How to Use Adobe Real-Time CDP and Marketo Engage for HIPAA-Compliant Marketing Automation
By Kristen Petersen and Bill Anderson
Earlier this year, Slalom’s global customer data platform (CDP) practice lead explained how Adobe’s Real-Time CDP with Healthcare Shield supports data mesh architectures as a business-focused data product with a 360-degree view of a patient. I recently sat down with Slalom marketing automation expert Kristen Petersen to talk about how Real-Time CDP works in practice to support downstream business functions.
Kristen has completed several automated email pilots for hospital chains across the United States, including using Real-Time CDP in conjunction with Adobe’s marketing automation platform, Marketo Engage.
Bill: First, can you tell me about common challenges faced by healthcare customers that would lead them to the decision to use Real-Time CDP and Marketo?
Kristen: When healthcare organizations decide to implement a marketing automation tool like Marketo, they often don’t want to risk putting patient data into it and potentially exposing protected health information (PHI). That’s where Adobe Real-Time CDP with Healthcare Shield comes in — its attribute-level controls and restrictions on user access provide deeper data protections as required by HIPAA while still having the data insights tools to provide a 360-degree view of their customers.
Bill: Since this is healthcare, we’re talking about a complex data ecosystem. There’s the actual patient data that is protected by HIPAA and stored in patient files, usually in a built-for-purpose system like Epic. Then there is Real-Time CDP with Healthcare Shield, which is HIPAA-ready and pulls in data from many sources to provide a comprehensive view of each patient. And then there are marketing automation platforms like Marketo Engage that house your marketing campaign information, including email copy and audience lists, as well as the logic supporting your marketing motions. How can customers approach connecting these various activation channels in an automated and compliant way?
Kristen: Rather than putting sensitive data that has privacy concerns around it into an unregulated system (like Marketo), customers can bring all that data into the CDP, where there are safeguards in place. This allows you to build out audience segmentation in that regulated system and just push the email addresses into Marketo. None of that private data ever leaves the CDP. Then you can send marketing emails out of the unregulated system. It’s a nice combination that allows you to adhere to HIPAA-compliance requirements and still use an activation tool like Marketo safely.
Bill: How have you seen this work?
Kristen: A common use case for our customers is a reengagement campaign, which identifies all the patients who haven’t scheduled an appointment with their primary care physician in a set period of time. As they hit those milestones, we send an email encouraging them to go to the website and schedule an appointment. We send the emails out on a set schedule as people qualify.
Bill: That sounds like a lot of hands-on work.
Kristen: It’s not! The handshake between the CDP and marketing automation tool like Marketo is totally automated. When you generate a segment in CDP, if you’ve said, “This segment needs to be shared with Marketo every day as data comes in,” it reevaluates those segments and people are removed from them or added, and that data is sent into Marketo without any human intervention. In Marketo, the automation is set up so that as someone is added to those lists, it automatically sends the emails out at a prescribed time every day.
Bill: The results for patient engagement are impressive. In marketing technology parlance, email “open rates” indicate the percentage of sent emails that recipients actually open and look at, which sits at a global average of about 15%. In the healthcare industry, open and click rates tend to be a bit higher, with marketing automation platforms Benchmark Email reporting an average open rate of 20.26% and Mailchimp reporting an average rate of 21%.
With your customers, you’ve seen a much higher open and click rate.
Kristen: Yes and, in fact, I saw with one customer who developed an evergreen-style campaign that it produced a 3x higher click-through rate and lower unsubscribe rate than with the batch email methods we were using previously.
Bill: What do you make of these types of outcomes?
Kristen: Obviously, the less time that it’s been since the patient has seen their primary care physician, the more likely they were to engage with the email. It’s not a surprise that patients who see their primary doctor more frequently had a higher response rate than the people who hadn’t seen their primary care physician in several years. But I think it’s a very actionable message, right? You’re specifically talking to a patient about their healthcare maintenance plan and giving them a tickler reminder to “Hey, stay on top of this.”
Before Real-Time CDP with Healthcare Shield, healthcare organizations really couldn’t use any patient data. Now we can be much more targeted in helping customers in their healthcare maintenance.
Bill: Now that you’ve seen how well Real-Time CDP with Healthcare Shield and Marketo can work together, what are some other ways organizations can continue to advance their client-centric marketing?
Kristen: With some of my customers we’ve begun introducing SMS as an additional marketing channel. With SMS you can take the same approach of building the segments in CDP and pushing them to Marketo to trigger that SMS message. I’ve also seen clients get more granular on their segmentation strategy to better understand how specific engagement factors affect behavior. With data from both Marketo and the CDP, customers can land that data in the organization’s enterprise data warehouse so that we can begin to use data visualization tools to do some back-end analytics on the outcomes from the marketing campaigns.
I like the challenge of ensuring the organization follows healthcare laws and working with the legal team and data security to make sure that we have the right level of rigor in our processes to ensure that we aren’t creating any liability. We have found a way to use robust marketing tools like Marketo and manage data that is sensitive.
Slalom is a global consulting firm that helps people and organizations dream bigger, move faster, and build better tomorrows for all. Learn more about Slalom’s marketing technology capabilities with Adobe.
