferred content wherever it goes. Regardless of platform, cable service provider or mobile device, consumers can now comfortably navigate different service providers. In the not so distant past, consumers were locked into single service providers by geographical boundaries. Entire counties could be serviced only with content from one ...

A detailed look at forecasted 2018 CRM Marketing trends, from technological advances to shifts in the structure of marketing departments. This white paper provides information to aid in rethinking strategies and incorporating the best resources to optimize results and achieve 2018 goals.

See for yourself how all of the numbers point to using direct mail for success in capturing senior enrollments.

AEP is around the corner. Make sure all your preparations are on track with KERN’s AEP Readiness Assessment.

Are you doing everything you can to capitalize on the growing Medicare enrollment market? Find out in our handy guide.

Gartner, a Connecticut-based technology research firm, has predicted that 30 percent of all web browsing will be screenless by 2020. Instead of typing and looking at electronic devices, people will request information out loud and a gadget will supply the answer in a humanlike voice. Of course, such systems already exist, including Amazon Echo and Google Home. How will this ...

The Medicare audience is more digitally oriented than you may know. Our new, comprehensive ebook will enlighten you on the latest digital marketing solutions and help you better segment and target individuals for effective results—just in time for AEP! Request your personal presentation of KERN Health’s Medicare Marketing handbook today.

We live in a digital world. The signs of people’s ever-increasing passion for digital communications are all around us. Digital has become woven into the fabric of everyday life, yet Medicare marketers aren’t prepared to develop a digital marketing strategy. KERN Health’s informal polls at the 2016 Medicare Marketing & Sales Summits in Orlando and Nashville ...

What Is a Digital Strategy? A digital strategy is the process of identifying, articulating and executing on digital opportunities that will increase your organization’s competitive advantage. Building a digital strategy will obviously require knowledge of the digital landscape, along with the knowledge that any Medicare marketing strategist would need to develop any marketing strategy. Part of the confusion surrounding digital ...

Every year, LUMA Partners, a unique investment banking firm that lives in the digital media world, releases several different LUMAscapes. These provide an infographic look at the landscape for a given digital area. There are LUMAscapes for digital display advertising, digital search advertising, mobile and video. As most Medicare marketers are in the nascent stages of both search and display, ...

Big data has advanced the development of AI systems that can take information from a variety of inputs, identify relationships among them and make predictions that humans could never dream of making. Let's take a look at what the recent advances in AI technology mean for content marketing. In 2018, 20% of All Business Content Will Be Authored by Machines ...

The late Dr. Wayne Dyer said, “Go for it now. The future is promised to no one.” This is sound advice for life and for ending the procrastination around when your Medicare marketing organization should begin to create a digital strategy. “Go for it now.” Let’s address the elephant in the room: Every Medicare marketer has numbers to make. It ...

We’ve come from a world in which our audience was addressable through a mass effort, rather than the precise pinpointed effort that we need today. The most challenging complexity that modern B-to-B marketers face is creating “individualism” within a mass-media framework. To speak to individuals, marketers require a model that directly addresses customer needs, wants and desires. We have evolved ...