It’s widely known that leveraging customer relationship management (CRM) systems for marketing purposes can be extremely valuable for organizations. It can assist with efficient communications, supporting patient/member journeys, building and growing relationships, and enhancing the customer experience to name a few of its benefits. As consumers are demanding more from the healthcare industry, irrespective of the size of your healthcare organization leveraging a CRM system to support marketing activities can be a key contributor to your organization’s success. It is often a crawl, walk run approach and isn’t just for the larger healthcare providers and payers, all healthcare organizations can leverage this in some form.
What’s most important is to ensure the marketing CRM has data from across several sources so you have a single source of all contacts and can build a profile of the interactions for these contacts. The marketing customer relationship management system should have minimal PHI data that is stored securely and encrypted. Not a great deal of detail is needed but just enough to know key interactions and specific events that are of importance.
Connecting a marketing CRM system to advertising software that allows you to send emails, newsletters, event invitations amongst others, is the mechanism in which value will be driven to the right individuals with the right message at the right time.
With so many use cases in healthcare for leveraging a CRM for marketing purposes, I’ll be sharing a comprehensive list to assist you in determining where to start or how to expand from your current use. Not all healthcare organizations are at the same level and I hope this blog post gives your organization ideas that you can implement.
- Support the acquisition of new patients by leveraging data from across your website and any third-party data you have to offer relevant services based on known data. For example, if a prospective patient has completed a form on the site for a downloadable guide for a specific condition, send them a follow-up email with the related services such as an appointment with a specialist or second opinion.
- Re-engage existing patients that have attended appointments in the past and are due for an annual appointment. Offer the ultimate convenience of a reminder and quick access to the key information they need to make an appointment.
- If your organization frequently hosts events, use previous event history data to identify similar related events they may be interested in. Send an email to create awareness for related events and increase participation.
- Various service lines and administrative areas may want to run campaigns to support specific business objectives they have such as increase appointment setting, raising awareness of a particular event, etc. and being able to segment by specific business rules to target relevant individuals will offer greater success.
- With having a marketing CRM that tracks key interactions and events, analyze this data to improve how you target prospective or existing members/patients by the timing of marketing tactics that are deployed as well as the type of message that receives the greatest desired response.
- Leverage data to personalize website experiences enhancing the experience and conversion goals. If a returning website or portal visitor come back to a website display health article and blog post content that correspond with the previous history.
- When a patient logs into a patient portal from a mobile device frequently follow up with an email with a quick link to installing the mobile app.
- Having the marketing history in one location will support you manage the frequency at which you make contact. This can be limited to a certain number that cannot be exceeded in order not to bombard patients/members with numerous marketing tactics.
The above healthcare use cases require patients/members (or other contacts within your organization’s CRM system) to be opted into receiving marketing communications and acceptance of privacy policies on websites and mobile apps.
As shown above there are multiple ways in which to deliver enhanced experiences and value to patients/members with timely messages that can build and grow relationships. I would love to hear how your organization is leveraging a CRM system for marketing purposes and the successes being experienced.
