3 Strategies For Pre-Qualifying Your Clients’ Insurance

For most addiction treatment clients, the single biggest barrier to choosing a treatment provider is cost. Luckily, insurance providers are often able to soften the financial blow, stepping in and covering important recovery services including detox, residential, and outpatient care.

We won’t dive into the in-network and out-of-network complexities in this article because you probably already have a short list of insurance providers that frequently reimburse your facility.

Instead, let’s talk about another aspect of insurance reimbursement that is sometimes overlooked in marketing: how can you pre-qualify your clients to ensure their insurance provider works with your facility?

Why pre-qualify

Let’s face it: your admissions team is busy. Between fielding phone calls from people seeking treatment to onboarding newly admitted clients, they don’t have much time to spare worrying about insurance policies.

While the admissions process will always involve gathering detailed information from a prospective client, including their insurance provider, pre-qualifying your leads can help streamline the process.

For one, with pre-qualified leads, your admissions team won’t have to spend as much time referring potential clients to other facilities that accept different insurance policies or government-run policies like Medicare, Medicaid, or Medi-Cal.

At the same time, pre-qualifying your leads makes it easier to commit your team’s resources towards certain potential clients. Since deciding on a treatment program can sometimes take weeks or even months, it’s important to make sure you’re putting the effort into clients that can actually afford your services.

Three ways to pre-qualify

We’ve talked about why it’s helpful to pre-qualify your leads. Now let’s talk about how to actually do it in a way that doesn’t alienate potential clients, anger referral sources, or lose people altogether by making them jump through too many hoops while they are still shopping.

“Soft qualify” through PPC ads

One of the easiest and least noticeable ways to pre-qualify leads is to use what we call a “soft qualification” process through Pay-Per-Click (PPC) advertising. These methods work on both Google and Bing equally.

There are two main techniques for doing this depending on how “soft” you’d like to be.

Using call-out extensions on your PPC ads is an excellent way to inform potential customers of the insurances that you don’t accept—typically Medicare and Medicaid—through bullet point-like additions at the bottom of the ad. This is a less direct form of pre-qualification which won’t alienate your clients, but, at the same time, many may miss it altogether.

A more direct form of “soft” qualification is through the use of landing pages tied to your PPC campaigns. While we recommend landing pages in general for PPC advertising, landing page best practices is an article for another time. Assuming you’ve set up a landing page tied to your PPC campaign, consider including an insurance qualification question on your landing page’s contact form.

Use social campaigns

If you’re already running social media advertising campaigns for your facility, you’ll likely have a few ads that direct users to a landing page, rather than your direct site.

If so, one easy way to pre-qualify leads in social media advertising is to add an insurance qualification question to the contact form, such as “What kind of insurance coverage do you have?” or “What insurance do you plan to use?”

Making these questions optional gives users the choice to answer or ignore them, lowering the pressure on their responses as they consider multiple treatment providers.

Try multiple-choice forms

When adding questions to landing page forms, whether in social media or PPC campaigns, one key tactic is to ensure that users have little to no barriers to sending their information to you. Adding just one more question to a form or making users go through one extra step to verify their responses can be enough to make users skip filling out a form altogether.

To that end, one technique we’ve explored is a multiple-choice drop-down menu for insurances rather than a blank “free write” option, lowering the amount of time it takes for a prospective client to submit their responses.

None of these techniques are foolproof and their effectiveness will depend greatly on your awareness of your market, your prospective clients, and your preferred insurance providers. But trying out some of the steps above to pre-qualify your leads can enhance your lead quality, spare your admissions team’s valuable time, and ultimately improve your clients’ admissions process overall.

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