As most B2C brands are now realizing, customer expectations are changing rapidly. Most businesses are taking steps to thrive in a world where customer experience trends are dominated by giants like Amazon. But these shifts aren’t just happening within the e-commerce space. Any business that serves customers or users will have to adapt to survive in our new reality — most of all are trusted businesses like healthcare providers.

Why healthcare organizations stand to benefit from transformation

In the first few years of the 21st century, marketers went from having only a few channels on which to communicate with customers to having an overwhelming number of touchpoints to manage. This led to marketers, even within one larger business, specializing in their channel of expertise. With these siloed teams, data and therefore the understanding of each customer became siloed as well.

As the myriad of digital channels we use became less stand-alone and more connected, this presented a problem for marketers not used to playing as one team. Now, consumers utilize three or more channels when making a purchasing decision. If your different marketing teams are working independently, then the view of your brand across channels will be fragmented, inaccurate, and ultimately less effective. 

Healthcare companies may not have the same buying patterns or priorities of most B2C companies, but they still can really benefit from a seamless, cross-channel brand experience both in the sales funnel and for existing members. This allows both existing and prospective members to feel loyal to a healthcare brand that is forward-looking and all-around “21st century” in both their health practices and communications.

Prioritize privacy while still optimizing member experiences 

With all those grand visions of autonomous, seamless marketing experiences in mind for healthcare organizations, it’s also essential that these companies follow stringent vetting processes for any martech they bring on. The key to getting this decision right is to pay great attention to the architecture of platforms and ensure they can protect members and your business from the ground up. 

Platforms like Blueshift’s Customer Data Activation Platform (CDAP) are doing just that. The key assumption with the CDAP is that marketers should be working off of freely obtained, 1st-party data. 3rd-party data is not only less accurate, but it also violates certain privacy tenants. Additionally, your members might be more interested in disclosing personal information, as long as you can reward these actions with personalization.

So, the first step in building a healthcare marketing program for for the 21st century is to ethically collect your customers’ data — just ask! While this process is already mandated by law in some jurisdictions (CCPA and GDPR territories), it’s bound to become standard law for most governments to protect consumer information. 

Now, to truly understand members, the data you collect doesn’t mean much unless it can be understood against other customer data sources you have. For example, Blueshift’s CDAP constantly ingests 1-party data from a business’ site and feedback channels and then unified any given data sources into a single source of truth for marketers in the form of Single Customer Profiles.

Behavioral, catalog (such as blogs, PDF, public-facing packets), transactional, and demographic data are all unified to create a profile for each and every customer. These profiles will in turn help craft self-driving journeys optimized with your company’s goals in mind. Having data all in one place eliminates the need for constant back and forth between marketing and engineering, faster campaign ramp times, and more secure data transfers in tandem with partners (like MetaRouter!).

The future of data-driven healthcare experiences

With your secure foundation of data in place, reaching members at critical periods in their journey becomes easier than ever before. Utilize trigger-based automation and AI-modeling to contact patients with helpful follow-up information on the best channel to reach them, immediately bring in call center data to inform future communications, and insert content such as dynamically updated appointment slots in messages for you busiest patients. 

The sky is truly the limit for healthcare providers who invest in secure, forward-thinking tech for not only improve customer experiences but revolutionize the way their members view healthcare. With frictionless messaging and experiences across channels, it will become easier for each member to be an advocate for their health, and extremely loyal to their provider.

If you’d like to learn more about compliance within martech, check out our thoughts over on the Blueshift blog, or reach out anytime to learn more about the powerful integration with MetaRouter and Blueshift for your healthcare marketing needs.

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*Photo by Luis Melendez on Unsplash