Healthcare marketers and organizations the utilize the same marketing strategies to craft targeted and personalized marketing communications to customers as their marketing peers in non-healthcare sectors with one very important difference: HIPAA. HIPAA is the acronym for the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act, and it was enacted to protect the personal health information of patients. There can be severe, possibly crippling, financial penalties for failure to comply. That makes it imperative that healthcare marketers and organizations adopt privacy-friendly alternatives for effective marketing and engagement campaigns without violating patients’ privacy. Key among these steps is obtaining patient consent before using or disclosing protected health information to market a product or service to them. It’s also vital that these businesses, and other businesses in their marketing distribution chain, have advanced encryption and security measures and implement blockchain technology to allow for the secure transmission and sharing of information among authorized entities.
With appropriate security measures in place, the next step in a direct marketing strategy for healthcare organizations, health insurance companies, and healthcare product marketers is building website user-friendly, responsive web websites that are accessible for all devices and optimized with healthcare SEO for search engines and local mapping in mind. The website should be a destination where people can find vital information, access personal records and account information, and order products. For healthcare providers, their site can be a place for patients to schedule appointments, have two-way chats, and access their records through secure patient portals to submit prescription refill requests and see lab reports. Email can be a great way to nurture patients with informative newsletters and relevant communications, such as appointment reminders.
Direct mail can be especially effective because much healthcare marketing is on a local level and direct mail continues to be one of the most cost-efficient way to reach households throughout local communities. Healthcare marketers can also build campaigns around patient and customer personas to promote to lookalike audiences without risking private data, and even personalize content by integrating familiarity into communications with local jargon or images of recognizable landmarks. A multi-channel marketing campaign, integrating direct mail, digital and video content, and social media platforms, lets organizations deliver content and communications in ways that their patients and customers prefer to engage.