What is Personalized Marketing in Healthcare Industry?
In today’s competitive healthcare industry, personalized healthcare marketing plays a big role in determining the success of a medical organization. Personalized marketing is businesses delivering messages to new and existing customers about their exact current concerns. It is all about talking to people about what they want to know about.
A personalized marketing strategy in the healthcare industry will help you increase customer retention and builds more meaningful connections with patients. These healthcare marketing strategies can be applied in order to add a new patient or retain previous patients. In today’s impersonal world nothing stands out more than a personalized, perfectly-timed marketing message.
Why Healthcare Marketing Is So Important?
Personalized marketing is powerful because it is a change to the mass-marketing approach. So why is personalization such an effective marketing tool? Psychological research has demonstrated that we are all struggling with information overload.
The overabundance of information pitched at us daily is overwhelming. When we find the information directly relevant to our needs and interests we feel less overloaded and more in control. Companies that eliminate all the extra unnecessary information and speak directly to customers create a positive association with their brand.
Today’s consumers are gravitating toward brands that they feel understand them, listen to them and meet their specific wants and needs. That is where personalization comes into play. It is a way for brands to contextualize the messages, offers, and experiences they deliver according to each consumer’s unique expectation. Consumers of healthcare are no different from consumers of any other product or service. They expect their needs to be anticipated and met efficiently and effectively through personalized healthcare marketing.
6 Personalized Healthcare Marketing Strategies
Patients are more empowered than ever before and their available options for healthcare continue to expand. As a result, providers are forced to step up their game and compete for patients’ business and loyalty.
Today’s healthcare providers need to be forward-thinking and implement strategies that ensure the most positive patient experience. This is why a personalized marketing strategy in healthcare industry is necessary in today’s world.
The following are personalized healthcare marketing strategies that have proven beneficial to patients as well as providers.
1. Doctor on Demand or Telemedicine
Imagine that someone is having sharp pain and does an internet search for an immediate doctor’s appointment near them. Your practice website is in the search results offering an immediate appointment via video chat. You get the new patient because you offer telemedicine consults.
Telemedicine is a modern-day technological tool for personalized healthcare marketing that has made healthcare more convenient, accessible, and cost-effective. It has been especially convenient in today’s world where many are hesitant to leave their homes due to the COVID pandemic. 
2. Personalized Marketing in Patient Portals
Most healthcare practices have patient portals that give patients access to their results, prescriptions and notes from the providers. As a healthcare marketer, a great way to market to your existing patients in a personalized way is to provide additional information on their diagnoses, health conditions, tests and prescriptions right in the patient portal. You can also add information on additional services they may be interested in based on their history, tests, results and prescriptions.
Easy-to-navigate patient portals are a key component of a positive patient experience. A patient portal is a secure online website set up by healthcare providers to provide patients with convenient, around-the-clock access to personal health information.
Many medical practices today provide access to secure health portals where patients can easily make appointments, review past visit summaries, refill prescriptions, request referrals, and ask questions. Providers often use this in connection with Salesforce Marketing Cloud which is arguably the most powerful digital marketing platform capable of transforming an organization’s marketing engagements. Health Cloud supports one-on-one patient management through a patient profile that merges information from multiple data sources, including electronic health records (EHR’s) and medical devices.
With the successful implementation of such portals benefits are again two-fold for both patient and provider. Patients are likely to play a more active role in their healthcare as they can conveniently reach out to their provider without having to make an appointment.
In addition, patients are able to access all of their personal health information from all providers and specialists in one place. Providers can see what other treatments their patients are receiving and this, in turn, can lead to better management of the patient’s overall health.
For providers, these patient portals represent a more cost-effective means of communicating with patients and can optimize medical office workflow. It eliminates the need for unnecessary and non-urgent office visits and phone calls. Patient portals basically enable a hassle-free and positive patient experience that can drive patient loyalty as well as promote doctor-patient relationships.
When used for marketing, patient portals can provide the best personalized healthcare marketing. Imagine that you’ve hurt your back and are in the patient portal looking at your x-ray and prescription for muscle relaxers and painkillers. In the portal, you see an ad for that practice’s physical therapist who helps patients heal current injuries and prevent future injuries. Fantastic personalized marketing!
