How to Measure ROI for New Mover Campaigns

What’s the best way to measure the success of a new mover campaign?

The short answer is to hold a control group.

While I was in the marketing department at St.Vincent Health, I had a hospital c-suite executive say to me “St.Vincent is already the best-known healthcare provider in Indianapolis. All the new movers will find us anyway.”

My response was “With all due respect, I disagree. Let’s hold a control group and allow the market to teach us what effect a new mover campaign will have on our hospital operations.”

CMPkc recommends hospitals and healthcare organizations isolate 10% of their new mover records as a control group. This control group receives no new mover communication. We then compare the behavior of 10% control group to the behavior of the 90% of new movers who received the direct mail and digital ads, to determine return on investment (ROI).

After the new mover campaign has been in effect for a full year, healthcare marketers can compare hospital services utilization for households that received the direct mail/digital ads to the control group. We can also compare utilization of those that responded to the new mover campaign to non-respondents and we can compare these two groups to the control group as well. This scientific approach to ROI analytics will teach us the value and effectiveness of the new mover campaign and provide information needed to optimize the program.

Measuring ROI for a new mover campaign isn’t as complicated as you might think. It can be done with or without a CRM.

For clients without a CRM, CMPkc can perform a simple “match” of hospital-provided patient financial records to new mover files to provide the analytics listed above. While this analysis is more simplistic than what a large-scale CRM provider might be able to do, CMPkc can provide data that healthcare marketers can use to prove the campaign’s value to the overall marketing plan.

In my experience leading CMPkc, when hospitals perform an ROI analysis of their new mover campaign, the campaigns run for many years. A new mover campaign will pay for itself and provide significant downstream revenue to hospital service lines such as primary care, urgent care, emergency, women’s and infants, orthopaedics, cardiovascular, bariatrics and more.

Tom Wiser is a former marketing director for St.Vincent Health in Indianapolis, IN, where he successfully launched a health system wide new mover campaign. He is now CMPkc’s Vice President.