Email marketing is about more than sending general emails to thousands of email addresses while simultaneously hoping for the best. Or, at least, it should be more than that. To emphasize the important role of personalization in healthcare email marketing, this blog will contrast the experience of receiving a general “one-size-fits-all” email with the experience of receiving a highly tailored, individualized email.

The catch-all approach: an email written for HCPs

Olivia is a healthcare provider in the middle of a particularly hectic day. In fact, she is several hours into her shift and has finally found a small window of time between patient visits to sip coffee and check her work email.

She sits down at her desk and musters the courage to see how many unread emails are waiting in her inbox: 146. Despite having cleaned out her inbox yesterday evening, it seems the emails have regrouped and returned with reinforcements. Fortunately, Olivia excels at discerning which emails are worth opening and which ones belong in the trash bin. Her eyes take one row at a time, skimming the sender, subject line, and preheader of an email. With precision, she decides each email’s fate (to click or to dump?) in one second or less, though not always with perfect accuracy.

More than halfway through sorting her inbox, one email’s subject line and preheader pique her interest. This email promises information on a recently FDA-approved therapy that could positively impact the treatment of Olivia’s patients. Though the subject line and preheader are cut off due to size of her screen, she decides the email is worth opening based on the details available. She soon realizes she made a mistake.

First, the email’s content is not what she hoped. The therapy is for a disease state that does not pertain to Olivia’s specific patient group. Secondly, the email’s design is not displaying quite right. Olivia had to jump around in the email to learn the most critical points regarding the therapy being marketed. Even if she had been a member of the email’s target audience, she still would have become frustrated while trying to glean useful information.

By all accounts, the email is ineffective. Its content does not pertain to Olivia’s area of medical expertise or patient group and the email’s design offers a clunky user experience. Worse yet, the sender of the email knew next to nothing about Olivia aside from her email address.

Within five seconds after opening it, Olivia deletes the email because the marketers responsible for sending it failed to understand Olivia as an individual. In fact, the marketers failed to understand the thousands of other HCPs who received the same email. What happened to leveraging data and insights that are at each marketers’ fingertips to create meaningful and carefully curated messaging for their target audience?

What about healthcare marketers who understand HCPs beyond their email address? Here is the scenario again. Only this time, the marketers leverage a 360-degree view that will enable them to create a personalized experience for Olivia.

The personalized approach: an HCP email written for Olivia

Marketers in the life sciences industry want to send emails that promote a new educational program for patients recently diagnosed with type 1 diabetes. The goal of the program is to help patients better understand the nutritional requirements and the daily ins and outs of treatment.

This is where Olivia enters the picture. The marketers know that Olivia:

• Is a nurse practitioner trained in endocrinology
• Specializes in treating patients with type 1 diabetes
• Oversees the needs of admitted patients with type 1 diabetes

These details already make Olivia an ideal candidate for receiving materials regarding patients with type 1 diabetes. However, the healthcare marketers also know that Olivia:

• Works at a rural hospital where disease state literacy is low and educational resources are scarce
• Attends conferences that focus on raising awareness of type 1 diabetes in rural, low-income communities
• Spends time online searching for resources to help educate patients who are newly diagnosed with type 1 diabetes
• Engages other HCPs in public forums, seeking advice on how to educate patients who are admitted into the hospital due to complications from type 1 diabetes

The educational program the marketers are promoting is the solution that Olivia is actively seeking. To pique Olivia’s interest, the marketers now must ensure the email itself is written, designed, and delivered in such a way that it maximizes the likelihood that Olivia will open it and click through to learn more. The marketers know that:

• Olivia’s “day” is really night because she works the night shift at the hospital
• She consistently checks her work email between 1:30AM and 2:30AM
• Her device of choice is her mobile tablet (because her “desk” is really a table in the hospital cafeteria)

Knowing when Olivia checks her email, the marketers can schedule the email to improve its odds that it will be at the top of her inbox when she opens her email app. Since the marketers also know what device Olivia is using, they can also make sure that the subject line and preheader don’t exceed character counts and that the email layout is designed for the best possible experience on a tablet.

So, as Olivia checks her work email in the middle of her particularly hectic day, this message stands out, earns an open, and receives a click-through. Meanwhile, even though the marketers behind this email are sending it to fewer HCPs than the marketers in our first scenario, the HCPs who are receiving it are now more likely to act promptly on the call to action of the email.  

Take the personalized approach to your HCP email marketing

Email marketing is a science that requires data, personalization, and precision. IQVIA’s OneKey Global Marketing Services team can help you create and deliver a customized communication strategy tailored to individual HCP preferences like Olivia’s – all while backed by the world’s largest and most comprehensive database of global HCP reference data known as OneKey. This database contains profiles on 23M HCPs and 2.6M healthcare organizations across 116 countries, all with up to 1,000 data attributes, ready to help you reach the right HCP with the right message at the right time.