Personalization is essential to successful omnichannel campaigns, whether that is at the healthcare professional (HCP) or the patient level. Once seen as a luxury, the tailoring of messages to individuals or segments of the target audience has become a necessity for marketers who want to meet evolving customer expectations and ensure efficient, impactful engagement. The change is forcing biopharma companies to rethink how they design campaigns, engage their audience, and measure success.
Years of exposure to personalized campaigns from consumer brands has primed patients and HCPs to expect tailored communications from biopharma companies. Campaigns need to deliver the right message, to the right person, at the right time, and in the right channel to connect with the audience, as Ben Clark, Director of Omnichannel Strategy at Jazz Pharmaceuticals, explained on a Reuters webinar.
“If you're just sending the same experience to absolutely everyone in all moments, you’re not really able to move the needle,” Clark said. “You’re also probably not communicating your message appropriately.”
Yet, Clark also cautioned marketers against overdoing personalization. Companies can segment HCPs at a high level, eliminating the cost and complexity of creating many versions of a message while still driving effective communication. Clark said the cost and complexity of precise personalization is more justified for campaigns targeting patients and caregivers, when nuance is needed to address specific challenges.
The comment points to the need for a considered approach to omnichannel personalization. Clark and other experts on the webinar identified the first steps companies can take, discussing 3 key actions for getting started with personalization and maximizing the impact of campaigns.
Start Small, Measure and Expand
Aletta Brandle, Team Lead Omnichannel Excellence at Boehringer Ingelheim, outlined a tiered approach to personalization, starting with simply dynamically inserting the physician’s name or sending an email based on material they engaged with in the past. At the other end of the complexity scale, teams are building full campaigns based on segmentation.
Clark recommends starting small and doing “something measurable quickly.” CRM is the easiest channel to start with personalization, Clark said, because of the one-to-one data connections. As the first project gets underway, teams should be thinking about the internal capabilities, technologies, and investments that will be needed for more ambitious campaigns.
Scott Fasser, Principal at Point B, made a similar point, explaining that “email is one of the easiest places to do personalization out of the gate” because of the potential to combine templates with information in CRM systems. Fasser added that real-time personalization of content, an approach used for years in e-commerce, offers another starting point for pharma companies.
“We did an omnichannel survey of life science companies and 93% are not using a next best action capability. That's table stakes in most of the other industries,” Fasser said. “Really thinking about how to use predictive analytics and AI to pick up that next best thing that you can deliver in a really easy way is a pretty low bar and you can easily measure that as well to see what the lift is.”
Brandle discussed her work to move beyond simple personalization by planning out tactics and messages by segment and automating the delivery of content. Pharma is less experienced than some industries at creating omnichannel customer experiences, but Brandle sees no regulatory barriers or knowledge gaps that would stop drugmakers from delivering more complex personalized campaigns.
“I think the most important thing, the key to success, in these instances of personalization is having your segmentation criteria defined. Who should be receiving what and why? What are the objectives? What is the end goal?” Brandle said.
Identify Leading and Lagging Metrics
When assessing objectives, Brandle advocates for moving away from vanity metrics such as views and towards analyses of what phases of a campaign a user has engaged with. Identifying users who have and have not engaged with all parts of a campaign can empower companies to recalibrate their field forces to focus on HCPs who are yet to be fully informed.
Clark still sees a role for simple media metrics such as click-through rates as leading indicators. While the ultimate goal may be to increase patient starts, such metrics are lagging indicators that cannot provide early signals about the performance of the campaign.
Tyler Redelico, Director of Omnichannel and Content Strategy, AstraZeneca, said “lagging indicators are a bit tougher to measure” and vary depending on the targeted disease. Medical teams “don't have the luxury of looking at sales data,” Redelico said, and instead analyze changes at the drug class level or in the ordering of diagnostic tests to evaluate the impact of campaigns.
Such metrics lag even the prescription sales data received by commercial teams and are only applicable to some products. Medical teams cannot easily measure the impact of unbranded campaigns on drugs without competitors because they need to look at a drug class, Redelico said. In that situation, having a diagnostic that is unique to the drug can provide insights into the impact of a campaign.
AI could address some of the challenges medical teams face when trying to assess the impact of their campaigns. Applying AI to medical science liaison sentiment data “would be a game-changer if it works,” Redelico said, "but in medical it’s tough because we can only look at so much data on claims.”
Establish Cross-Functional Teams
While AI could enhance parts of omnichannel marketing, unlocking the full potential of personalization is more about people and processes than tools and technology, as Fasser explained.
“Technology is the easy part,” Fasser said. “It’s really about how you bring alignment across different teams, how you bring measurements that people can respond to, how you bring a process that reduces friction in the overall flow of work.”
Agreeing, Redelico said “everyone should be working cross-functionally.” The approach makes campaigns more efficient internally and more effective, Redelico said, and “less noisy” for HCPs. The first step is for medical and commercial teams to meet and agree to work together, something that does not always happen when timelines are tight. Once an agreement is in place, teams can focus on their strengths.
“Dividing and conquering, even within a unified initiative, based on what we’re best at is important,” Redelico said. “Medical is great at creating deep scientific content, typically things that are longer form, and commercial has years of history in targeting and making things that grab attention. That partnership, where we're both working on what we're best at, is a best practice.”
Conclusion
Personalized, well-executed omnichannel campaigns can drive commercial success. The pharma industry is evolving to establish the strategic vision, cross-functional collaboration, and technology that is needed to meet the advancing expectations of HCPs and patients. Companies that rise to the challenge will deliver more relevant and impactful experiences to change behavior and improve outcomes.
Contributors
- Aletta Brandle, Team Lead Omnichannel Excellence, Boehringer Ingelheim
- Ben Clark, Director of Omnichannel Strategy, Jazz Pharmaceuticals
- Scott Fasser, Principal, Point B
- Tyler Redelico, Director, Omnichannel & Content Strategy, AstraZeneca
- Moderator: Jonathan Elliot, Lead Editor, Reuters Events Pharma
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