8 Ways Email Marketing Can Help Pharma Marketers
8 ways that email marketing can help marketers operating in the pharmaceutical and life science sectors.
Some marketers think email marketing is a dying art.
Email marketing, however, has never been more active in both B2B and B2C campaigns. Emails are an integral part of a marketing campaign and good email campaigns get a specific message out to an individual or audience group within a few minutes of the campaign being created. It can also provide real insights into customer behaviour, allow you to personalise content to different segments and drive traffic to your website.
In this post, we will be looking at how email marketing can help pharma marketers, but first, let’s look at the benefits and drawbacks of email marketing.
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Benefits
Email marketing can easily drive traffic straight to your website where your primary content lies. CTA and buttons can be very powerful when used correctly, so if you make your email engaging, relevant and interesting, they will drive more people to your website. Emails have the power to be kept, read again and engaged with multiple times. They will always be there, unless they are manually deleted by the receiver whereas content such as a video on social media, will most likely be lost and never found again. And whilst emails do get lost in the bulk of emails that come in daily, flagging good email content for later consumption is not uncommon. In addition, there are over 4.2 billion email users worldwide, which is projected to grow to 4.73 billion by 2026. This shows that email marketing isn't going anywhere; the world of emails is only getting bigger and more powerful.
You can determine what is performing best and what your audience engages with the most. This will give you valuable data that you can implement into your marketing strategy and will give you a stronger understanding of what your audience wants to see. For example, if your CTR and open rate are higher when you produce an email about a certain topic or if you craft a shorter length email, then you know your audience prefers and engages with those types of emails more. Therefore you can continue to send out emails of that nature and keep people engaged.
Drawbacks
Like any marketing channel, our audiences are potentially overwhelmed by the vast amounts of emails coming in every day. They are busy and don't have time to read each email thoroughly, so you need to be able to catch their attention quickly, which can be difficult to do, of course. If not, they might disregard your email and consider it spam mail. On average a person will receive 121 emails per day, so you will need to ensure you encourage them to act further!
A customer may engage with a company once and then be added to the database. Just because they have engaged doesn't mean they want to be on a database, meaning they might get annoyed when receiving emails and unsubscribe from any future emails, which ruins your chance of ever engaging with them again. For this reason, without consent, email marketing is best avoided. There can be deliverability issues when sending emails, some people will have spam filters, resulting in many emails heading straight to the spam folder. Usually, this is due to the overuse of certain words or poor formatting. Emails can also bounce back if the recipient's email address is incorrect or outdated. 2024 presents a new wave of challenges for pharma marketers as mailboxes, such as Outlook, Gmail and Apple Mail, are constantly evolving to prevent marketers like us send unsolicited emails.
8 Ways Email Marketing Can Help in Pharmaceutical Marketing
Now we’ve set the scene, let’s look at 8 practical ways that email marketing can help marketers who operate in the pharmaceutical and life science sectors.
1. Gaining Valuable Customers
Email marketing is an effective way to reach prospects and turn them into valuable customers. Email marketing is a valuable lead nurturing tool, and when someone visits certain web pages you can configure your CRM system to send automated email workflows to that contact, with a view of turning them into a prospect and then a customer. This is where a prospect may show interest in a service you provide, and your CRM will inform you and automatically send an email to them, encouraging them to respond and engage with your company. This sort of relationship-building is vital within a B2B setting. In the pharmaceutical industry, trust and credibility are paramount, and email marketing can help establish a company as a trusted authority. By sending out regular, accurate and relevant information, you can build a strong relationship and set the foundation for the next stage of the supplier-customer relationship.
2. Email Marketing Automation
Email automation uses predefined rules to trigger email messages based on what actions a customer does or doesn’t take. This could be you sending them a welcome email when they sign up for the newsletter, or even somebody interacting with a certain web page. Email marketing automation will get rid of time-consuming tasks meaning pharmaceutical marketers can give more time to other projects, and emails can be sent quickly and efficiently. It may be sent 30 minutes after they have left the website, which will remind and encourage them to engage further with you. Automation isn’t just concerned with sending emails to prospects, however. Tasks that can be automated include adding notes/tags to contact records, creating new CRM opportunities as well as tasks to notify relevant sales/inside salespeople of key actions that need to be undertaken.
3. Email Personalisation
You can send emails that personally target the customer, like previously mentioned, if a customer goes to a certain webpage, your CRM can send an email directly to them to encourage them to interact further. Personalisation tactics such as addressing the user by *name*’ can make people feel you are actively wanting them to react with you. There are also other opportunities for referencing the user’s job function, and company name, as well as highlighting some of the user’s previous interactions with the website or emails. You can also send automated emails from somebody at your company (who may have had a conversation with that user previously), which can be from your email and signed off by you. This looks like an email which has come directly from you, for example, where the ‘from’ sender could be “Lucy from Orientation Marketing”, which is instantly eye-catching, prompting people to interact with the email.
