Is Your Hospital Hiding From the Consumer Revolution?

“There is a vital change happening in healthcare….Providers who are ready to respond by creating a strong patient experience are going to win, and those who aren’t will be left behind.” That’s from the recent GE Healthcare/Prophet study of the patient experience.

There’s a few key findings cited in the study that merit repeating and, most importantly, addressing:

  • Consumer-patients are unhappy and frustrated: 81 percent of consumers are unsatisfied with their health care experience, and the happiest consumers are those who interact with the system the least.
  • Hospitals are failing to meaningfully address the patient experience: 75 percent of providers say patient experience is critical to the future success of their organizations. Yet, on the list of hospital CEOs’ top concerns, patient satisfaction doesn’t make the top five.
  • Consumers are expecting different…and better. “The power has shifted to the consumer in nearly every industry —transportation, retail, and financial services. Finally, it is healthcare’s turn.”
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Hospitals and health systems can no longer keep operating as if the consumer revolution doesn’t apply to them. The key to survival and to thriving in a health care market where consumers have many more choices than even just a decade ago is investment in a holistic patient engagement strategy.

Fortunately, hospitals can benefit from the early work already done and perfected in the retail and hospitality industries to automate the delivery of personalized content to create a more meaningful brand experience. They don’t have to reinvent the wheel.

With a robust marketing personalization platform, hospitals can deliver an omnichannel patient experience through multiple touchpoints. It’s what consumers already are used to and expect. The consumer revolution is well underway. Read more about how NectarOM can position your hospital for success or request a demo of our platform.

Responsibility for Patient Engagement Belongs to Everyone

A recent Becker’s Hospital Review article challenges the practice of putting responsibility for patient experience under the purview and responsibility of a single department or individual. Historically, hospitals have focused on satisfaction with a clinical experience solely as measured by HCAHPS scores. Some task marketing departments with improving experience by focusing on brand image. More recently, bigger hospitals and health systems are assigning chief experience officers the responsibility of improving the larger experience—a combination of clinical care satisfaction and brand perception—of both patients and caregivers.  

But, as the Becker’s author notes, “the question of responsibility, of who owns the patient experience, must be answered with reference to a robust partnership among everyone involved—including clinicians, experience departments and marketers.”  

The key to this shared ownership is a holistic patient engagement strategy.  

Such a strategy understands that in many ways, today’s health care consumers are different from those of the past. They expect convenience and information and services on demand. They are accustomed to personalized, customized marketing content. They consult multiple sources – friends, family, online sites – for health care information. They form brand loyalty based on perception and experience. 

But, in many ways, they are the same. They want their health care providers to care for and about them as individuals. They want to be healed and their fears alleviated. They want to be respected and understood. They want straightforward, understandable information.  

What health care consumers want is personalized care and service – before they become a patient, during their care experience and after. They want information and experiences that speak to them….to their values, needs and concerns.  

A robust, technology-enabled patient engagement strategy ties together these two halves of today’s health care consumer. It uses the contemporary tactics and tools of consumerism – personalization, digital targeting, convenience, data-driven behavior insights – to achieve the timeless goal of patient-centered care. 

And it ties together the multiple, diverse departments and individuals within a hospital to share the patient engagement commitment. 

For more information on how NectarOM Health can work with your hospital to implement a patient engagement strategy to enhance patient experience across channels and settings, contact Amrit Kirpalani or request a demo. 

How To Augment Customer Experience With Omnichannel Personalization

Omnichannel personalized marketing is no longer just “nice to have” in today’s marketplace, especially with customer experience becoming a key brand differentiator.

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Consumers are now interacting with brands across multiple channels. Not only do they expect relevant content but they also want the ability to “pick up where they left off” when they switch from one channel to another.

Many retailers consider implementing omnichannel personalization as one of the key strategies to generate growth and increase revenue through providing a customer-centric brand experience. In fact, many retailers see an increase in revenue and new customer conversion rate when they start offering personalized customer experience.

A study by Invesp has shown that personalization has been proven to improve customer loyalty and increase conversion:

  • 53% of online shoppers consider customization valuable.
  • 45% of shoppers prefer to shop on sites offering personalized recommendations.
  • Personalized ads have a conversion rate 10 times higher than “one-size-fits-all” ads.

