The ever-changing nature of the pharma industry demands that its players stay in vogue to remain ahead of competitors. Recently, personalizing content with closed-loop marketing has influenced how marketers interact with patients and healthcare professionals.
Also, tailoring content for different customer segments increases trust and enhances customer acquisition. However, when employing personalization marketing, you must consider the ethical considerations that come with it. As a result, you should fully understand this marketing strategy before going into it.
In this article, you’ll not only learn how closed-loop marketing works, but you’ll also get a step-by-step guide on personalizing messages for closed-loop marketing in the pharma industry.
Table of Contents
- Understanding closed-loop marketing
- Seven steps to personalize messages for the Pharma Industry using closed-loop marketing
- How to measure personalization success in closed-loop marketing
- Compliance and ethical considerations when personalizing messages with closed-loop marketing
- A case study of message personalization using closed-loop marketing
- Challenges and future trends in message personalization
- Final thoughts
Understanding Closed Loop Marketing
Closed-loop marketing is a data-driven strategy that gathers, analyzes, and personalizes data to boost sales and improve marketing ROI. For closed-loop marketing to work, there is a continuous collaboration between the sales and marketing teams.
The marketing team promotes awareness and visibility of a pharma product or service. The individuals in the sales team sell these products and services to patients and health care professionals (HCPs). After that, the sales team gives a closed-loop reporting feedback to those in marketing.
The feedback indicates how the marketing activities are employed to impact the sales process and outcome. With closed-loop marketing, your pharma company stands to gain the following:
- Targeted and Personalized Marketing Approach: Collecting and analyzing data helps marketers get familiar with individual customer preferences. As a result, you’ll get content and offers tailored to suit a patient’s needs.
- Rational Decision-making: You make every decision after thorough data analysis. This will prevent losses and drive your business to the right path.
- Spotting Loopholes: Closed-loop marketing helps to identify lagging areas in a pharma business. The continuous feedback feature of closed-loop marketing serves as a means of identifying loopholes.
- Boosted ROI: Ultimately, closed-loop marketing increases conversion rates, resulting in better leads.
Seven Steps to Personalize Messages for the Pharma Industry Using Closed-loop Marketing
Crafting personalized messages in pharma sales is a highly effective marketing approach. It involves carefully considering each patient and HCP’s unique behavior and interests. Though personalized marketing is a strategic process, there is no standard way to go about it. The steps below will serve as a guide.
- Data Collection and Analysis
The foundation of personalization in pharma sales is data collection and analysis. You can source data information from social media engagement, a company’s website search history, and more.
After a successful data collection, you analyze it using standard marketing analytics software. This process will detect trends and patterns common to patients and HCPs.
- Segmentation
Segmentation involves dividing prospective HCPs into smaller groups based on shared characteristics. You can group them based on their demographic or behavioral similarity. Segmentation acts as a means of identifying niche markets and driving growth.
- Customer Profiling
Though people often confuse profiling and segmentation, they are different. Profiling means examining a particular group of patients using specific established criteria.
To carry out our profiling, you need to ask yourself some questions like:
- What is the likelihood that a patient will use your pharma products?
- To what degree do they use it?
- What is their level of advocacy for your brand?
- Content Customization
The next step is to customize your content to individual client segments. This involves adjusting your product or services to create unique experiences for patients. You give each group content they will engage with most.
However, content customization entails more than just tailoring messages. It also includes customizing the messages’ style, structure, and communication medium.
- Message Personalization
Research shows that 80% of existing customers will respond positively when brands provide personalized messages. It is essential to provide information that explicitly tackles individual concerns or issues.
This includes targeted emails with HCPs’ names, product recommendations based on their specific medical interests, or custom-made video messages.
- Closed Loop Marketing Feedback
After sending personalized messages, the next step is to receive feedback using appropriate means. Here, you follow up on how patients interact with your content.
Closed-loop marketing is an active form of feedback. When customer support teams receive feedback, they respond to inquiries and accept suggestions – an excellent means of assessing marketing performance.
- Continuous Improvement
The feedback marketers get creates a pathway to continuous improvement. With this feedback, you can focus on more productive marketing campaigns. Additionally, one will be able to discover what works for each patient. Following this discovery and identification, you can make adjustments as needed.
How To Measure Personalization Success in Closed-loop Marketing
Personalizing your marketing strategy does not automatically mean it will meet your sales goals. Experts recommend using certain Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) for measuring success. Some of these KPIs in closed-loop marketing are:
Conversion Rate
The conversion rate in closed-loop marketing refers to the percentage of people who did not just visit your website but took buying action or performed a desired task. Conversion rate is the evidence of personalization success.
