Campaign Management Playbooks

It's a great deal of effort to design a relationship marketing campaign, from the first brainstorming of business goals, to the user experience designs, through to the final creation of communication pieces and the media planning. It's critical not to let that careful thought go to waste as you are about to head into market.

The campaign management playbook is where all of the operational specifications sit in one well-structured document. The playbook includes the segmentation specifications, and how segments are computed at registration time, or from the database. It maps out the communication plan by segment, and the business rules for determining under what conditions each communication is sent. Also included are the fulfillment requirements for each communication, and each testing plan.

The playbook should not be massive or burdensome; 10 to 25 pages, including figures and tables. This is the necessary script that all vendor partners must follow, so put time into a clear design.

Having this playbook is critical to insuring that when executed in market, your relationship marketing program brings the consumers or healthcare professionals have the experience that was designed.

Is this topic a bit dry? Sorry about that; but the intention with playbooks is to avoid the excitement of in-market mistakes later.

Managing Healthcare Email Cadences

An interesting point of view article just came across Mediapost on Managing Email cadences by Greatchen Scheiman of Ogilvy One.

The article covered off on basic frequency and portfolio ideas, asking sensible questions from the *sender's* perspective like "do you have new information to discuss," and "how often is the market changing." The example cited are sporting events like baseball: in-season, daily updates on games make sense -- out of season, less frequent news is far better.

However, thinking about Email cadences for healthcare is really more about what the *recipient* is going through in their decision making journey, whether this recipient is a patient, caregiver, or a health professional.
Time-based events are inherent in medicine:

* decisions to visit doctors, scheduling appointments with doctors, patient visits, and follow-ups, referrals to specialists
* time of health progression, like pregnancy, or pediatric growth
* seasonality of conditions like allergies, and arthritis pain
* treatment and medication protocols, as in oncology, psychiatry, or neurology
* refill schedules
* adherence drop-off patterns


Therefore, plan your healthcare email cadence so that your messages are in fact preparing your stakeholders for the important decisions they need to make.

Furthermore, let's not forget other Email best practices like subject line testing, creative testing, clear calls to action, and Opt-out management.
Proper planning can help you make the most of this channel.

RM differences for consumers and professionals

I have seen this multiple times in each direction: well meaning companies and their I.T. organizations wanting to adapt their consumer relationship marketing systems to handle professionals, or inversely, attempting to modify their professional RM infrastructure to handle consumers.

After all, the "C" in CRM stands for "customer" and these are just two types of customers, right? The both have names, addresses, emails, true?

Yes, but that is just scratching the surface. These two segments are not exactly the same. Software and database vendors who specialize in one or the other are likely to advocate this supposed equivalence when they are trying to sell themselves from one customer vertical to another. Be cautious about this.

There are different business processes, data availability, and campaign rules that apply to each of consumers and professionals. Here is a sample:

For professionals, there are sets of affiliations that we care about, such as group practice memberships, hospital affiliations, medical schools. Multiple addresses result. Multiple specialties are important to note. Usually, professionals are called on by a sales force, whose activities on each call, details and samples, must in turn be noted as transactions that are separate from the 'transactions' of prescriber-level Rx data. There is the firm distinction between marketing and medical contact management that must be preserved.

Consumers have special attributes as well: census, demographic, and psychographic data are particularly important. Also, due to HIPAA compliance, for most companies there is not usually an option to measure direct behaviors, so surrogates from web analytics are even more important. Consumers also change residence and email addresses quite frequently, making data cleansing especially vital. Consumers are the ones in conversion and adherence programs with financial components like coupons, vouchers, or copay cards, depending on the healthcare category.

These differences can demand distinct data structures, and different campaign business rule designs. Does a company need to pay twice for RM infrastructure for each customer vertical? Many companies in fact do. Even those that have tried to adapt one system to the other, the lesson learned is: this is not a quick migration, it takes a great deal of planning, implementation time, and specialization.


For these reasons I tend to advocate using "C" in CRM is "consumer" and the "P" in PRM is professional.

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.