3 Reasons to Revisit Your HCP Email Data
Current research shows that 30% of HCP interactions happen through digital channels. Many HCPs prefer email as their primary way to receive information from life sciences organizations, making it a key engagement channel for marketing and field teams—but only if those emails reach their audience.
While most organizations make it a priority to get their message right, their data strategy often doesn’t get as much attention, resulting in missed opportunities. Here are three reasons why marketing teams should revisit their email data before their next big campaign push.
- Data cleansing likely isn’t happening often enough.
- Bad data takes a toll on engagement rates.
- HCOs continue to grow in size and complexity.
Email authentication and hygiene should take place every 30 days. This practice may fall to the wayside because it can be a time-consuming (not to mention tedious) process that many teams don’t have the resources to dedicate consistently to the task. However, contacts that haven’t opened emails for months can eventually affect your sender reputation and can be the source of deliverability problems. Bad records containing typos, outdated email addresses, duplicates, and missing last names can leave big gaps in the data and affect your bounce rate and deliverability over time.
If a data cleanse every 30 days may seem like too much for your team to take on, you’re not alone. Instead, consider providers who prioritize good data. Good data providers cleanse their data often, respond to data change requests quickly, and have teams dedicated to ongoing data hygiene.
The average hard bounce rate in healthcare is .51%. If your bounce rates are higher, you may be dealing with data problems. Bad contact lists are a red flag to spam filters, which can mean the difference between your emails going to an HCP’s inbox or not.
Most teams focus primarily on content and subject lines to drive engagement rates without putting the same focus on email lists to make sure names and emails are accurate and up to date. And even when incorrect data is identified, it takes most companies up to five business days to resolve a data change request (DCR).
Knowing how critical timely DCRs are for commercial teams, more and more data vendors are providing data changes in as little as 24 hours. Check with your vendor to see how quickly they update data after receiving a request.
HCOs are constantly restructuring, reorganizing, and merging, and that impacts domain names, which can lead to high undeliverability rates if you aren’t laser-focused on data quality. That may help explain why the majority of companies rank data accuracy in their top three priorities.
Part of the problem is that it can often be hard to recognize when a data list is incomplete due to HCO restructures. Relying on third-party vendors specializing in HCO and HCP data can help you close critical gaps in your data lists to ensure you are reaching the right audience.
Takeda, for example, uses Veeva OpenData Email Data to close gaps in its customer reference data. Saket Malhotra, head of Decision Intelligence and Innovation at Takeda says, “Veeva OpenData emails are really helping our campaign management strategy, allowing us to reach specific targets that previously weren’t in our database.”
Successful email engagement starts with high-quality data. Choosing a partner focused on delivering the most up-to-date and complete email lists will save your team time and money down the road. Veeva OpenData Email Data gives you access to more than 1.3 million validated prescriber email addresses, processes most data change requests in 24 hours, and boasts almost a 100% deliverability rate.
Want to see how your data stacks up? Request a complimentary email coverage assessment.