Blog Posts By: Gina LeMay

I’m finding myself reading a lot of blogs from Seth Godin – primarily because they are short ‘n sweet, but very insightful.  For anyone who knows me… the shorter and sweeter, the better.  For those who do not know Seth, I recommend that you check him out.  I’m amazed at how well Seth can get a point across with so few words.

Each Sunday when I set out to do the grocery shopping for the week, I find myself hesitating whether I should jump on the highway to Hannaford or go down the road to Shaw’s.  I have been frequenting Hannaford for almost 10 years and really like the store.  The store is clean, the people are friendly and improvements over the last couple of years have propelled the “value” of the store.  The new seafood area provides a lot of fresh choices and the butcher counter showcases a lot of choice meats letting the buyer choice what they’d like (versus having to pick through the pre-packaged stuff).  Hannaford seems to be more expensive than their competition, but it is a real nice place to shop.

I haven't blogged in a while - call it lack of being inspired.  That all changed this morning when my car displayed an alert that the tire pressure was low and maintenance was needed.  All I could think of was flying out later in the day on a business trip and coming home to a flat tire late Wednesday night at Logan airport.  After contemplating a couple of different options on what to do (ignore the warning, call my husband and let him handle it), I decided to give AAA a call.

I'm being asked more and more from clients in the healthcare and pharmaceutical space about text messaging (SMS) and how it can be used to increase customer retention and loyalty.  Some in healthcare might think this is new idea, but many in this space have been using SMS as a communication channel for several years - not only to help drive retention and loyalty, but more importantly, patient adherence and compliance.

A medical device company I'm currently working with is interested in integrating SMS into their marketing database solution to provide customers another means to receive information.  In addition, this channel is being teed up to provide something back to the customer - reminder messages. 

I've been thinking a lot lately how to approach marketing executives about mobile marketing because it is still one of those things that is hard to grasp, especially in the pharmaceutical and healthcare space where patient privacy is so important.  A lot of marketers I speak with are interested in the idea of SMS, iPhone applications, etc., but wonder how to fit it into their overall strategy, never mind getting buy-in from management and legal.

While reading a blog about Social Media Marketing, I stumbled upon an article about Smartphone ad responders on Marketing Charts which had some staggering statistics that are well worth sharing.

Whether marketing to consumers or Healthcare Practitioners (HCP's), many pharmaceutical companies have changed the way they segment.  HCP segmentation, for example, is no longer driven exclusively by specialty type and rearview mirror volume metrics such as NRx and TRx.  Instead most companies are becoming savvier and incorporating marketing and analytic best practices to build robust customer profiles and segmentation schemes that are based on customer need and value, interest, attitudes, and behaviors.  Integrating customer data from multiple data sources, appending records with commercially available data (census, demographic, interest/lifestyle, etc.) and surveying prospective and current customers to determine attitudes about the disease, treatment programs and tools, and the brand are all part of developing an effective data strategy to be able to tag customers to segments.  The challenge, however, is that newly created segments don't always manifest themselves to customer records that already reside in the database.  So how can you make your segmentation actionable and realize the benefits? 

MarketingSherpa recently posted an online article that is related to a previous blog about recently gathered research on what drives people to unsubscribe from email communications.  The premise of that article was that the top reason was identified as 'Inbox clutter' and its effect on all email communications. 

MarketingSherpa recently posted an article presenting research they've gathered on what drives people to unsubscribe from email communications.  Year after year, their email benchmark survey states that the top reason was identified as 'Inbox clutter' and its effect on all email communications.  'Delivering on the promise of relevance' comes in a distant second. 

The findings in this article were based upon feedback at the MarketingSherpa's email summit in Miami where people at that conference painted a different picture.  The top two answers both speak to the important of the individual relationship between emailer and recipient.   They identify relevance and campaign-level frequency as the top reasons for opting-out or simply ignoring a sender's email. 

In reflecting upon this finding, I would have to agree. 

It seems that every time I log into my Comcast email account, I have a million new emails to go through (o.k., I'm exaggerating), and I wonder, for the majority of them, how the sender even got my email address.

I'm sure there are better ways dissect emails that should be important to me, but I generally scan the sender name (and immediately delete those that I don't recognize) and then delete any email that doesn't have a subject line that is appealing.  My guess is that you have a similar method to the INBOX madness.

SMS/Texting was a hot topic at a recent client meeting. Like many industries, pharmaceuticals and healthcare are also challenged with the tough economy and as such are adjusting their promotional activities and leveraging lower cost channels that align to customer preferences. SMS/Texting appears to have a place in this particular customer’s arsenal for several reasons:

I've been helping customers maximize their marketing database solutions for over 10 years and often see marketers struggle with the decision whether to or not to enhance their customer data.  Ideally, additional information that could be used to build customer insights would be collected directly from the source (the customer!), but doing so may not be realistic.  Just the other day, I got a Facebook request from a friend to register to a website.  I started to fill out the form and backed out about half way through because they were "asking me too many questions".  I really didn't "know this website" and wasn't comfortable providing more than some basic information.  Something tells me that a lot of people might feel that way...