#1: Stop paying to advertise to your own customers
(Exclusion lists)
The situation
You’re running acquisition campaigns to bring in new members, patients, or prospects, but a big chunk of your traffic, clicks, and phone calls are coming from people who you’ve already spent acquisition dollars acquiring.
That creates a double cost:
You’re paying ad dollars to reach people who don’t need to convert (again)
You’re also paying operationally when they call, chat, or submit forms unnecessarily
Why teams do this
Teams use exclusion lists to:
Cut wasted spend
Reduce call center and support noise
Improve conversion rates on acquisition campaigns
Get cleaner performance data
The mental model
Think of this as budget protection.
Before you try to grow, you make sure you’re not leaking spend on people who already converted or aren’t eligible.
This is basically suppression logic (the same thing ecommerce and SaaS teams do) just applied in a healthcare-safe way.
Typical audience logic (conceptual, not prescriptive)
Goal: Reducing wasted spend and call center overload
A large, regional health plan started with exclusion lists as their very first Audiences use case.
During insurance open enrollment, they were seeing massive volumes of traffic and phone calls driven by paid ads, but a large portion of that traffic was coming from their own existing members.
Roughly 30% of all inbound calls were from current members who were already enrolled. That meant they were paying twice:
Once in ad spend to reach people who didn’t need to convert
Again operationally, when those members called in to the contact center
They implemented exclusion lists to remove existing members from acquisition campaigns.
This allowed them to:
Stop paying to advertise to people who were already enrolled
Reduce unnecessary call center volume
Protect acquisition budget during high-spend enrollment periods
