Email is one of the core channels for building and developing communication between pharma brands, patients, and HCPs. As a marketing tool, email allows delivering well-targeted messages to the recipients, highlighting the key point of your emails and it is a fast and simple way to communicate with your target audience. Thoughtfully designed email campaigns may benefit pharma brand image in multiple ways:
- Increase brand awareness
- Increase sales
- Develop trust
- Increase traffic
- Communication automation
Today pharma email marketing has the capacity to reach patients, clients, and HCPs on a personal level, giving brand sales the opportunity to create a close connection with the audience. At the same time, large-scale email campaigns designed for reaching more generalized target audiences, allow marketers to work with customers on an international level. Modern marketing practices in pharma and life sciences industries show that email marketing is not only a powerful standalone tool but also has to serve as a vital part of the omnichannel approach as well.
However, many marketing specialists working in the pharma sphere nowadays face multiple obstacles when it comes to a better understanding of the effect of email communication. As well, many marketing practices and tools frequently turn out to be task-irrelevant or simply obsolete. And when it comes to international campaigns, the quality of communication can be compromised due to the large target audience volumes and the lack of data which may result in complete entropy for email marketing managers. All these major concerns witness that pharma companies require a powerful email platform, that will allow its users to make informed decisions.
The modern pharma market requires an approach reaching above “universal”, above non-industry-specific tools and pre-omnichannel marketing conventions. Nowadays it is not a question of whether it will be a benefit to use AI and ML-based algorithms for reaching high personalization in mail targeting, but a necessity recognized by both pharma brands and top MarTech companies working in the field.
In the present blog, we will highlight some of the top obstacles that stand before sales representatives in pharma and will focus on the major directions of marketing innovations that help break through the noise and make thoughtful analytics-motivated solutions. But let’s start with some of the key specifics of email marketing for pharmaceuticals, so we can understand the challenges better.
What is interactive email?
Interactive email is, basically, an approach in digital marketing that allows creating complex digital letters featuring such interactive elements as dynamic templates and AMP elements. The other important element of the interactive email ecosystem is the analytical tools suite that helps gather relevant data, process, segment and employ it for better personalization of your email campaigns and customer behavior prediction. For businesses, interactive email is a great opportunity to boost email marketing and contribute to the digital maturity of the brand.
Email marketing in Pharma: Channel-specific features
Marketing approach and, namely, email marketing codes are, of course, not the same for all industries. When we are talking about the pharma and life sciences field, it is important to understand the smallest nuances, to get a clear understanding of how the workflow can be optimized.
MLR requirements
Every piece of content and information provided by pharma marketers has to go through a legal audit before the information can be published. This requirement adds a certain complexity to the production of big volumes of content, increasing its value and time required for production. However, with the help of advanced digital content practices like module and reusable content approaches, the marketing team can save resources by smartly dividing content into semantic modules that can be used multiple times across different channels.
Hybrid marketing approach
When we are talking about marketing in pharma companies it is also important to keep in mind that conventional, face-to-face marketing methods are still playing an important role in communication between different stakeholders. Hence, all digital marketing efforts should stay in line with the non-digital activities, complementing each other within an omnichannel approach. This means that effective marketing strategies imply the integration of all related activities and all marketing agents, whether they communicate with customers via digital channels or in person.
Various stakeholders in the patient journey
Sometimes the sales funnel can be a little bit complex when it comes to marketing services and goods in the pharma industry – multiple HCPs like doctors and pharmacists are important agents that may influence the decision made by the patient. This means that each valuable groups of influence have to be targeted at various levels, to build and support effective communication with all stakeholders involved in the process.
Privacy matters
Quite often the most valuable information that can be used by the marketing team to draw up a roadmap and better understand the market is classified. When we are talking about the healthcare industry, we face multiple information-protective legislations aimed at concealing patients’ personal data and other sensitive information. However, modern AI-based algorithms are frequently applied to get a better understanding of the market and the audience based on information collected by your system. This means that valuable data is not unreachable, still, it requires some special solutions to be extracted.
Interactive Email Campaigns by Viseven
Interactive Emails Solution is a specialized tools kit designed for building effective strategies. With more than 12 years of experience in the MarTech sphere, Viseven has built numerous omnichannel marketing strategies, utilizing all advanced marketing automation platforms and essential analytics. Interactive Emails functionality can be integrated with the eWizard content development ecosystem opening opportunities for automation of the content production process, implementation of a modular approach, and achieving cost and time reduction. So, let’s have a sneak peek at some of the key Interactive Emails features and find out how they help marketers to break through the noise and deliver the key ideas to the users in a most engaging way.
Analytics and performance metrics
As we already mentioned, advanced analytics is crucial for the pharma industry, since the spere has numerous legislations aimed at the protection of the personal data of the patient. However, it does not mean that marketers have to stay completely “blind”, once they can rely on advanced behavioral data collected by AI-powered algorithms. Interactive Emails solution allows collecting basic metrics like delivery rate or click-to-open rate, processing large volumes of behavioral data, and coming up with a better understanding of the target audience.
