Timing is everything—both in life and also in marketing.
Perhaps you’re considering a trip to the Grand Canyon and you suddenly get an email with links to hotel deals, airfare specials, and tours of the South rim. Such a well-timed message may encourage you to go ahead and book these details. This makes your vacation planning quick and painless.
In the marketing world, a “hand-raiser” can be summed up in a simple sentence: A person who identifies himself as a prospective customer, to a company, by volunteering contact information. For the marketer, receiving that interest is a choice position to be in.
Physicians who are viewing online job posts are, in a way, raising their hands. But, until recently, unless they took the extra step to hand over their personal information, you couldn’t know for sure which physicians were in the crowd. Rather, it was just a sea of hands—undeterminable through a foggy landscape of aggregate data.
Growing up, my parents always told me, “You get what you pay for.” The unsaid message was not to be tempted by bargain prices for things too good to be true. Sometimes they were talking about the importance of selecting reputable local service providers for things like auto repairs and home maintenance. Other times they were referring to saving up for quality restaurants and vacation destinations. I grew up learning the value of investing my own hard-earned money wisely. The sting of disappointment in a cheap product or service far outlasted the joy of saving a few bucks up front.
The same adage also holds true when it comes to educating physicians about your products. If your marketing campaign is worth your time, effort, and cost, your investment will pay off in the results you can expect. The best place to start is by ensuring you’re using a high-quality physician email list to create segmented messages to engage your recipients.
One of the key tactics for successful healthcare staffing is following up with physicians who have expressed interest in available positions. Since email is physicians’ preferred mode of such communication, it’s important to think about where the email addresses in your database came from so you know you’re reaching the right physician every time.
Fortunately, DMD provides email data that guarantees just that. Specifically, there are three core assurances that speak to our level of physician list quality.
We all know the stereotype of the used car salesman trying desperately to sell someone a vehicle that they don’t need or want. Perhaps the shopper is looking for a compact car, but the salesperson is pushing an SUV. This effectively halts the sales conversation and leaves the shopper running for the door.
While this scenario is often played from a comical angle in sitcoms and movies, it can also drive home a serious reminder for pharma marketers: Know your physicians and listen to what they want. This insight is essential to forming authentic alliances so you can deliver the desired information through your website and email marketing.
Limbo doesn’t always have to resonate as a bad spot to be in, especially when the outcome is out of your control. You can’t do anything to change it, so the resulting downtime presents the opportunity for a welcome break. However, this “intermission” doesn’t mean you can kick back and let all responsibilities rest.
The U.S. News Best Hospital surveys have been collected and the data is being compiled. With the results not scheduled to be released until later this summer, it’s to be determined whether you make the grade (or not). Yet, this is not the time to neglect communicating your health system’s strengths to physicians within your network—or even those outside your network.
Every industry has its metrics. Batting averages in baseball, stars for restaurants, ticket sales for musicians—to name just a few. These crucial measurements can determine salaries, menu prices, or venues. Yet their importance varies according to the context.
Batting average is irrelevant for an American League pitcher, and a local band may be more concerned with attracting YouTube followers than selling out its Friday gig. In other words, for metrics to be meaningful, you have to choose them carefully.
You’d never go onto a car lot, close your eyes, spin yourself around, then randomly point at a vehicle with the intention of buying it on the spot. A great amount of research and inspection occurs before such a large purchase. While the phrase “kicking the tires” has literal origins in doing just that, it has evolved to also encompass the process of reading consumer reviews, researching safety features, and figuring out if you can realistically afford new wheels.
The same course of action applies to physicians contemplating a job change. The thought of a physician showing up at a hospital’s door and declaring, “I’m ready—hire me!” is appealing to healthcare staffing professionals, but it’s not realistic. Physicians also do plenty of research before making life-changing decisions—checking out your practice opportunities along with accompanying financial and lifestyle benefits.
Having ready access to a wealth of information about disease tracks and population health is changing the way HCPs do business today. With concrete data points to guide them, providers are able to apply key analytics as part of a comprehensive approach to improving patient outcomes and increasing efficiency.
Pharmaceutical marketers can also benefit from incorporating such a strategy rooted in metrics to guide their marketing efforts. When you work from detailed data about your providers, you can build more effective campaigns to educate them about the latest medications and their benefits.
We all know what you do when life gives you lemons. The extent to how tasty the resulting lemonade is depends on what other ingredients you have at your disposal. Straight lemon juice is sour-tasting at best, not to mention the number it does on the stomach. But, if you have water, sugar, and ice, it becomes far more palatable. Consider how delicious a concoction you could create if you had additional components, like fresh lavender, berries, or bubbly to make a spritzer.
Simple data only allows for the most basic of campaigns, which often leave physicians with a bad taste. Full-bodied data provides the type of additional details that can really make email campaigns enticing—and leave your physician audience asking for more.
It goes without saying that data and analytics play a crucial role in pharma marketing today. Digital channels are the most efficient way to engage with your target healthcare professionals (HCP), but evaluating the success of your digital strategies can be difficult.
The trick is knowing what data to collect and how to put it to work.
You’ve likely received an email or two (or twenty) referencing the European Union’s implementation of the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), which took effect May 25, 2018. While GDPR is an EU standard, it’s already had a global impact. Companies around the world—from large corporations to small firms—were tasked with deploying “repermissioning campaigns,” fearing the worst in terms of regulatory compliance.
All of this has created quite a digital windstorm surrounding privacy, compliance, and the protection of data. Instead of getting sucked up into the GDPR hurricane, take a minute to sit in the calm of the storm.
In part 2 of our 4 part series, Leveraging the Email Channel Throughout the Pharma Brand Life Cycle, we consider how email marketing can be used to optimize the product launch and introduce a new indication.
The email channel plays a pivotal role throughout a pharma brand’s growth and maturation. This is never more critical than at launch, when the long-term success of the brand is at stake.
If you think about digital advancements, specifically in terms of the healthcare online experience, a friend-or-foe conundrum exists. “Shopping around” for a new provider or seeking out a medical specialist has become nearly as accessible as deciding upon a new brand of washer/dryer for your laundry room. Ease of access becomes a friend for patients but a potential foe for health systems.
Certainly, there’s a consumer component to be considered when addressing patient leakage, yet much of the work to keep cases in-system has to start “at home” with your physicians who are on the frontlines with those patients. Targeted, personalized email is the best way to connect with physicians who are sending patients elsewhere.
At Digital Pharma West, industry leaders will explore how innovative technologies are transforming the pharma business model. Digital tools offer new opportunities for engaging customers, streamlining operations, and staying competitive. In the process, data and analytics are taking center stage.
I see this every day as we work with clients to implement highly effective email marketing and audience identity programs. And I’m looking forward to learning from other’s experiences, starting with these four sessions:
Knock, knock.
Who’s there?
Orange.
Orange who?
Orange you going to contact me about that physician position I’m interested in?
If healthcare staffing was as elementary as a knock-knock joke, healthcare staffing professionals would have an easier time filling vacancies. At the very least, knowing exactly which physician candidates are knocking at your virtual door would ease the process considerably.
