To explain why behavioral targeting is integral to your email medical marketing campaign, we'll use a retail analogy. Imagine if your favorite retailer sent you – a customer of ten years and thousands of dollars in purchases – an email offering 20 percent off your first-ever purchase. Likewise, imagine receiving a promotion from a retailer you’ve never shopped with, advertising double reward points for customers who've spent more than $500 in the last year.
Pharmaceutical marketers on top of their game know that they have about 150 characters, or 18 to 20 words, to make or break an email campaign. Why just 150? The sender field displays roughly 15, the subject line 35, and the preheader 100, when viewed on an iOS mobile device, the type used by about 95 percent of healthcare professionals (HCPs). These three fields, the three amigos of your inbox, have about a second to convince your recipient to open your message. Are you unleashing the power of the three amigos in your email campaigns?
According to Physicians Foundation’s recent report, a whopping 81 percent – up 10 percent from 2012 – of healthcare professionals (HCPs) report being at capacity or overextended when it comes to seeing patients. Nearly 45 percent are actively taking steps to reduce patient access, including closing their practices to new patients and cutting the number of patients seen each day. In fact, four in ten HCPs are so frustrated with the changes in the healthcare landscape that they are taking steps to accelerate retirement and stop practicing altogether.
You may have heard it called the spray-and-pray, shotgun, or batch-and-blast approach to email marketing. Healthcare marketers of that philosophy build huge lists of healthcare professionals (HCPs) and indiscriminately send them mass, generic emails. The only problem is that the shotgun approach to email marketing is the equivalent of an eight-track tape in a digital world.
It's not uncommon to see pharmaceutical companies trying to market a single product across multiple healthcare specialties. What's rare is to see them actually succeed at it. The key most multi-specialty email campaigns lack is a healthy respect for how differently various specialties interact with digital messaging.
The pharmaceutical industry of today is almost unrecognizable from what it was ten years ago. The industry’s dynamics continue to undergo seismic shifts, one of which is the explosion of specialized drugs. The increase in specialized drugs, coupled with the growing reluctance of healthcare professionals (HCPs) to meet with sales reps, has resulted in job cuts and inhospitable and unprofitable conditions for the remaining field staff.
To most pharmaceutical sales reps out in the field, HCPs have become like Moby Dick; reps are always chasing HCPs but never seem to catch them. The reasons for the disappearance of doctors are many, including increasingly hectic schedules and stricter ethical guidelines. Whatever the reasons, the elusiveness of HCPs places pharmaceutical marketers in a bind. These no-see, low-see, and hard-to-see doctors still have strong sales potential, but reps can't effectively sell to people they never see, right?
Changes in the healthcare landscape have transformed the way pharmaceutical marketers interact with healthcare professionals (HCPs). The number of HCPs who restrict rep access has climbed to nearly 50 percent. Similarly, the number of HCPs with no-see policies, especially among oncologists, has nearly doubled since 2008.
Pharmaceutical sales reps don't exactly have it easy these days. An increasingly specialized menu of medications demands highly nuanced knowledge for the reps who sell them. What's more? The Wall Street Journal reported that, in 2010, 25 percent of doctors were "no-see," meaning they wouldn't meet with reps at all. That number is now closer to one-third. As if that weren't enough adversity for reps, pharma companies continue to slash their sales force. AstraZeneca recently cut its sales force by almost a quarter; Eli Lilly cut its reps by 30 percent.
