Let’s face it, when you twist an ankle or take a tumble, the last thing on your mind is marketing. You’re focused on getting to the nearest emergency room stat, not on selecting an ER based on a hospital’s TV commercial.

But there is huge potential for marketing in healthcare around non-emergency medical scenarios where people have options for care, such as services like preventative screenings or elective surgeries where the patient has time to consider their healthcare decisions. These situations offer growth opportunities to leverage marketing to attract new or existing patients.

However, for many healthcare organizations, marketing directly to patients is still relatively new, and they often know what they hope to accomplish but don’t know the right processes and tools to get them there. By implementing Salesforce Marketing Cloud with other core systems, healthcare companies can develop loyal customers and service them throughout the continuum of care.

Why the healthcare industry needs Marketing Cloud

Today’s consumers have high expectations of how they receive messages from businesses. Such as when a package is delivered and triggers an email delivery notification, or a retail store is having a sale and sends a text message to its loyalty card members. 

This same marketing approach carries over to healthcare, albeit with different messaging. You may receive a text message reminding you to book a referral appointment or a postcard about a new practice location opening. And it is Marketing Cloud that offers this ability to meet customers in the way they want to be met and that they’re used to being met.

Marketing Cloud helps deliver the right messages to the right people at the right time to drive the right call to action. The platform does this by taking disjointed data and providing marketers with a unified view of patients and prospects. By identifying these two key segments, organizations can more effectively target their messaging to each audience – allowing them to act faster, more intelligently, and benefit from saving money.

The Total Economic Impact™ Of Salesforce Marketing Cloud study, conducted by Forrester Consulting on behalf of Salesforce, examines the cost savings and business benefits enabled by Marketing Cloud. Forrester interviewed five representatives with experience using Marketing Cloud, including a Chief Marketing Officer at a healthcare and life sciences organization, and aggregated the interviewees’ experiences and combined the results into a single composite organization. The study found:

• A 50% increase in engaged customers from improved relevancy of marketing efforts
• Improved email personalization resulting in a 250% increase in email subscribers and a 60% lift in email conversion rate
• A 10% reduction in media waste data prep automation with ad performance optimization
• A 60% time savings on building and running marketing campaigns and 90% time savings on marketers’ campaign reporting efforts

Healthcare marketing plays a significant role when it comes to closing operational inefficiencies because marketing unifies the overall patient experience through an automated system. For example, a consumer sees a Facebook ad for a mammography campaign that leads them to a web form to book a mammogram appointment. Marketing Cloud identifies the consumer’s data as an existing patient that is now taking advantage of the healthcare system’s additional line of service. The patient has entered a valuable conversion funnel that is driving loyalty and revenue.

The elements of Marketing Cloud

Let’s say your Marketing Cloud data shows an increase in existing patients that are women in their 30s having young kids, as well as an influx of males in their 60s with a pre-existing condition of diabetes. The marketing you deliver to each of these groups will be different to resonate.

This targeted approach is where Marketing Cloud shines and gives you the ability to provide personalized, relevant, and timely messaging. Think of personalization as any time you can appear to know and appreciate your customer in a way that is either expected or unexpected. You are engaging them with information that helps them make a better choice in their healthcare in some way. The message is relevant and relatable to their current state of life and not a blanket campaign that goes to the masses.

Take advantage of these Marketing Cloud functionalities: 

• Marketing Cloud Personalization: Promote relevant services across channels like web, email, and mobile in real-time with specific and unique offers and dynamic content. Go beyond digital channels and provide contact center agents with a customer’s real-time profile to recommend personalized healthcare services information, next-best actions, or quickly resolve issues.          
• Marketing Cloud CDP: Capture, unify, segment, and activate all your data with a single source of truth for every patient that allows you to deliver personalized content. Build trust by tracking consent and preference management when building segments and activating data. Improve decision-making, save time, and lower costs by understanding customers through AI-powered intelligence and analytics.
• Marketing Cloud Intelligence: Optimize spending and customer engagement by connecting all your marketing data, media investments, and KPIs. Marketing Cloud Intelligence uses AI to share performance insights in collaborative dashboards featuring real-time data visualization, insight, and activation. You can collaborate with your entire marketing team by creating reports in any format, exporting to databases, or sharing with a built-in Slack integration.

Many healthcare organizations’ legacy systems are disparate and not built for the scale needed to enable the real-time, 1-to-1 engagement that consumers expect. With Marketing Cloud, organizations can unify data in a centralized location and bring together data from all the touchpoints that patients or prospects come into contact with across the healthcare brand and services.

The platform uses configurable rules and AI-based decisioning to analyze contextual and behavioral data to determine what to do or say at each moment of the patient journey. You can also use the platform to take what you learn about a patient on one channel to inform the personalization delivered on another channel – ultimately optimizing the entire patient experience.

The Silverline team knows how to get healthcare and life sciences organizations from where they are today to where they want to be. Find out how we can help your organization.