Healthcare marketing: Optimizing customer experience

Your customer’s omnichannel digital experience is key to meeting your healthcare marketing goals. Your ability to prioritize determines how fast you’ll get there

Naturally, user experience (UX or CX) applies to just about every marketing sector right now. But, where healthcare marketing comes into its own, is the sheer opportunity for data-driven personalization.

Customer-focused marketing taps into the benefits of digital transformation for manufacturing, logistics, supply chain, healthcare agents, and the patients as end-users.

Firstly, let’s consider the digital disruption which puts consumers in a researcher’s shoes, and making personal decisions about their healthcare, online:

• 47% research doctors
• 38% research hospital and medical facilities
• 77% book medical appointments

But how can marketers and managers anticipate and satisfy the needs of healthcare consumers demanding products and services on-demand? In this article, we will look into some elements of digital experience, including recommended resources from our Digital Experience Learning Path.

Multiscreen technographics

It goes without saying that as healthcare/ pharma marketing professionals, our first priority is making products and services easily accessible across all audience technology demographics and multiscreen behaviour. Without this key usability, all other omnichannel tactics pale into insignificance.

Technographic data, as defined in our advanced module, Mobile and multiscreen usability, in our Digital Experience Learning Path includes:

• Screen resolutions
• Devices (Smartphone models and desktops)
• Browsers including browser versions

Apply a data-driven approach to optimizing your audience’s customer journey by applying technographic metrics such as market share and stats, as shown in this chart, taken from our Mobile and multiscreen usability module.

With the continued rise in mobile usage, mobile optimization and monitoring is a key priority in omnichannel marketing, for companies that are not ‘mobile first’. We should optimize our content for mobile because not doing so may lose us business. But, of course, the other side of the coin is that, when implemented well, mobile marketing offers marketers a whole host of benefits besides not losing business! By interacting with customers in real-time, marketers can use behavioural and locational data to personalize their content and increase conversion.

The following diagrams outline key mobile user experience considerations for marketers looking to optimize their mobile marketing. The full diagrams and further guidance can be found in our advanced module, Mobile and multiscreen usability, in our Digital Experience Learning Path:

• Consider what you are asking your audience to do on their mobile, and the easiest hand position for this activity (demonstrated in the first diagram).
• This will influence your omnichannel content and design (demonstrated in the second diagram).
• Apply data-driven testing and analysis to ensure the customer journey is fully optimized across the customer multiscreen experience.

Our Digital Experience Learning Path is packed full of tools and training to support you in applying a data-driven approach to optimizing your healthcare/ pharma customer experience, such as our featured advanced module, mobile and multiscreen usability.

Smart Insights Business Members are using the Digital Experience Learning Path and more to win, reach and convert more customers. Start today

Wearable technology

Healthcare marketers monitoring technological developments will know that the rise in healthcare-specific wearable technology offers great opportunities for healthcare and pharma companies to increase their customer digital value proposition.

Now is the time to expand into smart wearable technology – the wearable medical device market is expected to reach more than $27 million by 2023, a spectacular jump from almost $8 million in 2017. US smart wearable users are predicted to increase across all generations over the next 4 years, with Millennials predicted the highest adoption of 27.6% by 2024.

Intelligent wearable devices assist healthcare providers in caring for patients electronically (eHealth), as the devices can provide remote transfer of health data for day-to-day monitoring. This technology has developed as a result of the increasing need for ambulatory monitoring of patients.

A recent study classified wearable devices into 4 application areas:

1. Health and safety monitoring
2. Chronic disease management
3. Disease diagnosis and treatment
4. Rehabilitation

As you can see, the opportunities are vast. Used correctly, wearable devices can cut down the manual tasks involved in ongoing patient care, as well as reducing the cost of care due to prevention and early detection, and data-driven rehabilitation. This could be as simple as a smartwatch that monitors heart rate.

But what can you do with all this information? And how is it relevant to omnichannel marketers?

Omnichannel marketing for customers with a wearable device enables marketers to deliver hyper-personalized messaging. One example of this could be competitive health insurance pricing/incentives for customers taking measures to improve their health. There are benefits for insurers who can use this data to estimate health insurance more accurately, plus customers feel a sense of ownership in their own health journey.

When optimizing your customers’ digital experience, it can be easy to get carried away with large amounts of data, particularly considering exactly what is at stake here: Our primary goal in this task is to add value to the customer’s experience.

Therefore, keeping actionable analytics at the heart of testing and decision-making is crucial. Applying checklists and diagrams, such as the essentials of actionable analytics, from the improve digital customer experience module in our Digital Experience Learning Path will keep you on track so you can get the most value from your optimization.

 

Finally, gamification is a popular marketing tactic in a number of industries – this translates to health through omnichannel games for intelligent device wearers. Healthcare providers are creating competitive behavioural goals for device wearers to achieve through exercise, diet and nutrition, with similar benefits as discussed above.

Our Digital Experience Learning Path is packed full of tools and training to support you in applying a data-driven approach to optimizing your healthcare/ pharma customer experience, such as our featured module, improve digital customer experience.

Smart Insights Business Members are using the Digital Experience Learning Path and more to win, reach and convert more customers. Start today

Healthcare marketing strategy priorities

These examples are just two ways of incorporating wearable devices into your omnichannel marketing to optimize your customer’s digital experience and reap the rewards.

The graphic below, taken from our opportunities for improving digital experiences module within the Digital Experience Learning Path, demonstrates how improving digital experience adds value across your entire marketing process:

• Product
• Interactivity
• Service
• Design
• Reassurance
• Ease of use
• Relevance
• Performance

Depending on your digital maturity, your biggest priority may be finally streamlining mobile marketing processes, or, boosting wearable technology research and development, or, anywhere in between – including email and automation, social media, content marketing, SEO and more.

To make your priorities, we recommend a potential weighting for each in a scoring system, which incorporates resourcing viability, organizational value and fit.

The full scoring system and tools can be found in our opportunities for improving digital experiences module within the Digital Experience Learning Path.

Our Digital Experience Learning Path is packed full of tools and training to support you in applying a data-driven approach to optimizing your healthcare/ pharma customer experience, such as our featured module, improve digital customer experience.

Smart Insights Business Members are using the Digital Experience Learning Path and more to win, reach and convert more customers. Start today