Often emails may feel like they are addressing anyone and everyone, rather than you specifically, it might say your name, but the actual content could be for anyone, so it is important to provide relevant content for each person, otherwise they might feel undervalued and may think about going elsewhere. Personalised emails should always be relevant to the customer. On average, someone will receive 121 emails per day, therefore, it should be engaging enough for the customer to prompt them to act further, as if it isn’t, the likelihood is that they will skip straight past it. You can also target specific segments within a target audience, for example, HCPs can receive more detailed and technical information, whereas patients can receive advice, guidance and reminders. This ensures the right audience receives the right information.
4. Drives Traffic To Your Website
When it comes to email marketing, using CTAs is essential to ensure people navigate themselves to your website. The general rule with a call to action is you want something eye-catching like a bright colour that readers are more likely to engage as they are instantly drawn to it. Ensure a CTA is placed next to the relevant content (such as the example below).
This ensures readers have a quick and easy way to navigate towards your website. There are many tips and tricks on how to improve email call to actions, so see what works best for you and your customers. A/B testing is a great way of doing this, it allows you to compare 2 versions of an email to see which performs better, you can test things from different subject lines to different email templates. You can see what your audience prefers and what is more effective. You can send out emails to potential customers who have previously shown interest in your company to remind them about you and send emails to customers to show you are still interested in them & that they matter to you. This provides a more personal experience and makes customers feel wanted and valued.
Example from Orientation Marketing's monthly newsletter.
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5. Improved Relationships
In all industries, it’s beneficial to retain relationships with customers, but in B2B it is even more important. There are many B2B email marketing practices which we have previously referenced to help with relationship building. Building relationships establishes a foundation of trust, which can lead to more honest and open communication, allowing a stronger understanding of each other - vital within the sales process, and especially the case within B2B pharma where the sales process is usually long. When working with clients it’s essential to have a strong understanding of each other to ensure you know what they want to achieve. This way, you can deliver the best service and encourage them to work with you again.
6. Gain Valuable Data
Email marketing will provide data on what customers interact with most, and what content has the highest open rate or CTR, which allows you to understand your customers more. You can establish what customers enjoy seeing, whether that’s updates about the company, newsletters or new blog posts. This is valuable as you can ensure the correct content goes to the correct people. If you understand what certain demographics of people like seeing, you can then target those people with that content. For example, if somebody never interacts with new blog posts but always interacts with updates about the company, then you know to only send them that content, otherwise they may feel like they are being spammed with irrelevant emails that clog up their inbox, which could lead to them unsubscribing and moving away from your company. This allows you to redefine your marketing strategy and have a clear understanding of your customers.
7. Increased Brand Awareness
Email marketing provides an opportunity to target marketers in a digital location which they visit every day - their email inboxes. As soon as somebody sees your company name in an email, they are aware of who you are. They might not know any specifics, or what you do, but they know the name. You can then build on this relationship by providing follow-up emails that are specific to the customer, which will encourage them to engage further and develop into a lead.
One thing not to do is overload people with too many emails. The last thing somebody wants is 5 emails a week detailing why they should engage with you. This will no doubt make people step away from your company. You should create a scenario where people want to engage and interact with you by providing something valuable, this could be you stating how your services will help streamline the production of their drug, which will encourage them to contact you.
8. Easy To Measure
Email marketing is fairly easy to measure, which is always a benefit when looking at ROI. You can analyse how many people open and click the email and you can identify how successful your emails are by seeing what percentage of total website traffic comes from your email marketing campaigns. This way you know if what you are doing is working and whether it is relevant to your audience.
Some of the key metrics in email marketing are open rates and click-through rates, but other metrics are provided by email marketing tools which should be reviewed. It is important to always observe these metrics to understand your audience, and to know if you are providing relevant and engaging content. If you aren’t, they will be more inclined to unsubscribe from your emails. Keep an eye on these additional metrics:
Conversion rate: The percentage of recipients who completed a desired action, such as filling out a form, after clicking through the email. This shows how successful the campaign was.
Bounce rate: The percentage of emails that couldn’t be delivered, a high bounce rate will indicate that there may be problems with your email list, which could include incorrect or outdated email addresses.
Unsubscribe rate: The percentage of recipients who opt out of future emails, this can help you understand whether your content is relevant to your audience.
Email has a pivotal role in pharmaceutical marketing
By providing ongoing valuable content, email marketing can enhance user experience. Email marketing offers pharmaceutical marketers a versatile and efficient means to reach their audiences with targeted, compliant, and valuable information. It plays a crucial role in relationship building, product promotion and regular communication to both clients and prospects, as well as internally within organisations. It ensures you can stay connected to your audience and keep them informed and updated.
For more on strategic marketing approaches in the pharmaceutical sectors, visit our section on strategy.