Impact of AI-Powered Health Insurance Discounts and Wellness Programs on Member Engagement and Retention

Abstract

AI-driven health insurance discounts and wellness programs drive up to four times the member engagement of outdated, manual wellness programs that are disconnected from dynamic member attributes. Our testing shows that each member saves $200 annually or more on mirrored discounts she is willing to earn but would otherwise have paid more, leading to significant anticipated program retention. Nearly three-quarters of members who visit our site view and select actions to unlock discounts even before checking the other forms of personalized health resources we offer. Serial and tech-savvy members are most likely to view and select actions. Organically, up to 5% of members participate in referrals that lower our sales acquisition costs. We use moral words, metaphors, and vivid language to describe the quantified benefits of participation and program meaningfulness. A learning path split test gives members access to discounts immediately or only after they complete a health quiz. The learning path does not impact program engagement.

When a member on our site reveals consistent interest in a discount, we determine how close she is to program eligibility and begin follow-up emails encouraging her to earn the discount a few days later. Our analysis comparing engagement rates among those who visit our site suggests that follow-up emails boost overall engagement further. We conduct a holdout to determine the causal impact of our AI-personalized discount messages. Overall, AI-driven discounts control estimated engagement rates between 7% and 11.7%. Interest-based messaging generates slightly less engagement than scarcity messaging or bonus content messaging. Scarcity messaging, which prompts quick decision-making by threatening the loss of a budgeted resource, always performs better than interest-based messaging in scenarios where only interest or scarcity messaging is sent, or where both are sent but only scarcity receives a follow-up. Controlling discount strategies produces little engagement, at times breaking double digits.