More tailored content should result in higher conversion rates. However, this may not be the case every time as other factors may influence a customer’s experience.
Return On Investment (ROI)
Marketing ROI is the amount a pharma company makes from personalization marketing. Creating personalized content costs money. Hence, it is essential to make profits on the money spent.
When you generate high revenue, it shows that your closed-loop marketing strategy is working for your company.
Customer Retention Rate
Customer retention rate is not directly a function of personalized content. It is the percentage of patients who continuously seek your services for a specific time. A high customer retention rate in marketing implies that more patients are satisfied with your services.
Open Rate and Response Time
You get an open rate in marketing by dividing the number of customers that view content by the total number of messages sent. On the other hand, response time is the interval between when an HCP opens the letter and when he responds. A high open rate and short response time indicate clients’ interest in the content.
Compliance And Ethical Considerations When Personalizing Messages With Closed-loop Marketing
Personalization in pharma sales using closed-loop marketing tools is a straightforward strategy. However, there are some ethics in healthcare communication. Before carrying out a personalized marketing campaign, here are a few key issues to consider:
- Respect Privacy
Personalized marketing involves diving into a patient’s record for adequate data collection. Such research may pose a threat to their privacy. When gathering information from customer databases, ensure to follow the proper routes that comply with the necessary regulations and laws.
- Don’t Exaggerate your Claims
Marketers tend to twerk informative content to make them more appealing to each client segment. Do the twerking process with care. One must be truthful and avoid making claims based on undisclosed arguments.
- Prioritize Data Security
After collecting and analyzing a patient’s data, it is crucial to store it appropriately. You must protect the data against theft, loss, and access to unauthorized personnel. This is important to avoid financial losses due to a lawsuit.
- Avoid Bias
Segmentation in marketing may give room for stereotyping and discrimination. You must ensure that your entire marketing process is inclusive and not biased against a particular patient segment. Patients who sense bias will lose trust in that healthcare system or company.
A Case Study of Message Personalization Using Closed-loop Marketing
You might’ve wondered what personalizing messages with closed-loop marketing means in real-life scenarios. We thought to include a case study to aid your comprehension of the concept. Check this out:
XYZ Pharma is a company that has been in business for over ten years. In the last two years, they’ve experienced low sales and turnover, so they did a market survey. The survey showed that traditional mass marketing campaign no longer drives sales as effectively as before. Hence, they resorted to sending personalized messages using the closed-loop marketing process.
They gathered and analyzed valuable patients’ data, such as:
- medical history,
- health records, and
- lifestyle choices.
They also collected and analyzed potential Healthcare Professional’s data. XYZ Pharma sent personalized emails addressing these HCPs by their names and frequently recommended their products to them using customized videos.
Afterward, they personalized their content and marketing channels. The sales team gave adequate feedback to the marketing department. Consequently, the marketing team was able to improve their personalizing marketing strategy from time to time.
After successfully implementing this personalized strategy, XYZ Pharma experienced a 40% sales increase the following year. Additionally, 45% of patients referred their services that same year and there was a lot of positive customer feedback, showing their satisfaction.
Challenges and Future Trends in Message Personalization
Ethical considerations are the foremost challenge marketers face when employing personalization in pharma sales. However, this drawback is easy to overcome when you follow due process. The marketing and sales teams in pharmaceutical industries are constantly evolving, and the use of Artificial Intelligence and Omnichannel engagement has become the new norm.
The Role of Artificial Intelligence
There are powerful AI tools available for marketers. These tools can analyze data in a short time. With AI, there is marketing automation, which speeds up the entire personalization process.
Omnichannel Engagement
Omnichannel engagement involves interacting with HCPs and patients using multiple channels. Marketers use personalized mail, social media marketing, mobile applications, and companies’ websites to engage customers. They may even employ physical interactions. Their overall aim is to have a deep understanding of individual clients.
Final Thoughts
Personalization marketing gives you a competitive advantage in the pharma industry. It helps you tailor your messages to address the individual needs of your customers, prioritize data security, and guarantee a unique user experience for all end-users.
In this article, we’ve explored the “7 steps” Platforce uses to help you create personalized messages for your customers with closed-loop marketing, how you can measure the success of your personalized marketing approach, and how to tweak your approach for better sales conversion and results.
You cannot expect sales if your messages are the same as a thousand other pharma sale messages. Your sales will be mediocre at best unless you implement Platforce’s targeted and personalized marketing approach that helps you meet the needs of your customers on a personal level. Here’s a demo or tour to help you get started.
Also, stay ahead in your pharma sales by checking our YouTube and LinkedIn channels for the latest marketing updates.