Pharma marketing departments are no longer just responsible for bringing in new subscribers. They are now tasked with managing the entire customer experience, starting from the initial interaction to establishing and maintaining a loyal brand relationship.
While pharma companies invest heavily in digital media and omni-channel marketing, they don’t sell directly to the consumer. That can create a challenge when it comes to relationship building and journey optimization.
However, this shouldn’t discourage pharma marketers from working to improve the customer experience. To get an idea of how customer journey optimization works in practice for the pharma industry, let’s review a real-life illustration masked as a fictitious pharma company we’ll call Acme Pharmaceutical.
Acme Pharmaceutical determined that savings card downloads and redemptions reflected a leading indicator of its primary KPI measures – new prescriptions (NRx) and total prescriptions (TRx). The brand was looking to drive better performance by leveraging card data in the Google Stack. Acme uses its savings card program to drive trials of its brands – consumers download a “card” from the website, which generates a unique identifier that can be used at the pharmacy for savings on the prescription. Use of the unique code provides Acme data from the offline transaction, which then uploads into Google Analytics for reporting and analyses on metrics like redemption rate and value.
To improve performance, Acme sought to execute statistical analyses and more sophisticated queries than would be possible in Google Analytics. The brand migrated toward the Google Stack — specifically GA 360, Google Cloud, and DoubleClick — to stage data in an analytics sandbox. This enables data to be studied at the most granular level.
With this data, there are three common statistical analyses that Acme performed to identify audiences and their optimal site experiences:
- Audience – The first analysis would be a cluster analysis to help Acme better understand how patients and caregivers behave on the site. Audience segments are clustered based on site behaviors and campaign attributes.
- Interactions – The second analysis would be a logistical regression to understand which interactions and contacts have the most influence on savings card downloads or redemptions.
- Sequence – A sequence analysis would be performed to understand the situations in which the sequence of interactions influences savings card downloads.
Based on insights for these analyses, Acme hypothesized that its savings card download rate could be increased for intense researchers by directing them to the “How to Use” page and then to a “Getting Started” video. Acme tested its hypothesis and results showed that the first point was correct — the brand saw a 25 percent increase in savings card downloads for intense researchers by featuring the “How to Use” page in the hero image. However, the “Getting Started” video didn’t support the hypothesis initially but further analysis revealed that there was an impact in viewing the video in a subsequent visit.
With these results, Acme uncovered an opportunity to increase savings card downloads by using DoubleClick to retarget visitors who view the Savings and Support pages, yet didn’t download a card. Since Acme integrated DoubleClick with Analytics 360, it was able to create audiences in Google Analytics and syndicate them to AdWords and DoubleClick Bid Manager (DBM). In practice, this might look like the following: Acme creates an audience of anyone who viewed a savings card download page, but didn’t download it. Then, the brand could show a display ad that would entice that person back to the download page. Or, for a more advanced example, next-best-offer models could be built to direct the target audience members to different landing pages based on their score.
Pharma marketers are increasingly striving to create an improved customer experience, and with the right strategies, data, analytics, and execution in place, a better customer experience can become a reality.
Download “The Business Case for Optimizing Customer Journeys” white paper to learn more about how to gain a competitive edge through the delivery of optimized customer journeys.
