By the year 2025, the global personalization software market is expected to grow from $6.7 million in 2020 to $1.8 billion. In fact, the martech landscape has grown 5,233% in the last 10 years, according to ChiefMarTech.com.

In healthcare specifically, the demand for personalized and customized patient experiences continues to become prevalent. Today’s healthcare patients have access to a greater amount of health information than ever before – and yet still want more of that data used for their benefit.  Healthcare organizations that continue to invest in personalization can engage patients in their own care plans, thus driving better health outcomes while producing cost-saving measures.

Here are some ways that healthcare organizations can utilize the current trends in martech technology to achieve patient and business goals:

AI-Personalized Content

While it was a pipe dream a few years ago, it is now very possible to send recommended and customized content to target patient personas based on first-party data. For instance, if you have data that shows patients that are actively trying to quit smoking, you can send them content related to smoke-free habits and even special incentives to quit. Also, for patients that are pregnant, you can deliver both online and offline content focused on different stages of pregnancy and how to help them through different trimesters.

Creating Truth-Worthy Patient Profiles

Healthcare organizations need to know their consumers and patients better. In fact, it’s not only expected, it’s almost a normal (and competitive) business function.

A good example would be contactless engagement using virtual care services that perform care delivery across traditional ambulatory, acute, and post-acute care settings. By continuing to create seamless, personalized experiences during and in between treatments, organizations can gain better patient data and deliver on that data.

Triggered-Based Events

Using marketing automation platforms like Marketo, you can set up different smart campaigns that use specific trigger activities based on a consumer’s online actions. For instance, if a visitor to your website looks at specific health-related content, you can create a campaign that serves them related content and target them in additional marketing efforts. Additionally, you can create robust preference centers on your web assets that lets them choose the types of communications and topics of interest they would like to receive.

Want to learn more about the many ways you can utilize personalization in healthcare with martech? Contact us!

If you are familiar with chatbot tools like Drift and Intercom, then it won’t be a shock to get up to speed on this new feature that Marketo will soon roll out (probably later in the quarter).

Should you get excited? I would say yes because it offers another opportunity to engage with your website visitors based on their content and engagement preferences.  While forms are (and can still be) a primary way to capture intent, it’s no secret that the conversion rates for forms have been slowly dipping below marketers’ expectations.

In lieu of the eventual launch of this feature, here are some key things you should know about it.

No Coding Required

It’s as simple as copy and pasting Javascript onto the pages you want to utilize the chat feature. You will not need to involve your developers unless you must for website access reasons. Furthermore, you can customize the branding of the tool through the tool’s native UI interface.

Lead and Account Targeting

You can deploy the right chat dialogues based on detailed lead and account attributes that you can build out in the robust audience criteria section before publishing.

Book Sales Meetings

Imagine that a visitor comes to your website and the chat dialogue asks if they are interested in a demo of a specific product based on the page they are visiting. If they respond “yes,” your team can have the ability to sync a sales member’s Outlook and Google calendars to Dynamic Chat and book a meeting instantly. On the back-end reporting, you can also view all scheduled meetings.

Smart Campaign and Lead Routing Integration

Update lead scores and route leads appropriately based on interactions on your company’s website through the chat feature. You can also add chat members to relevant email programs and trigger campaigns based on chat history.

Based on what we have seen thus far, there are multiple opportunities to provide cross-channel optimization and engagement that expand paid, social, web, and email channels. More importantly, you can provide a more relevant and customized customer or prospect experience that benefits everyone.

Marketers are no strangers to change. Part of the role means adapting to consumers’ preferences, which are constantly evolving. Furthermore, marketers have gone through a lot of abrupt upheaval in marketing activities this past year, including the cancellation of in-person events.

As returning to all in-person events remain up in the air, there are emerging trends evolving for marketing teams to consider when planning GTM strategies for 2022. This is especially true when it comes to event marketing.

1.  Future Events Will Be Hybrid

When the pandemic forced closures and social distancing mandates, marketers faced the cancellation of in-person events like conferences and tradeshows.  In their place, virtual events became the new normal for engaging with prospects and customers.

In-person events will continue to have a sister digital component, and marketers will need to make sure that all engagement and interaction data with both virtual and in-person is passing back to their MAP and CRM systems seamlessly. Also, marketers will need to look into additional messaging platform integrations such as SMS/text in order to communicate event updates and messages to attendees in real-time. Keep in mind that when it comes to event registrations, the easier an experience you can provide the attendee via forms, landing pages, or calendar invites, the better.

