Your Secret Weapon for Life Sciences Email Marketing

Less than fifty percent of doctors currently see reps in their offices. However, the need for pharmaceutical information is higher than ever, as evidenced by the amount of time doctors are spending on Wikipedia – HCPs’ top source of product information.¹

To keep pace, life sciences is going online too, pursuing new digital channels, like email, web portals, and online meetings. The sheer volume of competing voices, though, means securing share of voice is a challenge.

Personalized rep email is emerging as a key channel to bridge this gap. The relationship-building, through one-to-one interactions between HCPs and their reps or MSLs, cuts through the noise in a way other channels can’t do alone. Veeva CRM Approved Email, which allows users to email relevant, compliant content directly to customers, was created to enable a more tailored and personal experience. We recommend a four-stage approach to prepare for success with Approved Email.

For pharma to maximize the success of email marketing programs with healthcare professionals, there needs to be clear buy in across the commercial organization on goals and content types.

1) Decide
The channel’s objective should be explicit, based on your company’s business goals and mission statement. For example, for an organization with a stated objective of improving patient outcomes, Approved Email can serve as a mechanism to drive critical discussions with HCPs on dosing and disease state management.

Determining the in-market application of Approved Email enables easier cross-functional decision-making around key deployment areas, including:

• What domain (the web address that comes after the ‘@’ symbol in an email address) will be used?
• Will Approved Emails be sent from the rep’s email account, or a generic ‘do not reply’ address?
• Will HCPs be allowed to ‘reply to’ approved emails?
  • Will the ‘reply to’ go to the rep, or a general inbox? If you use a general inbox, how will you monitor it?
• How will opt-in and opt-out be handled?
  • Do you have an existing consent hub? Will you have opt-in/opt-out applied specifically to Approved Email, or will an opt-in/opt-out for mass-market emails affect HCPs receiving Approved Emails from reps?
• Will email addresses be collected by reps, or purchased?

Once you know how Approved Email fits in your multichannel strategy, you are ready to operationalize your support for the channel.

2) Operationalize

Often, commercial teams are fragmented across multiple silos. Deploying a compliant HCP email capability provides the opportunity for meaningful communication across these groups and setting common goals. With interdepartmental executive sponsorship, you can achieve alignment on:

• What are the best practices for digital content creation within your organization?
  • Survey your field team and HCP behavioral data in CRM to identify your highest-performing content. This exercise will help establish a baseline for best practices that will flow into your Approved Email content plan. Consider how Approved Email will be used to engage in conversations with customers, the appropriate messaging of the channel compared to others, and opportunities to repurpose content from other channels.
• What are the Approved Email content standards for branded vs. unbranded content?
  • What is required for blackbox or launch products?
• Is there an impact on your Veeva CRM or Veeva Vault PromoMats configurations?
  • How will configuration changes get prioritized and handled?
• How will you produce your email templates?
  • Establish standards to support cross-brand needs, involving representatives from your brand teams, agencies, multichannel marketing, sales and legal, medical, regulatory teams to create a core set of email templates. Securing buy-in on organizational guidelines will enable faster approvals and greater content reuse across brands.
  • Create common standards for content production – for example, will the core group of templates be custom coded, or will your content team leverage the email editor capability in Vault PromoMats? The Veeva Vault PromoMats BEE Editor tool enables a non-technical end user to create an Approved Email template from scratch, without the need to hard code.

Now that you have operationalized how you will support the channel, you are ready to deploy.

3) Deploy
To ensure a smooth transition, you need a change management plan that addresses how you plan to engage with all internal and external partners. Key considerations include:

• What is your content plan, and how will content get created, approved, and deployed from a people, process, and technology perspective?
  • At this stage, you’ll want to be sure that your brand teams are engaged and ready to execute their content plan. Prioritize email templates, use cases, and supporting content you want to share through the channel.
• How will you map Approved Email to your multichannel strategy and sales cycle?
  • Understanding the customer journey helps define the templates that need to be ready at launch. Engaging with your sales teams will help guide decision-making around key use cases. Many clients start with meeting requests, event registrations, and educational materials. Over time, they may ensure they have supporting content for everything they include in their CLM presentations to facilitate follow-on discussions from face-to-face meetings. Also, consider how you will keep content fresh as customer needs and market events demand.
• How will you collaborate effectively across multiple stakeholders?
  • Develop a playbook for your internal and external partners which includes content standards, templates, processes, best practices, and requirements. Have a plan on where to store and share the playbook so updates can be deployed quickly and there is a single location for everyone to access the playbook.
• Who is your subject matter expert?
  • Provide access to subject matter experts who can answer technical, standards, and best practices questions. Intervening early on questions from your teams keep the content creation process moving forward and control costs to the brands for re-work. Frequently, the Veeva Transformation Consulting team provides support while customers prepare for launch and build internal expertise. In the long term, this can be an Approved Email channel expert within your multichannel marketing team or a digital production partner that touches all of your brands.
• How will you design your field training?
  • Training should not be confined to the functional aspects of using Approved Email. Cover specifics on how the channel fits in the sales cycle, and various use cases supported by email, such as medical education or product launches. If the reps don’t know the content, how to use it, and when to use it – they won’t use it!

4) Improve Continuously

• Monitor utilization by the reps to identify issues by assessing:
• What is the adoption rate?
• How frequently is Approved Email utilized?
• What templates and content are being sent to HCPs?
• How is the content performing?
• What are your open and click through rates
• What email templates and content are performing best?
• What devices or email clients are most used by your customers?
• Are you receiving bounce backs?
• Are there drop-offs of utilization over time?

Once you gather insights and identify opportunities for improvement, you need to demonstrate continuous improvement to the organization and the value to the organization. Make sure you communicate across groups on what is working and where improvements need to be made. Remember, you don’t know what you don’t know. Stay engaged across all teams!

¹“Doctors’ #1 Source of Healthcare Information,” The Atlantic. https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2014/03/doctors-1-source-for-healthcare-information-wikipedia/284206/