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However, there are many moving pieces to ensure the successful implementation of such strategy, including the collection, integration, and synthesis of a large amount of customer data and the ability to turn it into actionable insights.

Thankfully, there are many tools you can use to help gather customer data and apply them to improve customer experience. Here are a few helpful features to look for:

Customer Data Management (CDM)

Information on your customers’ behaviors and preferences will help you cultivate relationships and increase retention rate. Data collection is the first step to implementing a personalization strategy.

To see CDM in action, look no further than online retail giant Amazon.com. Customer information is collected and utilized for making recommendations that leads to increase in sales, as well as improving customer relationships with more personal services.

To get the most out of your customer data, you should:

  • Decide on the critical data to collect so you don’t end up having to parse through irrelevant information
  • Clean up your data to avoid duplication
  • Funnel all information into one centralized database to construct 360° customer profiles
  • Avoid siloed internal practice and encourage collaboration between departments
  • Make the information and customer profiles easily accessible to sales personnel in the field.

Customer Relationship Management (CRM)

After you have constructed 360° Customer Profiles that aggregate your customers’ unique preferences, brand interactions, and habits, it’s time to take that information to the next level.

You can leverage the analytics capabilities of your software to make data-backed business decisions based on the level of brand interaction and projected lifetime value of each of your individual customers.

To leverage the power of CRM, follow these best practices:

  • Create targeted content for specific customer segment to help your brand stay relevant and top of mind. For example, P&G developed the Being Girl microsite to share relevant content with a specific customer segment
  • Use geo-location to target customers who are in the vicinity of a physical store
  • Learn customer habits and preferences to create offers and deliver services that are timely, customized, and relevant
  • Implement Omnichannel marketing and customer care to deliver a seamless customer experience across all touch points

Automated Personalization

You can also leverage the information about your customers to create personalized campaigns and communications that help you deliver the most relevant information to specific customer segments in a timely manner.

This will not only allow you to nurture customer relationships and improve retention rate but also entice new customers to engage with your business by sending out highly relevant offers at the critical moments of their customer journey.

These are some of the ways you can leverage automated personalization to increase sales:

  • Segment and target high-quality leads that are likely to convert
  • Implement personalized lead nurturing campaigns to deliver the most relevant content and offers
  • Increase customer lifetime value by improving customer satisfaction and loyalty with relevant offers
  • Leverage your social media presence to deliver a seamless experience that moves customer along their purchasing path

The Best Marketing Speaks To What Makes Your Customers Tick

The effectiveness of one-size-fits-all marketing messages is plummeting as consumers are becoming increasingly savvy and expect for customized content and offers from brands.

As a marketer, you need to deliver a personalized customer experience across all channels and make sure your copy, content, and offer are highly relevant while appearing in front of your audience in the right place at the right time to get the highest ROI on your marketing budget.

4 Ways to Increase Seasonal Sales With Personalized Content on Social Media

How to use personalization technologies to drive more traffic and increase sales

Consumers are bombarded with marketing messages from retailers during holidays and seasonal occasions. They’re more selective about the brands they engage with and purchase from.

In fact, 63% of consumers are annoyed by repeated generic advertising messages. On the other hand, 79% of the companies that exceed their revenue goals use personalized marketing to reach their customers.

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Personalized marketing is the key to increasing conversion, and social media platforms offer a lot of opportunities for retailers to leverage the latest personalization technologies to boost revenue.

Here are 4 ways to use personalize content on social media:

 

1. Segment your audience

The foundation of any personalization strategy is to understand the preferences, behaviors, and habits of your target market. Social media marketing allows you to leverage customer data and segment your audience at a granular level so you can deliver timely and relevant messages.

In addition, your content should relate to the audiences’ customer lifecycle stages. During seasonal occasions, many consumers would actively research products and make purchasing decisions. Your posts should provide the relevant information to shoppers with a high purchase intent.

 

2. Focus on one-to-one interactions

Consumers want meaningful interactions with brands. Instead of constantly selling your products, focus on being helpful and relevant to build trust and relationships with your audience.

Monitor all your social media profiles to ensure that you’re answering inquiries or comments in a timely manner. In addition, engage your followers in meaningful conversations — for example, you can ask a question, take a poll, or tag your loyal customers for more personalized interactions.

