A Guide to Executing Impactful Multichannel Healthcare Campaigns

Customers and patients expect a multichannel interaction, and connecting these various platforms has valuable benefits for the healthcare organization as well

In today’s healthcare marketing landscape, customers and patients have a lot of choices in how they interact with your organization, through both digital (website, social media, blogs, webinars) and traditional channels (events/seminars, direct mail, and call center).

They also get to decide which digital device they’d like to use, whether that be a smartphone, desktop computer or tablet.

This fractured landscape could potentially lead to disjointed experiences that may frustrate customers and lead them to seek out other options. Well-planned multichannel marketing campaigns, however, can minimize this possibility and make the journey across channels seamless.

Multichannel marketing campaigns mimic consumer behavior, which, according to a Forbes report, is trending toward using many platforms to research and interact with companies prior to purchase. In fact, 72% of consumers report that they would prefer to connect with businesses across multiple channels.

Not only do multichannel healthcare campaigns appeal to customers, but they provide valuable benefits for your organization. Here’s why:

Benefits of Multichannel Healthcare Marketing

Multichannel healthcare marketing ensures customers experience seamless, connected, personalized interactions with health systems, regardless of communication method. Multichannel healthcare marketing has numerous benefits, including:

Improved Brand Awareness

Brand awareness is crucial; strong healthcare brands inspire consumer trust and boost revenue. It takes five to seven impressions on average for customers to remember your brand, meaning the more touch points, the better. Multichannel marketing is an effective method for creating touch points, driving up impressions and building strong brand awareness.

Unified Patient Experience

Switching between platforms and devices is now an extremely common customer behavior, and leveraging multichannel marketing creates a seamless patient journey, connecting interactions to smoothly move patients from one stage to another.

Greater Patient Engagement

Increasing patient engagement not only boosts acquisition and retention numbers, it also creates more satisfied, healthier patients. Multichannel marketing helps increase patient engagement by providing personalized, proactive interactions throughout patient life cycles.

Increased Revenue

Across industries, 90% of marketers report higher profits and sales when using multichannel strategies, and 52 percent say they “usually” or “always” hit their financial targets. In the healthcare industry specifically, we’ve seen health systems report a more than 40% improvement in conversions when using multichannel marketing.

Best Practices for Effective Multichannel Healthcare Campaigns

To be impactful, you need to execute multichannel healthcare campaigns strategically. Let’s look at five best practices:

1. Integrate Your Technology Platforms

If you want customers and patients to have seamless cross-channel experiences, you need to integrate the back-end technology platforms that execute them. As with personalization, think of the health cost and risk management (HCRM) as your multichannel marketing hub; it’s the central feature that powers all else.

Key platforms to integrate for multichannel success include:

• EHR: By connecting your electronic health records (EHR), you bring certain clinical data into the mix, enabling you to personalize by needs and service lines. This integration also helps align marketing with clinical experiences, creating a truly seamless care journey.
• Marketing automation: By integrating a marketing automation platform with your other marketing technologies, you can create triggers for key touchpoints such as appointment reminders, while still maintaining a level of personalization. For example, if a patient signs up for an informational webinar on lowering blood pressure, you can send a follow-up email around your cardiology services to send the day after the webinar. This keeps customers and patients engaged, with minimal time and effort.
• Call Center: Healthcare call centers offer quick, person-to-person service. They are also an effective communication channel for patient acquisition and retention. Integrating with your HCRM creates an optimized call center platform that supports personalized campaign communication and relationship-building across channels. You can also collaborate with a marketing automation tool to deploy follow-ups on call center discussions, further enabling a seamless cross-channel patient journey.

By connecting marketing tools with your HCRM at the center, you establish processes for personalized, effective cross-channel marketing campaigns.

2. Personalize Across Channels

Impactful multichannel marketing campaigns include personalized features at every step using service line, customer names, tailoring based on location and patient journey stage, then providing applicable information and services and referencing previous interactions. This increases engagement — customers are twice as likely to interact with your content if it’s personalized to them — and creates smooth transitions throughout the patient engagement journey.

To do this, you need detailed insights that give you holistic, 360-degree views of customers and patients. Use a sophisticated HCRM platform to gather, store and organize customer and patient data across email, social, website, direct mail and the call center.

The platform then allows you to easily access the data you need to properly target and communicate with customers and patients, no matter what channel you use to do so. It also collects insights throughout multichannel campaigns, helping you see what messaging customers have already received, building on it for increased personalization.

3. Keep Messaging Consistent

To the customer, multichannel campaigns should feel harmonious. This means that campaign messaging should be consistent, no matter the platform. Customers view your healthcare organization as a whole — the sum of all interactions they have. Consistent, positive experiences with strategic, well-planned messaging at each turn are crucial.

Keep in mind that wording can be varied depending on the stage of the campaign and the platform, but the underlying message should remain constant. For example, a campaign designed to drive flu vaccinations might phrase content for Facebook less formally than for a direct mailer, but both will contain the key message: that your health system is hosting a flu vaccine clinic and customers should attend as a proactive health measure.

Read the last two best practice tips by visiting the original article on the Evariant blog here.

Final Thoughts

Proper campaign management is critical to multichannel campaign success; in one report, less than half of respondents said they felt confident in the way they were managing integrated campaigns.

Be sure your campaigns have strong leadership and that you break down operational silos so that messaging and goals are universally understood, planned, and delivered across channels. Prioritizing multichannel campaign management will help your healthcare organization prove ROI, giving your department a strong case for greater investment into these types of initiatives in the future.

This article originally appeared on the Evariant blog here.

About the Author | Chris Girardi

Chris Girardi is VP of precision marketing at Evariant. In his role, he helps clients optimize growth through smarter patient acquisition and retention. Clients look to Girardi and the Evariant Campaign Center for help with multichannel digital media offerings including planning, analysis, management, execution and analytics. He has more than a decade of experience in digital media and direct response marketing.