One of the goals of many pharmaceutical brands these days is to create a HIPAA-compliant (Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act), opt-in database consisting of both prospective consumers and brand users or patients. The strategy behind building such a database is to be able to begin a relationship with these people and re-contact them when appropriate, in a context that is meaningful to them, and via a channel they prefer. In this way, prospective consumers can be driven to their healthcare professional to request your particular brand. Patients can also receive information that helps manage their expectations while on your brand and gives them reasons to stay compliant with their therapy.

Acquisition direct mail is a direct marketing tactic that can help you build your database. To raise the probability that these acquisition tactics will be a success and provide you with a positive return on investment (ROI), here are some proven direct marketing tips to help insure that you keep your cost per lead (CPL) to a minimum.

Tip #1 – Choose Your Partners Wisely
Direct marketing acquisition strategy, planning, creative and tactics are best left to those who have both pharmaceutical and consumer direct marketing experience because they have the knowledge of how to properly mix healthcare strategies with relationship marketing principles. They also know which suppliers are best suited to handle the production and fulfillment of the programs they implement, as well as how to manage the daily interaction with those vendors. Keep in mind that consumers and professionals are different audiences and need to be addressed as such. Find an experienced relationship marketing agency to guide you down this path.

Tip #2 – Know Your Audience
Pharmaceutical companies spend a lot of money on research before launching a brand or entering a new ailment category. So should it be with targeting your audience. Work with your agency and research team to segment your potential audience when discussing who to target with your acquisition efforts. Then narrow down to the top two or three segments so that your agency can work with a list broker to create profiles of each segment. they will also hunt down appropriate lists that meet your profile criteria.

Tip #3 – The 40/40/20 Rule?
Many direct marketers preach that 40% of the success can be attributed to the lists, 40% to the offer and only 20% to the creative. This may be true when selling financial services, widgets and telecommunications, but in the pharmaceutical industry it’s really more like an even split among the three. They all have to work in concert with each other (plus the DTC campaign, if applicable) to attain success. I give them equal weight and then add in a fourth value – frequency. Frequency has to do with both timing and awareness. What if you reach a consumer with a mailing piece but the timing is off? Maybe a life event prevents them from responding to your offer because of bad timing, but the first communication helps create awareness of your brand. If one of the next two communications are better timed, then they will respond. Frequency in the mail definitely pays off. It’s not unusual to see a 20% - 50% lift in response to a second or third mailing wave. So my personal rule is more like 30/30/20/20.

Tip #4 – Be HIPAA Compliant
When asking consumers to opt-in and give you personally identifiable information (PII), you must be sure to be HIPAA compliant with your data gathering, storage and use. We have found that if you are open and honest about what you intend to do with the data you are gathering, consumers will share surprising amounts of personal data about themselves and their diseases. Especially if you tell them that you will only use the data to help them manage their condition and are not going to sell it to any third parties for marketing purposes. First, speak to your privacy officer about your intentions and find out what corporate restrictions are in place. Then communicate those to your agency and they will create a response mechanism that meets the marketing, research and privacy needs for your brand.

Tip #5 – Have a Strong Call to Action
When sending out a mailing, you not only must give people a reason to respond, but tell them when and show them how. The call to action, combined with your offer, has to be compelling enough to drive people to want to respond. Show it early and often throughout your mailing. Some examples are: call today; log on now; reply now and get a free gizmo; the first 500 responders get a free guide to managing your condition, etc. Give them a reason not only to respond, but to do it sooner rather than later because most people who put your mail piece aside will forget about it. Time sensitive offers also tend to raise response.

Tip #6 – Provide Multiple Response Options
And speaking of response, you should give consumers multiple ways to respond to your offer. Toll-free number, web site and business reply card (BRC) are the three main response channels. By utilizing all three of these you give consumers the option to respond in the manner they prefer. This increases your chances of having them respond and take advantage of your offer. Be sure to give equal weight to the different response channels, unless you are trying to drive responders to a particular channel (like the web, so you can cut down on back end costs).

Tip #7 – Gather Only Actionable Data
Don’t just gather information from people for the sake of being able to do so. There is no point to gathering PII unless you can use the data points to drive future communications programs. That’s what we mean by actionable data. If your loyalty program is segmented by age range, then ask for it. Conversely, if your loyalty program is not targeted to users based on the brand dosage the patient takes, then don’t ask for it. Collecting extraneous data also costs you money. It takes up data storage space and you may be charged for it by a database vendor. With an in-house system, your company pays for it with the cost of having to purchase additional hardware. These data points also provide you with insight into patient behavior market research, which you can share with your brand team.

Tip #8 – Test, Test, Test
Direct marketing is both an art and a science. The beautiful thing about direct marketing is the fact that you can test in small numbers and extrapolate to project your rollouts very accurately. Testing will allow you to find out which lists, offers and formats work best with your target audience. Always test a number of different lists against each other. Chances are that there will be a few that pull well for you and five or six that do not. When you roll out, you will only use the lists that pulled the best in testing. For mail format, test a self-mailer versus a letter package, or a 9" x 12" envelope versus a 6" x 9" envelope.

Try different offers, coupons, rebates and premiums, including the tried and true "no offer" test to keep fulfillment costs down. Sometimes just offering additional information is enough of an incentive to drive response. It all depends on your category and audience. Just remember that you can only test one variable per piece at a time. An experienced agency will put together a test matrix that allows you to test multiple variables in one mailing, with many test cells.

Tip #9 – Don't Forget the Backend
Before you go out with a program or tactic, you have to get your back end in order. Get all the program vendors on the same page so you are certain they will be able to work together and communicate with each other. Make sure all your response mechanisms are gathering the same data in the same order. This is very important! When your teleservices and web vendors download to your database vendor (who probably inputs your BRC’s), all sources feed their data into the database without any difficulty. And before you launch anything, test and check URLs, toll-free numbers, post office boxes, mailing permits, reply mail permits, file sharing, data flow, reporting mechanisms, etc. for functionality and accuracy.

Tip #10 – Analyze the Results
After your response has dropped off to the point where it only trickles in, then begin analysis of your campaign. Measure the response for each test cell, list, format and offer. Cross match each variable with every other variable. What combinations attracted the greatest response and the least response?

Part of your re-contact strategy should be to create a follow up survey to measure what actions the responders took as a result of your mailing effort. Did they ask their physician if your brand was right for them? Did they ask for a script? Did they receive a script? This is all valuable market research you can supply back to the brand team and use to project results on rollout programs.

Once you find brand users/patients and enroll them in your loyalty program, profile them to create segments. You may find that your patients turn out to have a completely different profile! These patient models will determine who you target in future acquisition efforts.

Acquisition direct mail to consumers can work in the pharmaceutical marketing world if a brand is committed to doing it properly without cutting out any important steps. It can also be very cost effective and help you build an opt-in database that can be used for patient support programs (compliance and persistency), patient education, research, and even cross-selling to patients with other concomitant conditions.

Jeff Schwarz is Program Management Supervisor at The Xchange Group, the CRM unit of CommonHealth LLP. You can reach him via e-mail at jschwarz@commonhealth.com.

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