2. Find Alternatives in A Cookieless World

While Google has postponed the eventual death of third-party cookies (until 2023), marketers will still need to learn to wean themselves off of third-party cookie targeting strategies. This is why investing in CDP (customer data platforms) will need to be a part of your martech stack. As a side note, you can use tools like Google’s Privacy Sandbox to achieve personalization and consumer targeting without intruding on user privacy. Regardless, CRM tools, surveys, and interactive content will become increasingly instrumental to overcoming the cookieless era.

3. Thought Leadership is NOT going away

Content is still the driving force of many marketing efforts. As you consider what will drive attendance to upcoming events you sponsor or host, think about the topics you want to be known for and how you deliver that content through omnichannel such as social, video, and search.

4. “Micro-Events” versus Big Production Conferences

As a cost-saving measure and to lessen the need for more in-person resources, many companies are starting to scale back those big blowout conferences that take place once a year. Instead, it’s a series of smaller, more intimate events that still deliver the same networking value. For example, a healthcare company could schedule a series of customer appreciation events that includes a wine tasting conducted virtually but the custom wine is delivered to participants. Or, a series of accounts could be targeted based on buyer personas to attend a virtual conference hosted by the company but attendees are sent conference swag as a physical touchpoint.

My colleague and I will continue to explore omnichannel strategies for marketers in marketing technology and operations in our “Beyond Email” series. Be sure to check back into our Marketo blog channel for more content.

Let’s give Carrie Bradshaw some credit – at least she knew how to organize her shoes properly. Each pair stacked neatly in its’ own cubby and separated from the other pairs by color, size, and season. Don’t we wish we could all be that organized with our shoes, much less our marketing databases right?!

What Do My Shoes Have To Do With Databases?

Organizing shoes are like organizing your data in a marketing automation platform. You keep meaning to make time but other priorities get in the way. But, there are tools in your instance you may not be aware of that can help. For instance, Marketo’s workspaces and partitions feature are a hidden gem. Yes, I know, it’s not one of their sexier features. But, it packs a powerful punch in keeping your databases streamlined as well as your campaign management.

Let’s breakdown the core functionalities and why it’s important as part of your overall MAP architecture:

Workspaces: As kids, do you remember being so protective of your workspace where you drew and practiced homework? Your desk was your workspace. In Marketo, workspaces give you the ability to create and manage multiple brands based on your business units. If you have different assets such as logos, branding guidelines, etc, then you can make sure you have a separate storage environment.

Partitions: A partition acts as a separate database and keeps that data from crossing or duplicating with another data set. Why is this important? Well, if you have a business unit that has a completely separate database you want to integrate with Marketo, wouldn’t it be great to automatically assign that data to a specific partition that then goes into its own workspace.

Let’s Get to Organizing, Shall We?

Here are some other simple ways to think about better organizing your MAP database:

• Always stay on top of your marketable database size and where those lead records are originating.
• Create some standard smart lists to clean out any invalid or duplicate email addresses.
• Before you add a new lead through imports, check out record logs first.
• Create operational programs to manage and review your hard and soft bounces.

Try to pencil it in your calendar to complete a database audit at least every quarter. Also, schedule some time to review with your team and look into features like workspaces and partitions to make your life easier as a MOPS professional.

Which reminds me, I think it’s time to revisit my shoe closet as well.

Personally, I hate running long distances. I like to think I’m a pretty athletic person,  but the idea of running more than 5k or even 10k races just makes me cringe. So, last year, I ran a virtual marathon for the first time ever to challenge myself. I created a schedule based on how many miles I wanted to complete per day. At first, the ramp-up was slow and arduous. I felt like I wasn’t getting anywhere with my training and I would never finish the race. But, gradually, my pace improved and my endurance increased. Needless to say, I’m now proud to admit I am a marathon runner. The process of Email IP Warming is like running a marathon.

Begin with the End in Mind

Essentially, you’re training your system’s email deliverability through strategic send exercises based on volume, engagement, and domains. Why is this important? Because as you adopt a new marketing automation platform, the goal of warming up is to ramp up your sending volume to anticipated “normal” levels. Ultimately, this will reduce your soft and hard bounce rate as well as avoid spam lists. 

Getting Started with IP Warming

Throughout my career, I’ve seen many clients and companies skip this step as part of an implementation. My advice: Don’t do it. Your email warm-up is a way to establish your sender’s reputation. It’s hard to undo any fallouts as a result of not taking this action. Again, going back to marathons, would you run a race without training for it first?  

Here are a few tips to keep in mind as part of this exercise: 

• Start your first to second week of IP Warming by sending to your most engaged audiences first 
• Monitor your blacklists throughout this process 
• Use a clear and instant link for unsubscribing
• Make sure you have a branded sending domain along with a reply-to address 

As part of our engagement with clients, we always consider IP Warming during initial implementation, if you are curious to learn more about our processes and strategies related to Marketo, contact us today.