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Breaking Through the Noise: Email Marketing Best Practices for Life Sciences Marketers
Rui Gaspar, Senior Consultant, Global Marketing Services, IQVIA
Nov 10, 2023

If you have a drug, medical device, or service that can improve the quality of care or drive better patient outcomes, telling healthcare providers about it—and doing so in a meaningful way—is easier said than done. After all, HCPs are focused on treating and caring for their patients above all else. So, any external messaging perceived as a distraction from this focus is considered little more than noise and most often forgotten or ignored altogether.

For marketers targeting HCPs, this means that creating an effective email campaign takes more than well-written subject lines and copy.

Follow these best practices for email marketing to break through the noise and achieve meaningful engagement.

Go beyond basic segmentation

HCPs live in the digital world with the rest of us. Traditional email lists, alongside leads provided by sales reps, can fall short in terms of accuracy and reliability. HCPs move to different offices, retire, or even leave the profession over time. They also experience changes in their daily practice (and life) that can render your information on them null and void.

The more data points you have on HCPs, the closer you are to establishing a 360-degree view of each individual provider. These attributes must also be updated in real-time, so that your view of an HCP is always reflective of who that provider is today, not yesterday. Remember: HCPs are dynamic and ever-changing.

When you can go beyond basic segmentation and tap into the profiles of individual HCPs comprising several hundred data points each, you can customize your email marketing so that messages reach your audience exactly when, where, and how they’ll resonate the most. This level of personalization across your email campaigns contributes to a highly effective omnichannel engagement strategy. For example, if an HCP prefers to learn about new products and services through video, that HCP can receive an email with your brand’s video embedded front and center. Conversely, HCPs that respond better to deep-dive publications can receive links to detail-rich content.

Customize email delivery and content

Once you can tap into a wealth of trustworthy, real-time information and build comprehensive HCP profiles using a multitude of data attributes, you can effectively “dial in” using analytics that inform the when, where, what, and why of your email campaign on a granular level. In other words, you can optimize each email to appeal to very specific HCPs based on the most relevant attributes.

By understanding each HCP’s behaviors, preferences, accomplishments, and connections alongside more static attributes such as their patient population, areas of specialty, and geographic location, you can create an email campaign that is:

  • Tailored with messages that resonate with your target audience
  • Timed for optimal engagement (frequency and moment of delivery)
  • Compliant with all data privacy laws

In other words, you can take a “quality over quantity” approach.

Gather meaningful metrics (and put your findings to good use)

Understanding how well your email campaign is performing is critical to shaping the targeting, timing, and messaging of campaigns yet to come. Metrics that are beneficial to measure include:

  • Open rates: A measure of awareness. This is the number of times an HCP saw your email in their inbox and opened it.*
  • Time of day/day of week: An extension of the open rate metric. This helps you understand which HCPs opened your email on what day and at what time.
  • Read rates: A percentage of email recipients who spend at least eight seconds reading your email.
  • Click-throughs: A measure of engagement. This is the number of times an HCP clicked a link included in your email.
  • Site characteristics: This includes attributes such as geographic location, office hours, and proximity to major medical centers.
  • Devices used: Knowing which device was used to open your email (phone, tablet, laptop, etc.) can inform your design and copy approach in future emails and campaigns.

The greater your ability to capture and analyze your email campaign’s performance in terms of discernable metrics like the ones listed above, the more proficient you will become at uncovering trends, patterns, and connections that guide future engagement efforts.

*It should be noted that open rates aren’t as reliable for measuring campaign success as they once were. With its iOS 15 update, Apple has given mobile users of its Apple Mail app the option to block email marketers from seeing whether their emails were opened. An email sent to any user who opted into this Mail Privacy Protection feature will be reported as being opened, even if that’s not the case. This can result in artificially inflated open rates.

How to implement these best practices and improve email engagement

IQVIA OneKey Global Marketing Services provides you with the methods and means to break through the noise and get your message noticed by the right HCPs in the right way, and at the right time.

Backed by the world’s largest and most comprehensive global HCP reference data, OneKey. Reinvigorate your email marketing strategy with a trusted reference dataset that contains over 23 million HCP and 2.6 million healthcare organization profiles globally, all with up to 1,000 data attributes.

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