When most people think about marketing automation, they think about sending emails to contacts. But, what can you really do with the right marketing automation tool? You can send personalized emails, text alerts, nurture customers, save internal time and resources, and create an overall better experience between your brand and your customer. With that being said, how can marketing automation benefit the healthcare industry? It can be especially difficult for both health payers and providers who have extremely sensitive and confidential protected health information (PHI).
To help understand the real benefits and steps necessary to create a powerful marketing automation system, our team has answered the following:
What is marketing automation?
Marketing automation is defined as, “the process of using software to complete repetitive marketing tasks designed to nurture sales leads, personalize marketing messages and content and in the process, save marketers’ time and effort.”
Why is it important for healthcare companies?
For healthcare organizations, marketing automation may look a little different as the primary objective is not the typical sales to marketing alignment. Platforms like Marketo Engage, offer key benefits like:
- Seamless engagement across healthcare audiences
- Personalized conversations for superior results
- Performance insights to guide investment
- HIPAA compliance and industry leadership
The last point is critical as HIPAA compliance is key to creating a successful marketing automation campaign for your organization. Marketo Engage specifically has tools and assets that allow your organization to store PHI in a compliant manner to create meaningful marketing automation campaigns that are personalized to consumer needs and habits.
Where has it been used successfully?
At Perficient, we have helped healthcare organizations navigate marketing automation to see real results. For instance, we recently launched a managed care consortium’s first marketing automation campaign on Marketo Engage. To get to that point, we had to solve for multiple issues including:
- We had to insert PHI data into their system so appointment reminders could be delivered via email and text. This needed to include data that allowed us to provide directions to the office in the email, so the members’ full journey was built out.
- Personalized newsletters based on location for the insurance side of their business that would include preventative information.
- Build out new functionality that was advertised to members, like live nurse chat.
- Establish the ability for the organization to build out a new member welcome nurture campaign.
Will this speed up our processes?
In creating each of the above campaigns and solving for each of their issues, a main point of focus was on system performance. Prior to implementing Marketo Engage, the managed care consortium had issues with newsletter sends taking multiple days to send to their multimillion-member base. With Marketo, that process now takes about an hour. Because the user interface is so much easier for internal team members to use, the newsletter creation has now gone from multiple days to multiple hours.
By implementing the new platform and shortening the processing time for internal teams, they are now able to focus on creating additional campaigns and initiatives. Therefore, marketing automation has created a more seamless internal process that frees up resources for creating additional, personalized member experiences.
For more success stories, check out this Fortune 50 Health Insurer who generated $34 million in revenue in the first year, and positioned the marketing team as a credible, reliable, and trustworthy resource that contributes to membership and revenue growth.
What are my next steps?
Creating a seamless member experience across all channels can be tricky for healthcare organizations with sensitive PHI across disparate systems. That makes choosing the right platform and the right partner to integrate your system onto that platform vital.
Our experienced team of marketing automation experts has found that Marketo Engage is an ideal platform for consolidating systems so your team isn’t using something for internal and external sends. Not only that, but it is scalable and can house content, data, along with performing your marketing automation functions of email sends, alerts, nurtures, reports and more. For an easy way for your team to start the process, we offer a quick solution – Marketo Email Send Quickstart.