 

3. Leverage the power of conversational selling with messaging apps

Messaging apps are popular among consumers, and brands are using these features (e.g., Facebook Messenger) to tap into the power of conversational marketing.

With the aid of AI technologies, it’s now possible to deliver highly personalized shopping experiences at scale via messaging apps. You can combine consumer data available on social media marketing platforms with your customer database to deliver meaningful interactions that’ll drive engagement and conversion.  

 

4. Use retargeting ads to reduce cart abandonment

Sales lost due to cart abandonment is a particularly acute challenge during the holiday season and merchants can recover some of these sales by using retargeting ads to re-engage shoppers on social media.    

For example, you can use Facebook dynamic ads to show the exact product a customer has viewed on your website. You can segment the target audience to deliver a highly personalized message or a special offer to increase your conversion rate.

 

Increase the effectiveness of personalized content with customer data

While social media platforms allow you to access a large amount of user data, you can augment the effectiveness of the content by layering on your own customer data to deliver the most relevant and timely information.

By using a robust customer data management platform that supports multi-channel campaigns, you can leverage your database to reach shoppers that are most likely to make a purchase.

Request a demo today to see how our unique personalization solution can help you increase seasonal sales on social media.

Increase eCommerce Conversion this Holiday Season with Personalization

3 key strategies to make more sales on your website with personalization strategies

 

Did you know that 72% of consumers find that online gift shopping has made life easier during the holiday season?

As a retailer, you can’t afford to ignore the various ways that eCommerce can boost your online sales.

In particular, personalized marketing technologies allow brands to engage with consumers online and increase conversion rates. Here are three effective strategies to increase your eCommerce conversion rate this holiday season:

 

1. Optimize website user experience with personalization

Shoppers that engage with personalized website content are more likely to convert. Research found that even though visitors who clicked on product recommendations accounted for only 5% of clicks, those clicks represented 30% of Cyber Week revenue.

You can deliver a personalized experience by displaying relevant content based on a customer’s preferences, browsing behaviors, and purchasing history while augmenting the shopping experience with features such as wishlist, past purchases list, and personalized gift guide.

In addition, you should leverage existing customer data to streamline the checkout experience, reduce cart abandonment, and optimize conversion rate. For example, by pre-selecting options based on customers’ past preferences, providing one-click checkout using existing customer data, and pre-filling forms using information from customer profiles.

 

2. Promote personalized offers with Email Marketing

Email marketing is a great way to engage with your email subscribers and customers who are already familiar with your brand and therefore, more likely to make a purchase.

Leverage your customer database and segment your email list to send emails with offers tailored to specific groups based on their past purchases, customer lifecycle stages, or other data such as preferences, interests, geographic location, and demographic data.

You can set up behavior-triggered workflows, which are initiated by how recipients respond to your previous emails. You should also leverage email retargeting — which can help eCommerce websites increase their revenue by as much as 400% — to re-engage visitors who came to your site but didn’t take action.

 

3. Implement an Omnichannel Personalization Strategy

While 86% of consumers would make an in-store purchase, 75% also order gifts online. Instead of engaging with a brand on one specific channel, consumers do so via a variety of touchpoints — whenever and wherever that’s most convenient for them.

Multichannel shoppers tend to spend more per transaction, so it’s important for retailers to be present in multiple customer touchpoints so they can engage with shoppers at the right place and in the right time.

To increase the effectiveness of your omnichannel marketing strategy, use a customer data management tool that collects customer information so you can understand how shoppers engage with your brand. You can then generate insights on how to deliver the most relevant offers through each channel based on customers’ real-time interactions with your business.

 

Implement your eCommerce personalization strategy at scale

Personalization marketing is a proven way to increase eCommerce conversion rates. In order to implement this strategy at scale, you need the ability to fully leverage all customer data so you can deliver the most relevant content and offers.

Our customer data management platform and its syndication layers, which enables real-time acitiviation of content and offers on multiple channels, allow you to effectvely engage your customers by leveraging the power of personalized marketing.

Request a demo today to see how our solution can help you increase eCommerce conversion this holiday season.

How to Use Marketing Personalization to Increase Holiday Sales

5 ways to use personalization technologies to increase revenue this holiday season.