3. Personalized Dynamic Website Content
Website content personalization has become increasingly popular and has proven to significantly increase patient satisfaction. The foundation of website personalization is sharing relevant content to target the audience. If you need help in writing content for the healthcare industry, we can help you.
The website can be designed to display customized information and provide recommendations to visitors based on certain criteria. Such criteria include the visitors’ recently used search terms, pages visited, geographical location, ads or email campaigns clicked and online appointments made.
Using this information, healthcare website visitors can be provided with relevant healthcare topics in blogs such as patient stories, health seminars, health screenings, appointment calendars and offers provider services. Customized websites enhance patient engagement which drives them to play a more active role in their health management.
This technique is like asking the visitor to your website what they are looking for specifically and then showing them only that. It is an unfair advantage against the competition and is a great personalized healthcare marketing tactic.
4. Mental Health Online Counseling and Support
The next marketing strategy is online mental health therapy. It involves mental health counseling sessions virtually via the internet. Online counseling can be provided through mediums such as video conferences, mobile apps, emails, or text messages and is a growing specialty area of telemedicine.
Many websites connect patients with licensed mental health therapists depending on the mental health condition they are seeking support for. For example, addiction treatment, anxiety, depression, eating disorders, or post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) are commonly treated with online counseling.
Therapists provide personalized care for a variety of conditions and tailor their approach to each person and their unique needs. After taking a healthcare needs assessment, patients are matched to a mental health provider they can connect with. These online counseling services are personalized programs that fit the patients schedule and recovery needs. They can be conducted in conjunction with traditional in-office visits or as a replacement for office visits. Mobile mental health apps are also becoming increasingly favored and allow patients to massage therapists extensively for a monthly subscription fee.
Mental health is a very sensitive and personal subject for many and some people may feel more comfortable discussing such topics over the internet as opposed to face to face. In addition, patients can participate in therapy from their home and often outside of regular business hours.
If you have a mental health practice of any type, offering mental health counseling on demand is an easy way to grow quickly. Having your website offer immediate sessions via video chat, email, text or an online platform is attractive for a patient looking for help right away.
5. Personalized Emails
Personalized email marketing offers endless opportunities for personalized healthcare marketing. Nearly all of us check our inbox at least once a day if not more and we know firsthand how well personalized emails can perform. Segmenting email lists into groups with shared characteristics allows email content to be relevant and valuable to each recipient. 
Segmentation classifies groups of patients based on quantitative data such as demographics, risk factors for healthcare concerns, and healthcare services used. Personalized email marketing can be a very powerful tool in the competitive healthcare industry. Individualized messages perform up to three times better than generic email blasts. By tailoring your messages to a specific patient or group of patients, you can obtain 5 to 8 times more return on investment (ROI) for your marketing spend. Due to HIPAA regulations healthcare providers cannot use the standard marketing tools to send emails containing protected health information (PHI) and therefore need to choose a secure HIPAA compliant email marketing solution.
If a patient just had a baby, email them information about all your company’s services that are relevant to new moms, breastfeeding women and people with fatigue. Let people know that you can help with their condition and you can help right away. That’s the way to use personalized email marketing.
6. Omnichannel Personalization
Marketing on multiple platforms with the same message is called omnichannel marketing. Today’s consumers search for healthcare information and solutions via multiple websites and devices, such as laptops, desktops, and cell phones. This provides more touchpoints where healthcare providers can deliver personalized and relevant information, thereby, increasing consumer engagement. Every touchpoint including call centers, websites, and mobile apps are potential pathways to enhance the consumer experience. Omnichannel healthcare consumers are no different and prefer a personalized experience and healthcare providers that are able to realize that goal will be the ones that reap the benefit.
To utilize this tactic, think of the personalized marketing that someone sees on your website, also being in their patient portal, showing up in the social media news feed, and in an email that pops up in their inbox.
Summary
It is essential, now more than ever, for healthcare organizations to embrace the concept of personalized healthcare marketing in order to achieve success in today’s ever-evolving healthcare market. Offer patients immediate online appointments, market to their exact situation on your website, in the patient portal, or via email. These healthcare marketing strategies will help you to get new patients and keep your existing ones coming back.