Consumer Multi-Channel Experiences

What can a faulty commute teach us about relationship marketing?

This morning the New York City number 1 southbound subway train stalled at 116th st, for about a mile. After being stationary for 5 minutes, we passengers got frustrated. The transit system responded with alternatives; a bus to the next free station, a mile south a 96th st.

New Yorkers reacted in alternate ways: some sat and waited, steaming or confused. Others piled into crowded buses southbound. Some hailed an expensive taxi. Finally, a large pack, including myself, saw the bright sunny morning and decided to walk for 20 blocks downtown, enjoy the weather and get healthy exercise.


So too with acquisition campaigns for relationship marketing. They need multi channel response vehicles (web, phone, text, and sometimes even mail?) to allow for alternate consumer preferences for their experiences. The multiple channels also provide backup coverage in case.of a temporary fault.

Of course, efficiency in your CRM system is still a valid concern, as it is for the Metro Transit Authority. Measure each response channel for throughput on its funnels, and monitor for quality control to keep faults and delays to a minimum.

Holistic Learning: Optimizing your CRM or PRM Campaigns

When developing a learning or measurement plan for your relationship marketing campaigns, don't stop at the dashboards, charts, and graphs. Be sure to anticipate the potential enhancements you may implement to optimize your campaign, depending on what the results are.

Improvements to RM, whether for consumers or healthcare professionals, can range from the most concrete to more abstract decisions, as itemized below:

* Operational Improvements

* Media Optimization

* Promotional Tactical Changes

* Adjusting Program Elements

* Changing the Offers or Incentives

* Adjusting Segmentation

* Re-Thinking the Campaign Strategy

Certain types of measurement findings are more indicative of each of these required changes, and a combination of insights can "triangulate" or combine to support particular optimizations rather than others.

For these reasons, campaign measurement reviews should be holistic, and should gather data from all facets of your campaign: media, promotion-response, website and call center activity, RM participation, and incremental conversion and adherence.
Making decisions based on reports from one class of metrics is, well, sub-optimal.

Twitter Usage and Measurement - Promise and Caution

Two recent studies about Twitter point to its potential promise as a measurement tool, yet point out the limited audience it measures.

The recent Twitter Usage in America Study, 2010, by Edison Research has revealed that awareness of Twitter has exploded from 5% of Americans 12 years and older in 2008 to 87% in 2010 (by comparison, Facebook's awareness is 88%). However, utilization is a different story. Despite equal awareness, Twitter trails Facebook significantly in usage: 7% of Americans (17 million persons) actively use Twitter, while 41% maintain a profile page on Facebook. And what does "usage" mean when the study finds that the majority of Twitter users are “lurkers,” passively following and reading the updates of others without contributing updates of their own.


The study also shows results on frequency and channel of Tweeting: 63% of tweeters do so at least once a week, and nearly two-thirds of active Twitter users access social networking sites using a mobile phone. (I access via both mobile and laptop myself). The age range biases young, not surprisingly: 29% of Tweeters are 12 to 24 years, and 33% are 25 to 34. (Thus I am in the older third...)


Meanwhile, a Carnegie Mellon data mining analysis has analyzed sentiments expressed in a billion Twitter messages during 2008-2009 related to yielded measures of consumer confidence and of presidential job approval. The sentiment results were found to be similar to those of well-established public opinion polls. Although the CMU researchers did acknolwedge the results were quite "noisy."

These study findings will be presented May 25 at the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence's International Conference on Weblogs and Social Media in Washington, D.C.

What are the implications of these two studies together? They show at the same time the promise of monitoring Twitter as a rapid, cost effective research tool, and yet the cautionary reality that those being measured are a limited, self-selecting subset of the population.

The same considerations hold for those planning to use Twitter as a relationship marketing vehicle for awareness or acquisition. The reach and demographic of your Tweets will be limited, so please understand that Twitter should be just one component of a well thought media plan.

Pharma Digital IQ: CRM Perspective

I highly recommend reading the just-released in-depth study of 51 Pharmaceutical Digital presences , a research report compiled by L2 (Luxury Lab) and PhD Media.


The review is quite well done in having a range of principled dimensions on which to rank a pharmaceutical brand’s online presence. These include:
• Website platform (brand translation, site functional elements)
• Off platform messaging (online advertising, mobile, email)
• Search engine optimization (keywords, search architecture, authority)
• Social media (dabbling in facebook, twitter, youtube, user generated content)


Within the study, products are reviewed by therapeutic category for meaningful comparisons.Note that the emphasis of this study is consumers and patients, rather than resources for healthcare professionals.

Brands are scored numerically, and given competence categories having catchy names like "genius," "gifted," or "challenged." To me, the rankings and categories are secondary, for each brand may change over time. What is important is a systematic process for taking into account the overall consumer pharmaceutical digital experience.

For a CRM perspective, this framework is valuable in that it recognizes that patients seeking healthcare information online are navigating through a broad array of digital channels. This matrix of channels: mobile, search, email, social media, and website must be integrated into an overall experience that provides health education, encourages consultation with licensed healthcare professionals and leads to better medical outcomes.

Professional Value and Multi-Channel Marketing.