 

The holiday season presents a great opportunity for retailers to drive more sales and boost profits. However, with the increasing competition from both online and offline merchants, it’s becoming more challenging to cut through the clutter and get shoppers’ attention.

Thankfully, you can leverage the power of personalized marketing to capture the attention of your customers and generate more sales. Personalization has been proven to increase sales, ROI, and customer lifetime value:

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Here are 5 ways to use personalization to increase sales this holiday season:

 

1. Analyze historic data

Metrics from last years’ marketing campaigns is a treasure trove of data that can help you better target promotional messages with personalized information, and deliver them at the right time through the most appropriate channels.

For example, if a customer segment tends to visit your website from a particular channel or at a particular time, you can create targeted messaging to drive more traffic from those sources.

 

2. Leverage geodata to send localized promotions

Personalize your holiday promotions by leveraging location data (e.g., address information on existing customer profiles or geodata from mobile devices) to target local customers with hyper-personalized offerings and drive traffic to your store.

For instance, you can send personalized emails to existing customers with an exclusive in-store promotion or use location services to promote special offers via a mobile app when a shopper is within a specific distance from your store.

 

3. Use AI technologies to deliver real-time offers

AI technologies allow you to analyze a large amount of consumer data and apply the insights to deliver real-time promotions based on each shopper’s preferences, behaviors, or purchasing history so you can increase conversion with the most relevant offers.

If a website visitor exhibits browsing patterns that resemble a specific audience segment, you can display product recommendations that are most popular with that group — similar to how a “lookalike” audience works in many targeting strategies.

 

4. Deliver relevant offers with push notifications

As more consumers are shopping with mobile devices, merchants can leverage push notifications to deliver timely offers via their mobile apps.

By using the vast amount of behavioral data you have collected on customers and website visitors, you can use push notifications to deliver the most appropriate promotions when shoppers exhibit certain browsing patterns that indicate a high purchase intent.

 

5. Entice existing customers with personalized offers

Offering exclusive promotions to existing customers is a great way to improve loyalty and boost customer lifetime value. You can increase the effectiveness of this strategy by leveraging customer data to create personalized offers that cater to each shopper’s preferences and behaviors.

For example, customers who are low spenders should receive a different offer than high spenders. The incentives you use to entice infrequent customers are likely to be different than those intended for frequent buyers.

 

The foundation of an effective personalized marketing strategy

To effectively implement a personalization strategy that will increase sales this holiday season, you need to start with a robust customer data management platform so you can effectively utilize consumer data to deliver a personalized shopping experience at scale.

In addition, choose a software that will allow you to automate the distribution of promotional messages via a variety of channels based on individual customer’s real-time interactions with your brand.

Request a demo today to see how you can use our marketing personalization solution to increase sales this holiday season.

4 Healthcare Marketing Trends You Can’t Afford to Ignore

How to improve patient acquisition and retention for your medical practice or healthcare facility.

The healthcare industry has been going through a massive change. With the dramatic shift in health insurance policies and consumer behaviors, patients are stepping up to take better control of their healthcare choices.

In addition to this, as more patients are covering a larger portion of their healthcare bills, providers need to put more efforts into marketing directly to consumers.

Here are the latest healthcare marketing strategies to help you meet the fast-evolving patient expectations while improving patient acquisition and retention.

4 latest marketing trends in the healthcare industry

The key to attracting more patients to your medical practice or healthcare facility is to deliver an outstanding patient experience. Here’s what successful healthcare marketers are doing to succeed:

1. A patient-centric online portal

Consumers are now accustomed to managing their relationships with retailers and service providers via a robust online platform.

You need to offer a sophisticated, secure, and user-friendly patient portal that can handle most of the day-to-day patient interactions, such as paying bills, making appointments, checking test results, ordering prescription renewals, obtaining medical histories, and even conducting virtual consultations.


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2. A search-engine optimized website

Consumers are now more comfortable with using online searches to look for a medical facility or a healthcare provider.

Your website needs to be optimized for local SEO so it’ll show up in the “local pack” at the top of the search result pages when users search for “_________ near me.” You can also build backlinks and drive more traffic by getting online reviews on Google and third-party websites.


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As digital assistants such as Siri, Alexa, and Google Assistant are gaining popularity, more than 50% of searches will be voice-based by 2020 — your website content needs to be optimized for voice search. You can do this by focusing on long-tail key terms, using patients’ language, and providing local information.

