The Electronic Health Record will change health care delivery forever with a complete record of all clinical patient encounters, as well as support other health care activities.
Pharmaceutical marketers want the same efficiency that comes from an integrated record of customer interests and interactions. It’s time for the EMR - Electronic Marketing Record. Essentially, the EMR is a single view of our target customers, the key decisions makers and influencers that affect the outcomes of our marketing efforts.
This EMR has the ability to aggregate data points across all important demographic, behavioral, preferential and customer interfaces into one longitudinal marketing record, a single view of your customer that allows you to make efficient decision, reduce spending and dramatically improve the return on your marketing dollars.
While the health care industry moves towards the EHR, we as pharmaceutical marketers continue to operate in a mode of silo-ed, episodic marketing to physicians. We rely on disparate databases from different vendors. We never aggregate the data to share intelligence (behaviors and communications preferences) so we can work as ONE marketing team and communicate to our customers in a continuum. And to really make matters worse, we never truly measure our marketing outcomes.
It’s been done in other industries with more complex media models and much smaller and tighter marketing budgets. For example, take the case of Destination Hotels & Resorts, an AIR Marketing customer in the hospitality industry. DHR manages over 30 properties across the United States. The sheer number of different properties in a range of geographic markets meant there were many redundancies with the organization.
AIR Marketing offered DHR a marketing technology solution to create the efficiencies needed to improve performance and reduce cost. The custom solution, called Destination Delivers, consolidated customer data across disparate platforms and rolled it up into one location. This allowed DHR to obtain a single view of the customer and devise custom messages, offers and promotions. As Andre Fournier from DHR explains, “The consistency and the quality of the messaging was huge, and the return on investment was almost 10 times what we would have gotten out of on an individual basis.”
It is time for Electronic Marketing Record (EMR) in pharmaceutical marketing. Watch this video on database marketing for more insights into the work AIR Marketing has done in other industries!
