Email automation and content campaigns: What healthcare marketers need to know

Educating physicians about the benefits and use cases for pharmaceutical products is getting more difficult all the time. Face-to-face conversations with doctors are harder to schedule, and physicians have more content available to them than ever before.

Considering more than half of all physicians are subject to a strict "no visit" policy when it comes to pharmaceutical representatives, email is an increasingly effective way to reach practitioners. Automated drip campaigns can nurture relationships with physicians while giving physicians the information they need to make the decision to adopt a new therapy.

Characteristics of a best-in-class email drip campaign

A drip email campaign regulates the release of relevant content to potential sales leads at a set schedule or a programmatically defined pace. Though it's possible to run a manual drip campaign, a DemandGen report found a 20% increase in sales opportunities when automation was introduced to lead nurturing strategies.

Enterprise-grade email marketing platforms, like Pardot by Salesforce, leverage automation technology to automatically populate drip campaigns with dynamic content. For example, if your CRM solution identifies that a prospect has viewed a digital ad, the email marketing platform can use that data to determine the most relevant piece of content to send next.

Other vital drip campaign components include:

• Audience segmentation tools.
• A/B testing capabilities.
• Automated lead scoring.
• Customizable analytics dashboards.

Above all, effective lead generation campaigns must have high-quality content.

Email is an effective way to reach physicians with "no rep visit" policies.

Understanding physician content needs

To optimize your automated email drip campaign, you need to have a robust understanding of the customer journey. For instance, if customers are first made aware of your brand through a print ad in a peer-reviewed journal, the next ad or piece of content they see should build on that narrative.

For this reason, sales and marketing must be in alignment. The marketing team should nurture leads with educational content and value propositions. Then, the sales team will be able to have more productive conversations with qualified leads. Therefore, you content should appeal to the reader's logical side and be engaging on an emotional level.

Building an effective multichannel campaign

Physicians don't make decisions hastily. They are trained to consider the evidence and to refer to their experience and the resources available to them. As such, pharma marketers must make several impressions on their readers before they can gain the most value from each lead.

Print ads and digital display banners can serve many purposes within a multichannel campaign. For example, digital ads can drive readers to more engaging content and capture email addresses. Then, an automated drip campaign can deliver more in-depth content that prepares the reader for a conversation with the sales team.

To learn more about how to integrate your email and display ad campaigns, connect with a trusted Elsevier consultant today.