DMD Intelligence

The rise of digital communications means our inboxes are fuller than ever. Think back to the overwhelm of Black Friday and Cyber Monday, when it seemed every single entity you’d ever given your email address to (and maybe some you didn’t) was emailing with some sort of offer. While those are exceptionally frantic days, using email as a regular means of communication will continue to grow.

How can you ensure your emails stand out in your healthcare providers’ overflowing inboxes? It starts with providing value. Doing so will condition your physicians to recognize your messages as important and worthwhile.

Life is met with little annoyances that are sometimes unavoidable. From loud cell phone talkers to the person who just can’t seem to land within the lines and takes up two precious parking spots, we all regularly encounter pet peeves that are out of our control.

That being the case, we should better understand the benefit of lessening annoyances that are within our control—including email marketing efforts aimed at healthcare professionals.

With winter right around the corner, skiing is a popular sport. Most ski resorts offer different trails to meet the needs of skiers with different levels of expertise. Healthcare marketers can take a similar approach to navigating the slippery slope of email marketing by tailoring their messages for different audiences.

The Importance of Precision Targeting

There are many types of skiers with different skill levels. Similarly, there are many types of physicians and patients with different needs and interests. Just as you wouldn’t send a beginner skier down the black diamond slope, you also wouldn’t want to send an email with physician CME opportunities to non-physician audiences.

We say “the customer is always right,” but a company’s actions don’t always match that sentiment. What the customer increasingly wants—and says he wants—is a more personalized user experience. If you fail to meet that expectation, the consequences can be severe; financial and otherwise.

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.

Have you ever received an email where you had to search high and low on how to take action? Unless it was something you were really interested in, chances are your search ended in a frustrated “forget it!” quickly followed by hitting delete.

A frustrated user is also less likely to engage the next time your healthcare marketing email lands in his inbox, a reaction brought about by the process of conditioning (in this case, negative conditioning).

Consumer data privacy is more than a “hot topic” these days; it’s become a major concern for many. The Cambridge Analytica breach involving millions of Facebook users was just one of the data disasters that exposed widening holes in personal data protection. As a result, regulations such as GDPR and the California Consumer Privacy Act of 2018 have been implemented in an attempt to attack the gaps.

The U.S. Chamber of Commerce is also entering into the discussion, with a recent statement proposing a federal privacy framework which would preempt state law on matters concerning data privacy. This federal structure, they claim, is necessary in order to provide “certainty and consistency to consumers and businesses alike.”

The drive for increased personalization in marketing, regardless of industry, means those on the receiving end of marketing messages have become more fastidious of where they devote their attention. Email messaging that lacks relevance will likely fall to the bottom of a healthcare provider’s digital mail pile, while communications that provide timely, meaningful information rise to the top.

So, anytime you can learn more about your healthcare provider audience—and thus tailor messaging accordingly—you should never pass up that opportunity. Email testing is one of the most helpful ways to accomplish this.

It’s a rare occasion to find solutions that are cost-conscious, highly effective, and fast-acting. One attribute is typically sacrificed for another. In healthcare marketing, email is that very thing—encompassing all of these positive traits.

One of the reasons email works so well is because it is physicians’ preferred messaging channel. Seventy-three percent of physicians report email as their top choice for communication. If you expect to succeed in reaching and engaging physicians, email should be a cornerstone in your marketing mix.

When pharma marketers think about email campaigns, metrics like opens and click-throughs immediately come to mind. It’s nearly impossible to develop successful campaigns without these fundamental measurements.

Yet newer metrics are equally valuable. That’s because the next generation of digital measurement provides individualized data about healthcare professionals (HCPs) who visit medical websites. With audience identity data and digital journey data, pharma brands can connect the dots between email and website marketing in order to produce highly effective, integrated digital campaigns.