Dynamic Email Theme Template
Dynamic Templates is a technology that, foremost, helps to save time and resources spent on the production of email content. The major benefits of this approach are:
- Reduced number of template archives
- Single email master template
- The production time is reduced by 20%
The present Interactive Emails feature is very much rooted in the modular approach to content production. It means that you will be able to use multiple reusable content modules like MLR-approved segments or you can make edits to the master email, automatically editing all the subordinate emails at once. This interactive email approach facilitates email content production and helps pharma businesses to free time for a creative part.
AMP Emails (Interactive elements)
AMP Email (Accelerated Mobile Pages Emails) – is a feature that helps to add dynamic elements to the email design. AMP features primarily serve two major purposes – to make your pharmaceutical emails more engaging and to organize visual information and written content in a more appealing and structured manner. With the help of AMP, the designers can add interactive visual elements, action buttons, gamification elements, mini-applications, etc.
Also, an interactive email service allows inserting a customer survey. For example, surveys on user experience or a personalized questionnaire for clients and long-time subscribers. Nowadays, email marketing is almost unthinkable without advanced design elements that help you to add interactivity to your design, break through the noise and make a strong impression on the recipients.
Email automation
This important module allows sending automated interactive emails triggered by some of the actions made by the subscribers. It is an essential feature that is crucial for providing fast and relevant feedback to the clients who are already engaged in their journey. Automated emails also serve for client retention, informing about policy changes or events. Automated emails also allow personalizing email content, with the help of user data collected by your system.
AI and Machine Learning Algorithms
Interactive Emails Solution help marketers take the personalization of communication to the next level, being able to collect essential behavioral data which also contributes a lot towards the automation of all processes. For example, ML algorithms help analyze the attributes of each subscriber for better management of the customer journey. In this case, every next channel of communication can vary in each next journey, depending on system recommendations.
Also, AI and ML-based algorithms may help set the best sending time for each subscriber, which helps maximize the efficiency of the email campaign. And with a reliable database, the marketing team can implement the omnichannel approach to its furthest extent, introducing prediction models and personalization on a scale of each individual subscriber.
Interactive Emails within an omnichannel approach
As you can see, Interactive Email is a powerful tool that can be used for building a solid email marketing strategy based on an innovative approach to email marketing. However, you can get even more out of your digital campaigns, once you learn to orchestrate all channels and manage the content according to the omnichannel approach, which implies the unification of all marketing channels into a single ecosystem. The great advantages of this level of system integrity are the ability to assemble the global marketing data and to create marketing campaigns that use several channels of communication which allows reaching higher engagement rates among your audience.
The omnichannel approach is proven to provide a 20% higher click-through rate and a 250% higher engagement rate in the pharma industry. One of the main conceptual points of the approach is that unified channels create more customer journey opportunities, while the well-targeted, personalized content also helps reduce the cost of each contact acquired. The Interactive Emails by Viseven are fully integrated within the eWizard Platform, which allows marketers to build global omnichannel campaigns, orchestrating multiple digital and non-digital channels via a single management ecosystem.
Remember that content is king
Interactive Email Solution can do a lot to help you optimize email strategy, boost your omnichannel marketing efforts and provide you with relevant data. However, the content still remains the key element of the success of your email marketing. No matter how well-targeted and aesthetically sophisticated your mail is, how good it is in terms of interactivity if the subject line does not resonate with the interests and needs of the receiver. That’s why we also included several essential tips for content production you may find helpful.
Goal and task of pharmaceutical email marketing:
Email is not a blog, neither it is a white paper or a complex guide. That’s why you need to define the main goal and task of the email, so you will have a clear vision of what exact information you want to communicate. The major goal of a marketing team is to lead the customers through the journey and reach the expected results. At the same time, the task of the email can be far narrower. It is defined by the key influence that the message is expected to make. We can designate the following key tasks of email in the pharma:
- Awareness
- Engagement
- Registration
- Acquisition
- Retention
- Special
The key influence, in other words, the task of the email, will define the style and tone of content you provide. Also, a clear understanding of the email marketing objectives helps to manage your content according to the mission it serves, segment and store your content according to its major purpose.
Content testing
There is no other universal way in email marketing to find out if your headline is really killing it, rather than to test it in the field. When planning a large-scale campaign, it is important to test your content – define the most clickable headlines, engaging core text, eye-catching interactive elements and define the most effective letter from the point of your strategies and goals. Simple A/B testing will help to increase the efficiency of the headline and express the main point of the letter in a clear manner. When your digital reaches a certain level of maturity, the data acquired during testing will also contribute to your global research data assets.
Overview
Nowadays it is no longer the question of whether pharma and life sciences industries need to boost their digital presence or not since it is becoming obvious that the role of digital is growing faster than many businesses manage to understand it. Since conventional door-to-door marketing can’t offer solutions for all the challenges the pharma sphere faces today, the importance of digital communication grows dramatically. Viseven interactive digital solutions designed specifically for carrying out marketing efforts in the sphere can offer all the required tools for building an effective marketing strategy for your pharma brand.
Learn more about Viseven MarTech solutions for pharma and life sciences industries and how your business can benefit from them. If you have any questions about interactive email marketing for pharmaceuticals, in particular, fill out the form below and our representative will contact you with more information about Viseven products and solutions.
