Whether your hospital’s patient base is local, regional, or national, service line competition can be fierce. You can’t afford to lose any of your case volume to competing hospitals. But how can you connect with the practitioners who will be the best referrers to your service line? How can you effectively communicate with the ones who will make the biggest contribution to your business?
Physicians love email, but general newsletters don’t grab their attention. Emails focused on their specific interests are much more effective. To be successful, though, those emails have to reach each physician’s preferred inbox. Whether or not that happens depends on the quality of your email list.
Don’t Skimp on Your Email List
Email lists have something in common with racehorses and purebred dogs—their lineage matters. The source of your email addresses, or your list pedigree, directly affects the success of your email marketing campaign, from deliverability to ROI. If you’ve ever bought an unauthenticated email list for pennies per address, chances are you know this first-hand.
The solution is purchasing a list from a company that vets the addresses through reliable email sourcing practices. An email list with a strong pedigree may cost you more, but the extra expense is an investment that will actually lower the overall cost of your campaign. Sending to reliable, accurate email addresses ensures the highest delivery, open, and click-through rates for each campaign.
First-Party Sourcing Matters
DMD uses first-party sourcing to guarantee our list pedigree. This means that our contact information comes directly and voluntarily from physicians and mid-level prescribers who give their information to our partner publishers. Our primary email sourcing comes from co-registrations on medical publisher websites and newsletters.
We then authenticate each registering user's information against the American Medical Association (AMA) Physician Masterfile. The Physician Masterfile contains certification and contact information for nearly every medical doctor (MD) and doctor of osteopathy (DO) in the United States, Puerto Rico, the Virgin Islands, and some Pacific Islands. In total, the Physician Masterfile contains information for more than 1.4 million physicians, residents, and medical students. Because today's healthcare professionals (HCPs) aren't just doctors, we also authenticate addresses against the National Provider Identifier (NPI) database.
Accurate Addresses Are Essential
Physicians, physician assistants, and nurse practitioners supply their contact information to our publishers for the purpose of receiving medical-related emails. We compare these addresses to the others they have provided on various websites we support to ensure consistency.
We also verify domain names. Domain verification refers to the practice of comparing the domain of an HCP's email address – the part of the address that comes after "@," such as "@stjudeshospital.com" – to his or her practice setting. Finally, to be sure we have the most current address, DMD provides our publishers with an e-change-of-address system to help them stay in touch with their HCP users.
An email list is only as good as its source, but when you work with DMD you can be confident you’re using the best healthcare database available. In fact, DMD is the only U.S. company with a first-party email database that has been certified by BPA Worldwide.
