Here's the problem: The digital communication movement travels at warp speed, and the pharmaceutical and healthcare industries are far behind. With healthy marketing budgets to support world-class products, more can be done to improve the return on investment in pharma and healthcare marketing programs.
As marketing guru John Wanamaker famously observed, half the money spent on marketing is wasted; the problem is figuring out which half. For brand managers working with healthcare professionals (HCPs), this maxim is both frustrating and true.
Confucius was around during the Spring and Autumn period, not the Digital Era, but he had the right idea when he said, “Study the past, if you would define the future.” HCP marketers must use metrics of past email campaigns to improve future campaigns. But, they need to look beyond the expected set of metrics (e.g., open and click-through rates).
According to Christopher Mims, tech writer for The Wall Street Journal, the World Wide Web is dying, and mobile technology is killing it. Of course, the Web's ultimate demise is far out in the future, but mobile statistics show some telling trends. For the first time, in 2014, mobile devices surpassed laptops and PCs as the preferred method of accessing digital content. In fact, 60 percent of all Web browsing and digital content consumption occurred on a mobile device.
Here are the questions many healthcare marketing agencies are asking: how can we continue to provide business value to our healthcare clients, and how is our offering different from the competition? Your agency has an opportunity to position itself as an invaluable partner for healthcare marketers by introducing business-building ideas that break down traditional business silos and distribute learning across channels.
The click-through rate long has been used as the benchmark for measuring email marketing success. But with the rapid adoption of mobile technology, the click-through rate is sharing the limelight with a newer metric, the tap-through rate. With tablets and phablets gaining market share, marketers are paying attention to tap through rates, which measure customer interactions from these mobile devices.
Massive growth in the use of mobile devices means more users are opening emails with smartphones and tablets than ever before. But too many healthcare marketers continue to optimize their campaigns as they always have for desktops. This, quite obviously, is a mistake that savvy marketers should avoid making at all costs. That is, unless you're among that rare breed of marketers who enjoy watching their bounce rates skyrocket, it’s time to pay attention to tap through rates.
Physician email marketing has evolved significantly from its inception. Initially, it consisted of unbecoming, inefficient, “batch and blast” tactics that ultimately turned off healthcare audiences. Now, these tactics are not only outdated; they are simply counterproductive.
