Marketing Automation


Marketing to a physician audience is more challenging than ever before. Healthcare marketers start with a huge disadvantage simply because physicians lack time. In addition, filters restrict email communications that are not clinically relevant and limit delivery to physician inboxes. Technology and time make reaching physicians more difficult than ever. Marketing automation ensures that your message is targeted to the right audience, delivered to their inbox, personalized for engagement and optimized to generate conversions. Now that implementing marketing automation technology is easier than ever, learn the 5 advantages of marketing automation on deepening and accelerating physician engagement.

Segmenting the Right Audience
The first step to engaging a physician audience is targeting the right audience with relevant content. Historically, database management has been cumbersome to say the least. Much time and effort has been exhausted trying to manage multiple databases. One of the advantages of marketing automation is the ability to maintain a single centralized database. This database can be segmented and filtered to a specific audience which targets the right audience at the right time and with relevant content. Segmenting based on audience engagement, behavior, and location also facilitates the delivery of customized messages and personalized content. For example, geotargeting allows you to target a specialist in a specific city or state with content from a local hospital, and this regional and relevant content maximizes physician engagement. Analytics from targeted outreach supports and enhances data-driven decisions allowing even greater personalization. Physicians who receive content they care about are most likely to become advocates.

Personalized Content
Marketing has become increasingly complex in the healthcare industry, specifically when targeting hard to reach physicians. Not only does the modern-day HCP lack more time than ever, new technology filters out disruptive and irrelevant information from their inbox automatically. Conversely, through user actions and profile information, we can determine what type of content is important to each physician. Distributing personalized content accelerates physician engagement by making it much more likely that an email is delivered directly to their inbox. Hospitals and health systems are seeking to engage their physician audience through educational content with the goal of increasing the standard and quality of care for their patients. Targeting your audience with highly relevant specialty-specific content that is tailored to the needs of each individual physician is crucial to deepening personal engagement.

Higher Conversion Rates
Email marketing campaigns in the past had to appeal to a mass user audience. This made the user journey extremely broad and inadequate. Consequently, the bulk of mass emails with generic messages landed in the junk folder. Marketing automation relies on technology that both learns and responds to physician actions in real time and guides them on a user journey from awareness to engagement to conversion. Automated campaigns have higher conversion rates and improve the physician experience which in turn develops loyal relationships. This increased engagement moves your physician target audience through a positive user journey which ends in a conversion most typically evidenced by: referrals, CME completions, newsletter subscriptions, or registrations.

Focus on the Brand
It is clear, one of the biggest burdens of email marketing in the past was the sheer amount of time it took to develop and execute each campaign. It is no secret that marketing automation reduces the time that it takes to complete each task. What once took days now takes a couple of hours. Marketing automation allows you to maximize internal efficiency while getting multiple tasks accomplished at the same time. This allows you to communicate with thousands of physicians all at once while still maintaining interactions that feel like one-on-one conversations. With marketing automation technology, the marketing process is streamlined. This frees up the marketer’s time to focus on their most importation responsibility – developing engaging content and building brand identity.

Customized Website Experience
In the past, visitors to your website were anonymous and received a generic message. Now it is possible to identify audience interests and preferences. Web personalization, treats your website visitors as the unique individuals they are. Their experience is optimized for what they care about. Marketing automation makes your website more effective by delivering customized content based on specialty, geography and behavior. Content is more effective because it is relevant and personalized. Physicians save time, receive more value and deepen their engagement. Imagine the value serving website content to a physician specialist that precisely matches their interests! Personalization and content customization go well beyond the inbox and drives engagement to an immersive website experience.