Sometimes, marketing inspiration can come from seeing where peers find success. That’s why starting this fall, we’ll highlight a different Pulse pharma customer every quarter, sharing their smart discoveries and highlighting their wins. This month, we spoke to the Head of Digital Marketing at a long term Pulse Health client. Although he wished to remain anonymous, he spoke freely about where he’s seeing the greatest ROI.
Pulse: How does your Pulse partnership fit into your plan to drive revenue?
Client: Not surprisingly, a high-level analysis showed that inbound is highly correlated to product use. You don’t see a lot of this, so it is important to make reaching out to us with questions as frictionless as possible. These are customers who have a genuine interest in learning more about your brand. It’s a super valuable channel. As an organization, lowering the barrier to physicians and healthcare professionals who are asking questions or requesting more information is a positive initiative.
Pulse: Can you share an example of how you’re doing this?
Client: There was an organization we were reaching out to that ended up not accepting in-person visits. We tried for a little while to make contact there and hadn’t been able to. When we started working with Pulse on Request-a-Rep, funny enough, one of the first people to reach out was from that very organization. We were able to set up a meeting and it went really well.
Also early on, we heard from somebody who we thought had no interest due to lack of response. But it turned out they were just on leave and made an appointment with us as soon as they got back. I love that by lowering these boundaries to inbound we’ve gotten some really good connections.
We would love to be everywhere. We’d love to give everybody the answers to every question they have, but with limited resources, you can’t be everywhere all at once. Sometimes somebody in a hospital or with an account that you’re not at right now has a question, and they reach out via something like Request-a-Rep, and they get the help they need, which is great.
Pulse: How did you work with Pulse to make these requests super-efficient?
Client:: I would say most importantly we try to make sure we don’t ask for too much information up front. Some forms put a lot on the user by asking for a lot of information they either don’t have handy at the time or are not pertinent to the interaction. This increases the barrier between our customers and our customer-facing teams, which is the opposite of what we want. We decided to try to shrink that form a little bit and put some of the work on us just to determine whether this is pertinent to the Rep, or is this somebody reaching out for something else, like selling copy paper for the printer. After we vet the contact, we direct them to the right person to talk to, which may be in the territory, or maybe not, depending on the product. We try and get them the answer they need, quickly.
Pulse: How are triggered campaigns working for you?
Client: We know statistically that triggered programs outperform others by about 3X. My goal in digital marketing has been the same for 20+ years – I want somebody to receive something from me and be glad they got it. That’s really my North Star for what we do. Years and years and years ago (not to date myself), if you looked at click-through rates on emails you would see open rates or click-through rates and media rates of 0.3% or something crazy like that. It’s like, wow, 99.7% of people didn’t even want that. We’ve had over +30% open rate recently, which is phenomenal. We work really hard to make sure the people receiving it are the ones who want it and would find the information useful and appropriate. That way, you’re always going to see great results. If not, we’re going to figure out why, and then we make it better next time.
