Priority Health: Driving Personalization & Experience Strategy

Role: Product Strategist

Situation

Priority Health, Michigan’s Largest Regional Healthcare Payer, was entering a new market in Southeastern Michigan, and to better gain control of that market, they wanted to ensure their marketing & user experience teams had targeted a strategy that would enable their business to effectively penetrate that market. 

The Experience Strategy team at Productive Edge partnered with Priority Health to help devise a strategy to enable them to deliver personalized experiences to their target segments. 

Choosing the right healthcare plan is an extremely important decision–one that impacts everyone from a health perspective but also financially. To ensure prospective members are choosing the right plan, Priority Health had to deliver a streamlined experience that helps educate and inform these prospective members of the potential benefits of Priority Health’s services and deliver Priority Health’s value proposition to that particular prospect.

Action

Working closely with the Priority Health team, a small team of strategists, including myself, devised a plan to help Priority Health focus their efforts and get to a place where they had a solid strategy in place to target this new market. We worked with them to understand how far along they were with their thinking related to this growth strategy, and the objectives they had for this new market, and we got a deep background on research they had previously conducted. 

We then conducted a small series of workshops to:

• Break down their strategic growth objectives into more tangible marketing goals

• Align each marketing goal to a specific user journey experience and broke the journey steps down into experience goals

• Map how these experiences by business value and anticipated traffic to understand the value of each experience to Priority Health

• And finally to assign prioritized lead scores to different interactions Priority’s prospective prospects may take while on their journey

Now, it was a matter of identifying what would be the best approach to building the right experience for these new potential users. The needs identified in Priotiy’s research were highly varied across their target segments, so to account for this, we suggested a moving forward with a modular approach to the personalized experiences they would be provided  Specifically, we proposed taking an ‘atomic approach’ to both how content and design components were presented on their website, where UI components and phrases–parsed through their digital asset management system–would be combined to serve up hyper-personalized experiences based on where a user was in their journey and what segment they were in. This would lead to enabling ongoing personalized marketing but also ongoing personalized experiences on their website for new and returning users.

Once we sussed out how this could work from both a technical and experience perspective, using tools like a Digital Asset Management system, Salesforce’s Journey Builder, and a Customer Data Platform to name a few on the shortlist. We went on to work with the broader PH marketing,  technical, and product teams– conducting another workshop to envision and align on how they could achieve this and operationalize it. We worked together to build a service blueprint that described their future-state operating model–and what teams, activities, and technologies needed to be augmented to make sure this new experience would work seamlessly and be supported at each touchpoint by the organization. 

Results

After the workshops, we went on to collaborate with Priority’s marketing, user experience, and technology leadership to build a crawl, walk, run roadmap that outlined what needed to be done from a product design, marketing, technology, and operational perspective to enable next best action-driven marketing and enable hyper-personalized experiences on their website for their new target geo.

Once live, the execution of this personalization and experience strategy allowed Priority Health to effectively penetrate the Southeast Michigan market in a targeted, executable way that enabled them to track the effectiveness of their campaigns and associated product experiences via delivering personalized content to the right people at the right time. Two years following this highly successful entrance to the Southeast Michigan market, Priority Health’s healthcare provider, sister-company Spectrum Health has merged with their largest competitor in Southeast Michigan, Beaumont Health, which completes the opening of the market to Priority Health.