For any clarifications, please kindly send an email to: michael.phee[at]drcomgroup.com
In this article, we’ll run through a recent case study whereby we’ve successfully implemented a seamless omnichannel strategy for a top pharmaceutical but first, let’s go through what really in omnichannel in the pharmaceutical context. It is important to understand the difference especially between multichannel and omnichannel as this will affect your strategy, customer journey planning and production of content/materials.
After working on numerous omnichannel strategies for various pharmaceuticals globally, we’ve realised that many marketers were confused about the differences between multichannel and omnichannel. What’s the fundamental difference?
In omnichannel, your messages in one channel will support and/or be relatable to another channel’s content; whereas in multichannel, you’re basically repeating the same content across different different channels. As such, omnichannel focuses on the customer experience – delivering personalisation.
For more information about what omnichannel is and some examples, please click here.
Before we even started planning and subsequently executing our client’s omnichannel strategy, we had to first address 3 issues:
Given the context, our team first did a series of educational calls with our client to share about the reasons for deploying the omnichannel approach, customer journey planning and best practices etc. This was aligned together with our client’s level of understanding.
Next, we had to start getting consent from HCPs first. This was done via personalised approved emails with infographics (for attraction & ease of understanding) designed by our in-house designers.
In our approved emails, apart from obtaining consent for future communications, we’ve also explained that disease information will be communicated in future (albeit with bits of product information) to provide value to the targeted HCPs. This approach was chosen to provide value to the HCPs first and to make it seem less about sales.
The initial phase (since there wasn’t any data to determine a starting point) was first to send a series of approved emails (after obtaining consent) with basic disease information to make our HCPs aware and curious. Those approved emails had a ‘Call-to-Action’ to invite HCPs to a webinar which covers more advanced information about the disease.
After that, the pharmaceutical representatives will prioritize the in-person visits with eDetailers to HCPs who’ve attended the webinars to affirm their knowledge and start to get more affirmation on the HCPs receptiveness to the product.
At this juncture, we were able to start making basic segmentation (and subsequently, basic customer journey planning) by segregating non-engaged and engaged HCPs.
Both non-engaged HCPs and engaged HCPs had their own channel mix and different types of content.
At the same time, a content calendar and the content itself were already prepared in advance so that there will not be any long periods of non-engagement with HCPs.
Over time, the segmentation was more advanced when we had more data – We were able to further segment based on the engagement level, awareness stage and channel preferences to provide an even better personalisation for the HCPs, which we can touch on privately here.
The omnichannel strategy partnership with our client still goes on, with content tweaks to continuously engage their targeted HCPs. While we weren’t given the numbers, our client was satisfied and gave feedback that their engagement metrics are constantly improving along with more product adoption by their targeted HCPs.
We hope that we’ve empowered your knowledge with regards to omnichannel marketing. If you’d like to view some case studies and to discover how omnichannel marketing can benefit you, please drop an email to: michael.phee[at]drcomgroup.com.