Improve the consistency and quality of patient engagement with Marketing Cloud

Healthcare marketing teams need a platform that can engage patients at scale while still protecting data privacy. Unfortunately, many healthcare marketing departments rely heavily on external vendors, IT, and manual processes that can be expensive and time-consuming. As a result, it can be difficult for these teams to meet their goals.

In this case, platforms like Salesforce Marketing Cloud can be helpful. Marketing can move functions internally utilizing Salesforce as a unified platform, reducing reliance on technical teams. For example, marketers can begin leveraging Journey Builder to automate targeted cross-channel journeys without the need to work with IT or external vendors. This ultimately empowers marketers to engage patients at scale and own campaigns end-to-end from strategy to execution. The two Salesforce products recommended for an integrated healthcare marketing platform are Salesforce Health Cloud as the core CRM and Salesforce Marketing Cloud working as the Marketing orchestration and execution engine.

Leveraging the insights gained from Salesforce Health Cloud can help improve patient communication across marketing efforts, but only if the right marketing tools and processes are in place. Without these, delivering personalized service to patients at scale becomes a major challenge.

The healthcare industry is complex and ever-changing, making it difficult for marketing platforms to keep up. Salesforce Marketing Cloud is designed to be flexible and scalable, with the ability to integrate with Health Cloud. This allows healthcare teams to engage with patients on their own terms, providing custom content that meets their specific needs and preferences.

Marketing segmentation and campaign execution can be accomplished in other ways as well. But this often means building a custom solution, outsourcing to an agency, or working closely with internal IT teams to move marketing initiatives forward. The cost of managing these approaches is high. The ideal solution is for marketing teams to own campaigns from start to finish. If set up correctly, Salesforce Marketing Cloud can become the centralized platform for marketers to identify audiences, engage them with personalized content across multiple channels, and track success toward marketing goals.

For Salesforce Marketing Cloud to be effective in the healthcare space, four crucial considerations must be made:

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Identify Data Sources

If you've dealt with healthcare data in systems like Epic or Cerner, you know that's easier said than done. Before you can take advantage of Marketing Cloud, you need a clear understanding of where marketing-relevant information is stored along with any integrations that might be required. You should also identify data that is not needed for marketing purposes so that it can be left out of Marketing Cloud entirely. Once all data sources are identified, you can begin the heavy lifting. This means developing processes necessary for passing data to Salesforce Health Cloud. The cleansing, mapping, and integrations will involve a deep dive into existing databases and will likely require working closely with a Salesforce Partner experienced in Health Cloud Implementations.

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Centralize and Surface Data

Salesforce Health Cloud provides a lot of value by allowing patient-facing teams to securely access relevant data in a centralized location. This leads to increased patient satisfaction and fewer call transfers, as well as making it easier for Salesforce Marketing Cloud to mobilize relevant marketing information through the standard connector.

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Make Data Actionable

Marketers can use the Salesforce connector to engage with patients and prospective patients in new ways. This integration allows for more customized marketing experiences that can be better tailored to each individual. Some examples of what this might include are:

• Creating a cross-channel journey for patients with overdue appointments to help drive them to reschedule.
• Automating welcome messaging to introduce new patients to your health system and share relevant services based on their individual profiles.
• Sending SMS or Push notifications to increase engagement when patients sign up for your mobile application.
• Developing and managing dynamic content in Email Studio to ensure patients see messaging relevant to their unique needs.

In summary, there are many benefits and capabilities, but the most important thing is that once data is structured and prioritized, marketers can deliver better communication to patients.

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Measure Success and Improve Over Time

Thanks to Health Cloud and Marketing Cloud, you can now track the success of your marketing campaigns and get clear insights into which ones are effective. With data visualization tools, you can see the impact of your marketing initiatives more clearly, including measuring the ROI of different campaigns. This way, you can make sure that your marketing efforts are paying off and make necessary adjustments to maximize your results.

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Key Takeaways

Personalized messaging is essential for healthcare marketers. This requires organizing and actioning complex healthcare data with robust tools like Salesforce Marketing Cloud and Health Cloud. To get started, focus on standardizing and surfacing your data in Health Cloud to set the foundation for moving forward. From there, you can empower Marketers with capabilities like self-service segmentation, triggered campaigns, and cross-channel messaging. For continued improvement, track each marketing initiative, log your successes (and failures), and visualize results using dashboards. These efforts combine to provide clearer, more streamlined, Patient-centric communications which drive a better overall patient experience.

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