How We Turned Slow Healthcare Email Development into 1.8x ROI

Life sciences marketers are running on a content treadmill. Recent research shows that more than half of them need to produce entirely new materials every two months to keep up.

At the same time, access to HCP attention is shrinking. The GMC report shows that many providers are stepping back from educational content because they’re overloaded with work. And when they do make time to engage, generic or promotional materials don’t cut it anymore.

HCPs expect content that’s highly relevant to their reality and their patients. If they have to dig through to find something useful, most won’t bother.

The client, a leading global pharmaceutical brand, needed to constantly produce fresh, engaging materials, personalized for each HCP and each market.

Large volumes of tailored content, combined with unoptimized internal processes, were slowing the company down. Since the brand relied heavily on email as one of its main marketing channels, long production cycles meant missed opportunities to engage HCPs.

Challenge: Costly, Lengthy, Cumbersome Production

With frequent updates and the MLR, building emails from scratch was expensive and exhausting. Every new version meant another cycle of creation, review, and approval.

And even when an email was finally created and approved, there was still another roadblock: marketers had to wait for developers to deploy it. On average, deploying a single interactive visual aid (IVA) with 20 slides could take up to a full day.

The lack of standardization and heavy reliance on manual work increased the risk of human error. Each fix triggered another round of revisions. In some cases, the content development stage for a single IVA took up to four days.

It’s worth adding one more constraint: budget focus was already stretched thin. According to stats, more than 90% of life sciences marketers are juggling, on average, 12 different areas of budget spend, from sales materials and advertising to pharma email development and localization.

In that context, spending days producing and deploying a single email was a luxury the client could no longer afford. Costs and time spent on production overhead also meant costs and time not spent on strategy, experimentation, or improving the quality of engagement with HCPs.

Solution: DCF + Modular Content Platform

The client turned to Viseven to move faster with their email campaigns and reach HCPs on time. When we suggested a modular approach, they raised a lot of concerns based on past experiences. Overhauling the existing strategy seemed expensive, because it implied more change-related risks and more time on training and onboarding.

They also wondered whether they needed to create the modules only or the assets and the modules. There was the fear that, down the line, modular content marketing might slow things down instead of speeding them up.

Marketers worried they would have to manually organize the digital asset management (DAM) system and then navigate through all the modules to find the right ones when building an asset.

Our answer to these concerns was the Digital Content Factory (DCF) and eWizard, an AI-powered content creation platform designed to remove friction from modular content.

The DCF helped create medically accurate content at scale, while eWizard enabled faster content time-to-market. The platform automatically tagged content, allowed to build ready-to-use templates, and made it easy to find the right module when it’s needed.

Some pharma marketers on the team avoided modular content, claiming that it forced them to memorize which module fits which template. It took up mental real estate that should have gone to more strategic work. With eWizard, marketers chose a module, and the platform suggested the appropriate block based on the design rules for that specific channel.

We also knew it was unrealistic to hand over, say, 70 modules to local teams and expect them to figure it out on their own. So, we provided practical guidance on how to assemble those modules into assets across markets.

We also noticed that sales, marketing, and PR teams felt entrenched in the deployment phase, constantly needing assistance from IT. Viseven helped to democratize content production by letting them create assets without involving developers. The low-code authoring tool, eWizard, allows users to drag and drop content modules to build impactful narratives in less time and at lower cost (since coders’ work is often not cheap).

Yet it’s important to understand that Rome was built brick by brick. We started with the pilot to not let errors and inconsistencies spiral and spot areas for improvement. Our team outlined all deliverables and defined what success would look like. It was important to nail down process definitions and develop testing methodologies.

After a month-long pilot, we measured the results to understand where we are right now and what needs to be done to maximize the outcomes over the course of the year.

Outcome: Trimming Production Time in Half

During the first month, we managed to reduce content creation time by 45% and speed up deployment by 38%. Seeing this success, we decided to implement the change agency-wide and extend our one-month pilot to a full year.

The annual results were even more impressive than the first month. We reduced email development time by 51% and deployment time by 45%. The client also reported an ROI increase of 1.8x by the end of the year.

Auto-tagging, templatization, a modular approach, and no-code deployment improved marketers’ satisfaction with their jobs. They could delegate tedious tasks to technology, move on to more high-level thinking, and no longer wait for IT teams’ replies to get things done.

Optimize Your Content Pipeline

To create an impactful story that lands in HCPs’ inboxes at the right time, you need two major things. First, a team of content professionals. They will not only help you craft relevant materials but will also teach your team how to think in modules, embrace organizational change, and make it part of the routine.

Second, you need the right technology. By using an AI-powered content platform like eWizard, you can automatically organize your content library, find the necessary modules, and match them with the right templates. You can also use the tool to deploy content yourself, saving time for the IT team and avoiding the long back-and-forth waltz with developers.

One key takeaway from this case is that when introducing change, you need both the right technology and the right people to make it stick in the organization.