DMD Intelligence

When we hear Facebook is monetizing the personal information of its members without their knowledge, we react with indignation. When we read that Google reads all of our email for keywords, we are offended.

And, when we understand that Alexa is listening to us all the time, we wonder if there’s any part of our lives that is safe from invasion.

My question to you is: Do we need laws to affirm that these are intrusions into our privacy or do we inherently understand that these practices are just plain wrong and never should have been undertaken in the first place?

Lectures, seminars, TED Talks—these are all great ways to get insights and information from experts in their fields. As a member of the audience, it’s understood that some of the information may not personally resonate with you. After all, the speaker cannot touch, specifically, on all the points that interest each and every individual in the crowd.

Or could they?

The New Year is about change. People make resolutions to lose those stubborn 10 pounds or quit French fries. Some vow to spend more time with family and less time in the office. It’s a new day, a new dawn, as the song says. Of course, we tend to keep the good things in our lives as the calendar turns—those things which we can rely on and are familiar with.

As marketing professionals, you know what you need to change and what you need to keep in your mix. Email is a keeper, with its high potential for targeted reach and deep engagement.  

A healthcare marketer I met with recently happened to mention that one limitation with his organization’s traditional physician marketing campaigns is that there’s no way to identify who they reach.  There’s also no easy way to measure the impact of these projects to tell if they lead to physician referrals.

With the increasing emphasis on marketers to prove their worth, I pointed out the value of adding email marketing to complement his organization’s broader physician communications strategy.

Scottsdale, AZ is known for its great fall weather, with temperatures averaging around 75 degrees in November. There’s also lots to see and do in the area. That’s why if you’re headed to the 22nd Annual Healthcare Internet Conference (HCIC), you’ll want to set aside a little time in your busy schedule to explore some of the highlights.

Whether you want to experience the art galleries, indulge in specialty food drinks, or visit Frank Lloyd Wright’s former residence, there’s sure to be something that appeals to your senses.

Healthcare staffing professionals are tasked with finding the "perfect match" for the hospital entities they represent. Thanks to a diminishing physician supply and increasing demand, that undertaking isn’t always achievable in its truest sense. Time constraints and an overfull docket of open positions often results in staffers pushing out a blanket list of open positions with no energy or resources for targeted—and thus valuable—communications.

So, instead of sweetening the deal with an inbox full of “treats” (aka: job incentives), candidates are left to weed through the same old posts with nothing to entice them to take further action. It’s not intentional trickery on the staffers’ part, but it does lead to a frustrated end user—one who might end up ghosting you in the end.

Email is a convenient way to communicate: you can include as much detail as you need to, and people can read and respond to it on their own time. For these reasons and more, many healthcare marketers use email as a cornerstone of their strategy for communicating with their target audiences—including physicians, nurses, social workers, specialists, and more.

When you’re driving to a new destination, you likely put the address in your GPS and let it guide you using the most efficient and direct route. Yet when it comes to your physician marketing efforts, if you aren’t using email to communicate, you’re not taking the best route to drive your messages home.

Many health systems overlook the value email provides to converse with their healthcare providers. Without this important vehicle, your messages may be getting stalled on the information highway.

With most healthcare systems aggressively competing for a limited number of talented healthcare professionals, traditional recruiting methods are no longer enough. That’s why the most successful staffing professionals today rely on a good email database that includes first-party sourced and opted-in physician email addresses. When this list is combined with deeper insights about each professional’s behavior and preferences, it’s easy to tailor your messages to make a more personal connection.

When you go out to dinner with friends, chances are you don’t all order the same meal or request your food to be prepared the same way. Most restaurants try to accommodate individual preferences. Pharma marketers also need to go to the same lengths to serve up content tailored to meet their physician’s specific tastes.

This requires capturing data on an individual level so you can begin to know your physicians and what they care about. Such insights can be the difference between marketing success and failure.