We are at the dawn of a mobile, personal health revolution. Beginning soon, technology will play a much bigger role in all aspects of healthcare and will have a heightened role and urgency for marketers selling drugs, health brands, devices, therapies and services. Apps will become a critical marketing and promotion tool. Apps hold out the possibility of fulfilling marketers persistent fantasy — that consumers will record daily, personal activity and that this data will fuel on-going relationship marketing programs. This belief is especially strong among pharmaceutical marketers who dream of patient diaries and yearn for patient data as a door opener for the patient-doctor conversation, widely acknowledged to be the single biggest hurdle in the DTC arena. Apps also offer technology for overcoming the two biggest consumer adherence and conversion stumbling blocks – what’s in it for me (WiiFM) and do it for me (DiFM). Depending on how you count, there are as many as 97,000 existing mHealth apps ranging from broad-based health and wellness tools to single brand, single action apps. Three out of four are paid apps. Forty-three percent are aimed at healthcare professionals. The majority of those are either dosing calculators or reference materials. In real life, less Read more…
It’s not the number of email addresses on your list. It’s the behavioral quality of the names. In email marketing size doesn’t matter. Segments do. Too many marketers measure their email program by counting valid email addresses. This is a classic way marketers are evaluated. If you grow the list you’re good. If you shrink it, you’re not. But while this may get you a bonus, it won’t get you results. The ugly truth is that at any given moment 20-30 percent of your list are dead men walking – consumers who haven’t opted out but have stopped caring, opening and clicking.
Remarketing and Retargeting Revisited
Retargeting, also called remarketing, begins by dropping a cookie on site visitors. This enables marketers to follow them as they search, do social networking or flit from site to site. A person coming to your site can then be discretely followed by ads reflecting the content they viewed or reflecting their psycho-demographic profile.
Mobility will turn us into direct, relationship and database marketers.That’s the cornerstone message from two new studies — Forrester’s “2013 Mobile Trends for Marketers”and Urbanairship’s “Connect with the Connected.” The keys to successfully making this transformation will be surrendering control to consumers while continuously creating relevant and resonant content.
In the beginning there were web pages. Brands staked their claims on the newly invented World Wide Web. Web 1.0 met consumer expectations that every brand would have an 800 number and a web page as points of contact. Web 2.0 was about finding, developing and embracing interactive technologies to engage customers, prospects and other constituencies. It was about Flash, bells and whistles and keeping up with the Joneses. Having a cool website mattered.