3. Real-time patient support and interaction

With the latest customer support technologies, consumers are used to getting their questions answered and problems resolved in real time.

Providing best-in-class support is the key to improving your patient acquisition and retention rate. Make sure patients can contact your team via multiple channels such as email, text, phone, social media, and live chat.

In addition to this, don’t just interact with your patients only when there’s a problem! You can use the same channels to increase their engagement with your brand by sharing valuable content and gathering feedback.

4. Marketing automation and personalization

Consumers expect relevant content, information, and offers from their service providers. You can use marketing automation and segmentation strategies to deliver a highly personalized experience that meets patient expectations, increases engagement, and improves retention.

A robust marketing personalization platform allows you to deliver an omnichannel patient experience through multiple touchpoints, such as email, social media, text messages, printed materials, and so on to provide the most relevant and helpful content so you stay top of mind.

Hyper-personalization will drive the future of healthcare marketing. Request a demo to see how you can use our robust customer data management system to unlock the power of this marketing strategy.

How To Use Email Personalization To Increase Customer Lifetime Value (CLV)

3 ways to use personalized emails to get customers to buy more from you

Customer lifetime value (CLV) is a metric closely related to the profitability of a business.

It’s a measurement of customer loyalty and how well you’re catering to their needs so that they buy from you again and again.

Why’s that important?

The cost of acquiring a customer is much higher than that of retaining one. In addition, loyal customers are more likely to tell others about your products and services, thereby increasing your sales through word-of-mouth marketing.

It pays to invest in cultivating customer loyalty, which will help increase the amount they spend on your products or services over time.

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Thanks to its cost-effectiveness, personalized email marketing remains one of the best ways to cultivate customer loyalty.

Email marketing has a median ROI of 122%, which is over 4 times higher than other marketing formats. Meanwhile, the average order value from personalized emails is 5% higher and conversion rates are 6% higher, compared to those that aren’t personalized.

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So how do you use email personalization to increase customer lifetime value and encourage recurring purchases?

1. Optimize customer segments by CLV

You can segment your email list by profitability, such as not-profitable (20%), profitable (60%), and very-profitable customers (20%). This way, you can send personalized emails with the most relevant content and offers to increase purchases from each segment.

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For example, you can move customers in the “not-profitable” segment into the “profitable” segment with a special offer or cultivate relationships with your “profitable” or “very-profitable” groups so they’d stick around and buy more.

The goal is to move as many customers as possible into the “very profitable” category and increase the average CLV.

2. Reward customers for their loyalty

Offering rewards via personalized emails is a great way to add value to the relationships that customers have with your business and increase their CLV.

A research has shown that customers who make one purchase have a 27% chance of coming back. Meanwhile, second-time customers have a 54% chance of returning for a third purchase.

There are many ways to show your appreciation to your existing customers, by adding special discount codes, offering a free gift with purchase, sending an exclusive invite to an event, or giving them early access to a sale.

3. Upsell and cross-sell relevant products

Customers have very little tolerance for marketing messages that aren’t relevant to them. In a survey conducted by Accenture, 44% of consumers indicated that they’re frustrated when companies fail to deliver relevant, personalized shopping experiences and 41% of consumers have switched brands because of that.

By offering highly personalized product recommendations via email to existing customers based on their preferences and purchase histories, you can upsell and cross-sell items to entice them to buy more from you and increase their CLV.

For example, JustFab leverages interest and behavioral data to encourage repeat purchases through personalized email campaigns. These highly targeted recommendations increased email revenue by 39% and cut customer churn by 46%.

The foundation of effective email personalization

In order to personalize your emails effectively to increase customer lifetime value, you need a comprehensive customer database and the ability to organize the information for your email campaigns.

A robust data management platform (DMP) provides the solid foundation for processing all your customer information in a centralized location so you can extract actionable insights to increase your customer lifetime value.

3 Compelling Reasons To Use Personalization In Healthcare Marketing

How personalization technologies are helping medical practices improve patient acquisition and retention.

The healthcare industry has become increasingly decentralized and consumer-centric, thanks to shifting patient expectations and insurance policies.

As people are taking a more active role in managing their health and wellbeing, they want their healthcare providers to do more than just making a diagnosis and writing a prescription.