At this week's PMSA conference in Savannah, new models of professional promotion were featured prominently.

Angela Bakker-Lee of ZS Associates described the success of "Value Based Selling" where representatives listen to physician clinical and practice needs, and helping to achieve these ends up within the rep's goals too. She cited positive examples from technology, airlines, and healthcare.

Richard Greenburg of Inventiv Health gave a thoughtful overview of multi-channel marketing, He noted the challenges of analytics from multiple-channels, requiring data integration, and faster speed of analysis required to be responsive and adapt.

We at The CementBloc had a poster presentation of design and measurement of Professional Relationship Marketing, which really tied the above two concepts together. Physician value can be actually be enhanced and measured through deployment of a PRM system offering a range of services that go with the product information. Furthermore, through online surveys and click stream data from registrants, professional goals can be better assessed, and even brought back to the healthcare company or the sales rep in a feedback loop.

As two examples of this approach to PRM value in the marketplace,
consider Bayer's new Simple Wins Professional as well as J & J Vistakon's Partners in Practice On these company portfolio portals, healthcare professionals can find practice resources as well as product information.

With these portals, healthcare professionals are receiving more value from healthcare firms, who can measure, gather feedback, and be more responsive over time.

Facebook as the new homepage - Thoughts on Juverderm

Increasingly, healthcare companies are dabbling with some kind of presence on Facebook. The most impressive execution I've see thus far is the Facebook pages from Juvederm, an aesthetics product from Allergan.

The Juvederm Facebook presence is essentially an alternative home page, with extensive product information, a doctor finder, and before/after pictures. Also included is detail on a promotional campaign celebrity spokesperson (Dayna Devon). There is fair balance as well. Most of these Facebook panel sections actually click through to interior pages on the Juvederm website; making this Facebook an alternative home page, or perhaps thought of as a "landing page."

But the question arises, from where are people landing? That is, what is the beginning of the prospect's user experience that gets them to Facebook? Not clear from browsing around, but here are some potential examples:

* A 40-something Facebook user sees a friend's post and perhaps photos of a friend who describes taking juvederm, or the friend uses more general terms like "dermal filler." This can prompt our prospect to search within facebook, and call up the Juvederm presence

* An offline advertisement (print, TV, in office, out of home) says, "see us on Facebook," prompting a prospect to search there.

*An online referral right to facebook, from a website or even another Facebook presence.

Hopefully we will be able to measure the pathways similarly to how we can measure website referrers.

Thus it seems that Facebook is growing as an acquisition component. 30-somethings and 40-soemthings are using it increasingly. However, marketers are encouraged to not build another island, but think through the experience to get them there.

PMSA Conference to Emphasize Change, Innovation, ROI

Readers are strongly encouraged to attend this year's Pharmaceutical Management Science Association Conference next week in Savannah, GA. The overriding theme is how analytics can help companies adapt to the changes forces of the industry:

* Greater need for promotional ROI
* New payer landscapes
* Increased digitizan and non-personal professional promotion

Also, come check our our poster from The CementBloc on "Professional Relationship Marketing: Strategies and Measurement"

Reinventing Web Analytics on the Sales Tablet

Brand and business goals remain the best way to measure impact of a promotional tactic. However, this truism is not always applied with new technologies

Many pharmaceutical companies are now selling with digital tablets, where almost every click the sales representative makes can be measured, and time tabulated. These tablets generate sequential data streams, which are sometimes measured with basic KPIs like time spent, and the order of tablet slides used.

This is reminiscent of the early days of website analytics ten years ago, where the metrics often cited were page views and time on website. Back then, those were used as KPIs because they were reportable in the elementary "web log" systems.

However, whether it's websites or sales tablets, the objective of engagement within a channel is to achieve a business goal. Therefore on websites, we now measure funnels to goal pages like CRM registrations, and consumption of segmented content areas.

The same should hold for sales force tablets. Think about your brand goals,and what particular sections of the tablet presentations are most aligned toward achieving those goals. Measure consumption of those sections as a valuable indicator of success.

Increasing engagement to increase compliance

Further innovation from Bayer Diabetes to encourage diabetes youngsters to test their blood glucose levels. Called Didget, the glucose meter directly interacts with a Nintendo game boy, in principal to make this critical patient tracking more fun and less onerous for children and teenagers.

Looking forward to tracking uptake of this new level of engagement, and any studies down the road of increased compliance and health benefits.

Increase in generics, Decrease in Big Pharma Reps

The almost concurrent newswires underscore the continuing shift in branded Rx and promotional channels.

A recent IMS 2009 Rx report points out that now 75% of all U.S. prescriptions are generics, up from 54% in 2004.

While shortly thereafter, both sanofi-aventis and Abbott have laid off hundreds of U.S. Sales reps.

IMS's Murray Aitken, SVP healthcare insight, inoted that “While the 32 innovative products launched last year brought important new treatment options to patients in a number of disease areas, including cancer, thrombosis and atrial fibrillation, they drove only a limited increase in drug spending."

As generics become more prevalent in chronic diseases, and newer branded launches are in specialty areas, there may be a decreased volume of sales representatives required to call on primary care physicians. Furthermore, those sales reps that remain must present a meaningful value proposition to healthcare professions.