How do you view email marketing? Do you see email as a precision medium of digital communication? Think of how an Olympic archer would zero in on a target for a perfect bullseye – that's good email marketing. Or, on the other hand, do you take the spray-and-pray approach, buying email in bulk like a farmer who buys soybeans by the ton? Falling into the latter school of thought could explain the lackluster results of past email marketing campaigns.
Optimizing email for mobile is no longer optional for healthcare marketers. For email campaigns that target physicians and mid-level prescribers, it is not enough that the email simply reach the HCP. It must also be designed to render across multiple mobile devices, with concise, to-the-point messages that can be skimmed and easily processed. Mobile email opens continue to rise; in fact, author Jenna Mons estimates that the mobile health market will more than double its share by 2017 in her article, Mobile Technology's Impact On Healthcare Marketing.
Gearing your message toward certain specialties is not just good target marketing; it's also the law. When you have a drug targeted toward a certain specialty, the marketing message is typically only approved for that specialty. If you inadvertently send that message to irrelevant specialties due to a poorly authenticated list, you may run afoul of the FDA and face compliance issues. The FDA continues to crack down on all pharmaceutical marketing practices – internally and externally. More scrutiny is on the horizon, which is why specialty authentication is more important than ever.
Are you ready for a time warp? Ready to leave 2006 and welcome 2016? While the healthcare industry has been asleep, email marketing has become the leading firepower in digital outreach. Industries from retail to travel to financial services continue to evolve email optimization strategies that engage audiences and drive transactions, leaving healthcare in the dust with its head in the sand. How can you catch up?
Purchasing a list from a vendor and trusting it blindly is not just a bad marketing move; it also poses legal and regulatory dangers. To understand why, think about early miners panning for gold. Now, imagine that instead of using a pan that filtered all the gravel, dirt, and other unwanted material away from the gold, the miners just took the entire deposit. As a result, most of the material the miners hauled back would be utterly worthless. The gold is now harder to identify, and the miners have added unnecessary weight during transit.
At some point in your childhood, you probably played the game telephone. With all players seated in a circle, the game begins with one person whispering a phrase to the person on the right. The whisperer is not allowed to repeat the phrase, so the hearer must then do his or her best to pass the phrase on to the person to the right.
This process continues until the message has reached its originator, who repeats the original phrase as well as the one that got whispered to him or her. Anyone with any "telephone" experience knows that the phrase is invariably mangled by the time it has come full circle.
When security personnel check our IDs at the airport, they don't just glance at the name to ensure it matches the one on the plane ticket. After all, that just proves that the person has an ID with the correct name; it doesn't prove that the person is who he or she claims to be. To verify that, you need to compare the photograph on the ID to the face of the person going through security.