Today’s savvy patients are used to receiving highly personalized services from businesses and they expect the same from their healthcare providers.

Here’s why personalization is the future of healthcare marketing:

1. Deliver a holistic patient experience

Healthcare isn’t a one-off transaction with a single seller. Patient experiences often involve interactions with multiple providers and facilities over time, as well as support for personal and emotional issues.

A personalization strategy, driven by a customer data management platform, allows healthcare providers to access all the patient data at a single location. They can gain a comprehensive understanding of each patient’s history and deliver a holistic experience that includes customized recommendations most relevant to each patient.

Not to mention, personalized interactions will help you build long-term and trusting relationships with your patients and improve the quality of care.

2. Improve patient acquisition and retention

Personalization technologies can help you acquire and retain more patients by delivering the right message in the right place at the right time to the right audience.

For example, you can send highly-targeted content to patients with specific conditions and reminders for checkups or vaccinations. This will help you stay top of mind, build trust, increase patient engagement, and get more patients to return to your practice for continuous care.


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When supported by a robust customer data management solution that provides a single customer view, your team can access each patient’s history and preferences in real time to improve efficiency and quality of care while reducing errors and frustrations.

For instance, by seeing all of a patient’s conditions and treatments in one place, you can help them better navigate their health insurance coverage. As you add value by personalizing patient interactions, you’ll also improve patient retention.

3. Increase patient satisfaction and word-of-mouth referrals

Personalization technologies help a medical team care for the patients more compassionately by developing personal relationships with them.

Such technologies also streamline the patient experience, making it more convenient and less time-consuming to visit a medical practice.

Patients will have more positive interactions with your practice, be more motivated to continue their care, and follow through with their treatments. This will lead to better outcomes and higher patient satisfaction.

Last but not least, most people still look for personal recommendations while choosing a healthcare provider. When you offer a highly personalized experience that improves treatment results and patient satisfaction, you’re more likely to get word-of-mouth referrals, which is often the best way to market your service.

4 Ways To Use Personalization For Healthcare Marketing

Apply marketing personalization to augment patient experience and improve patient retention.

The healthcare industry is becoming increasingly competitive while patients expect interactions with a provider to resemble other consumer experiences.

In order to stand out from your competition, as well as to attract and retain more patients, your medical practice needs to deliver an excellent patient experience that makes receiving care from you convenient and seamless.

With the aid of advanced marketing technologies, many businesses are now delivering personalized user experiences that have helped them increase customer acquisition and retention.

These strategies can be applied to the healthcare industry as well and here’s how you can augment your patient experience:

1. Personalized website content

Sharing helpful and relevant content with your audience and patients can help build trust and relationships. In addition, users are more likely to return to and engage with your website if they can find what they need easily.

You can program your website to show customized information and make content recommendations to the visitors based on a variety of criteria. For example, the search terms they use, the links they click on, the pages they have visited, or in the case of registered users, their medical histories and preferences.

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2. Customized patient portal

More and more consumers prefer to manage their relationships with service providers online via a self-service portal. A customizable patient portal can help you deliver a seamless experience that’ll improve patient retention, reduce errors, and lower administrative cost.

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Deliver a fast and convenient experience by incorporating each user’s medical history, preferences, and other personal data into the patient portal experience. Posting reminders and offering the ability to schedule an appointment, pay invoices using saved payment information, and order prescription refills are a few examples of this.

3. Targeted email marketing

Marketing automation and email personalization have been proven to generate an ROI of as high as 400% when combined with proper segmentation and content targeting strategies.

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By sharing targeted content that’s most relevant to each recipient, you can stay top of mind and nurture relationships with your audience. Such content can include information on specific medical conditions, event announcements, and seasonal resources.

You can also improve patient retention or re-engage lapsed patients by sending out reminders for regular checkups or vaccination visits and make it easy for users to set up an appointment through your online portal.

4. Omnichannel patient support

Consumers want to interact with businesses through their preferred touchpoints and be able to “pick up where they left off” if they switch channels in a middle of an interaction.

They also expect such interactions to take their histories and preferences into account so they can receive personalized content, recommendations, and solutions.

By using a customer data management platform, you can set up a single customer view to facilitate patient communications and ensure that your team is accessing the latest information in real-time to provide the best support possible to improve patient satisfaction.