DMD Intelligence

Spamville – our not-so-affectionate term for ending up in subscribers' spam folders – is every email marketer's worst nightmare. If we were professional athletes, Spamville would be a career-ending knee injury. Engagement rates, ROI, and – indirectly – sales, all depend on your readers actually seeing your content. When your message gets routed to spam folders, your content, however fantastic, becomes invisible. Think of the age-old question about the tree dropping in the forest with no one around to hear it.

A manufacturer wouldn't dream of shipping a product without first subjecting it to quality assurance (QA) inspections. QA ensures that lemons don't make it out of the plant and that consumers get what they want. This principle seems so elementary, yet many healthcare marketing companies fail to perform these kinds of checks on email lists. Instead, they take the "send first, ask questions later" approach to email marketing. As a result, their delivery and engagement rates reflect that haphazard strategy. By contrast, DMD puts every new email address through a rigorous quality control process that effectively separates the wheat from the chaff.

Healthcare marketers must offset the limitations of mobile with responsive design programming. If an email is not easily read on a mobile device, the chances of it ending up in the trash folder is almost certain. In a recent article in MediaPost, Loren McDonald identifies seven elements for optimizing email across multiple mobile devices. DMD wrote a similar blog in March 2015, Designing Emails for Multiple Devices.

If you were hiking and encountered quicksand, you would probably make a note on your map never to go that way again. Without making some record of where the quicksand was, you risk making the same mistake again.

The same idea applies to email marketing. Spam traps are the quicksand of our industry. We deploy millions of emails every month for our clients. With that many emails going out, you can imagine how often we've encountered bad domains on the email lists that they bring us. When we do, we add the domain to our email database. We also take a preventive approach, spot-checking addresses before we deploy to them.

In the creation and maintenance of an email database, relationships reign supreme. Medical publishers are among the best positioned companies that can obtain opt-in email addresses directly from healthcare professionals who are seeking medically relevant information. DMD, as a licensee of the AMA database, is among the best positioned companies that can authenticate HCPs against the AMA Physician Masterfile. Working in partnership, DMD and medical publishers who control more than 80% of controlled circulation publications have created a holistic, mutually beneficial relationship that breaks the barrier for maintaining an authenticated, opt-in HCP email database.

How a company goes about getting a list of email addresses is just as important as the addresses themselves. Some address-collection methods are simply ineffective, while others may even be illegal. For example, if your email list contains healthcare professionals (HCPs) who haven't opted in to receive communication in some way, not only will your email marketing campaign metrics suffer, but you’re putting yourself at risk of integrity and legal issues.

Dr. Roger Korman, President of DMD, personally answers some of the questions from last week's MM&M webcast, Catch Us If You Can: The Email Channel Has Taken Off While You’ve Been Left Behind. Missed the live presentation? Watch it on demand here.

There’s a time and a place for just about everything, but emailing porn stars about formulary change and patent expiration is not one of them. In fact, healthcare marketers are practically begging for the FDA to slap down a lawsuit – inadvertently or not – by marketing pharmaceutical products to people outside of the healthcare profession. All too often, marketers use lists full of bad domain names (i.e., the part of the address after the "@"), putting them at risk for legal action and getting blocked from email service providers for violating CAN-SPAM rules.