If you're looking for high volume voluntary health insurance product sales, you'll be knocking on the doors of the largest U.S. employers. But, if you want to sell to companies that truly value voluntary products, you might want to create a list of smaller employers.
That's what Eastbridge Consulting Group found while conducting surveys for its U.S. State ESI and EPI Data for 2012 report. Eastbridge also broke the 10 states with the highest penetration of voluntary sales, and the 10 with the lowest.
When companies are compared by number of employees, the largest employer segment (2,500 employees or more) represents the largest total dollar market for voluntary sales ($1.9 billion in 2012). However, size quickly fades as a factor.
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The second largest dollar volume market is that with companies of between 100 and 499 employees ($1.2 billion). Its sales are almost as much as the two immediately larger groups (1,000-2,500 employees and 500-999 employees) combined.
Then Eastbridge sliced the data more finely. It looked at ESI — sales divided by number of employees — to see which company size tended to buy the most product per employee. The results?
The most highly penetrated group sizes are, in order:
- 500-999
- 1,000-2,500
- 100-499
The least penetrated group sizes:
- 10
- 10-25
- 2,500
- 26-99
"In 2012, even though the very large market (2,500 plus employees) had the highest sales volume, it still had one of the lower ESI scores. The most penetrated market segment for voluntary again this year was the 500-999 segment," said Gil Lowerre, president of Eastbridge. "[Total] sales numbers alone don't tell the whole story."
When Eastbridge broke the data down by state, it found that the 10 states with the highest voluntary penetration were Delaware, Arkansas, Kentucky, Tennessee, Louisiana, Georgia, North Carolina, New Mexico, Florida and Nebraska.
Among the lowest : Hawaii, Wyoming, Montana, Washington, Colorado, New Jersey, Virginia and New Hampshire.
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Dan Cook
Dan Cook is a journalist and communications consultant based in Portland, OR. During his journalism career he has been a reporter and editor for a variety of media companies, including American Lawyer Media, BusinessWeek, Newhouse Newspapers, Knight-Ridder, Time Inc., and Reuters. He specializes in health care and insurance related coverage for BenefitsPRO.
