What is closed loop marketing?
Closed loop marketing (CLM) in pharma means the act of capturing data from your marketing efforts to understand what’s resonating with your audiences – and thereby deliver more relevant communications to healthcare professionals and other key stakeholders (payers, hospital management, administrate buyers).
CLM in pharma step-by-step
Closed loop marketing is a process. CLM starts by creating digital content that is interactive. To make CLM work properly, you need to encourage people to interact directly with the content because every interaction provides data that drives the CLM process.
This is because without interactivity, you can only know if your audience saw the content. But with interactivity you can discover what they thought about it and what was most interesting to them.
All the while your audience is interacting, data is being collected by the CLM software. Marketing and Sales then access this data and analyze the usage of the content – the performance of key messages and customer satisfaction.
The analysis gives you a picture of customer needs and preferences. You can then adapt the content based on what the data is telling you – making it more relevant to healthcare professionals and thereby more effective.
Common CLM-driven content updates:
- Revising poorly performing key messages
- Changing graphics to be more appealing
- Re-ordering content for a better flow
- Making interactive elements more engaging
In the final step, the content is redeployed in the marketplace, closing the marketing loop so that the whole process can be repeated. Data is again collected, and further adaptations made as you continually learn more about your customers. In this way, you benefit from a virtuous circle in which your pharma marketing materials continually improve.
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How does CLM work in practice?
These case studies show how to apply closed loop marketing to your HCP engagements. Using Agnitio solutions, companies were able to deliver better customer experiences, get the full value from their CRM investments, and improve commercial performance.
How to improve customer experience with Rainmaker Multichannel CLM
How to apply multichannel technology for better customer experiences
How e-detailing can inform and drive commercial operations
Multichannel CLM
Digital technology made closed loop marketing possible in pharma. It was initially introduced when sales forces were empowered with mobile devices like tablets for their detailing work. This not only made presentations more engaging with the creative possibilities of digital but also, as we have seen, produced high-quality data.
Today ‘e-detailing’ remains central to CLM but it has been augmented with other digital channels that provide greater opportunities for customer engagement.
Popular multichannel CLM options:
- E-detailing
- Approved email
- Personalized microsites
- Remote communication
- Self-detailing websites
Multichannel CLM is an increasingly common form of closed loop marketing technology. It enables digital engagement through a suite of channels that can be applied independently or in any combination.
In this way, today’s advanced multichannel CLM software ensures both effective face-to-face meetings with healthcare professionals and an extended experience through self-guided content and on-demand material – whenever HCPs need it.
New channels continually expand the potential of multichannel CLM software. One that has been particularly welcomed by both pharma and healthcare professionals is remote. This enables reps to reach more customers while maintaining the valuable personal contact of traditional face-to-face meetings. The increased flexibility is also appreciated by HCPs, who often prefer this kind of contact.
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Empower your stakeholders with
multichannel CLM software
How to get more from CLM channels
These e-books explain best practice for key channels that engage HCPs in your CLM solution – focusing on both face-to-face and remote forms of e-detailing in pharma and also the special requirements of the medtech sector.
Get started with e-detailing
Learn the basics of e-detailing and get the benefit of decades of Agnitio experience – all packaged in one short e-book.
Remote engagement use cases
Discover how you can apply remote engagement to solve common marketing challenges in pharma.
Medtech digital marketing
Explore how medtech can use digital technologies and closed loop marketing to better engage HCPs.
Individualized closed loop marketing
In addition to the overall marketing insights from your audience, closed loop communication in healthcare can also be run on a more individual level. In addition to knowing how healthcare professionals as a group are reacting to your communications, you can also see how individual people are responding and better understand what they might specifically need.
For example, if the CLM data tells you that a particular doctor has interacted often with information about drug tolerability, this can be flagged to their rep. He or she can then engage the doctor directly on this topic, using specific materials that explore it in more detail. This way of working not only removes the annoyance of irrelevant content but also – more positively – makes for far better communication.
That doctor’s interactions will then tell you whether their questions are now answered and whether you can now move onto another topic. E-detailing was particularly useful in this regard because it was very clear which individual is viewing the content, though today this data is available from all customer interactions with a multichannel CLM system.
Looking to quickly get started with multichannel?
Our Multichannel Kickstarter package empowers your field force with the tools to deliver more value to healthcare professionals in a fast and cost-effective way. We will help you prepare your multichannel customer engagement journey end-to-end: from setting strategy, objectives and metrics, to preparing digital content for each touchpoint.
The marketing benefits of CLM for pharma and medtech
Closed loop marketing techniques are widely used in the life sciences because of the specific challenges that the industry faces: information is often complex and you need to be sure that it is understood; there is limited time available with healthcare professionals; and patient expiry means that marketing needs to be highly efficient, especially in the launch phase.
Saves time and money
Closed loop marketing enables you to fix problems early. If your digital sales materials are well designed, you should be able to quickly assess their effectiveness in the field. That way you don’t have to wait half a year to find out whether the campaign worked or not. You'll know immediately and can start responding right away – updating the messaging and going back with new information – saving months of missed opportunity.
Confirms customer understanding
Even the simplest analytics will uncover useful things like the most-viewed parts of a presentation. With more sophisticated CLM data gathering, you can see whether you have raised customer ‘willingness to prescribe’ and discover specific topics that customer-facing staff need to address. This ability to track interactions tells you how customers are reacting, so you can tailor your marketing strategy to ensure that the message is being delivered and understood.
Increases efficiency
The expansion of closed loop marketing to new digital channels often reduces ‘cost per contact’ because of the more efficient use of time and reduced travel that it provides customer-facing staff. In fact, multichannel CLM can even expand the overall potential market because audiences that were previously ‘unreachable’ are now economically viable.
Improves customer experience
CLM gives you feedback from your marketing efforts by capturing both what’s resonating with your audience and what needs to change. This also benefits healthcare professionals (and other audiences) because it ensures that you can make your content more relevant to their needs. When there is only a few minutes available with healthcare professionals, relevancy is essential.
How CLM software enables your sales team to be more customer oriented
With closed loop marketing software, all customer engagements are tracked – no matter whether they take place using e-detailing software on a face-to-face meeting, or interacting via approved emails, virtual meetings or content on microsites.
Providing this data to your customer-facing staff greatly improves their effectiveness and makes them a much better partner for healthcare professionals. The latest CLM software will likely have data dashboards that provide all these insights to reps and even enable a ‘single customer view’ that highlight the needs, preferences and requirements of each medical professional.
Now when customer-facing staff prepares their customer engagements they can, for example, go deeper into a topic that the data shows is of most interest. Or they can cover a subject that so far hasn’t been discussed. And they can use different types of content or even specific channels that a doctor prefers.
CLM unites pharma organizations to support healthcare professionals like never before by transforming into complete service providers for HCPs. If you’d like to explore further how you can easily get started and empower your customer-facing teams, check our Kickstarter package.
From the healthcare professional’s point-of-view, this is a better service. CLM makes your communications more relevant, which in turn means that interactions with your company are more valuable. Your sales reps become less ‘delivers of marketing messages’ and more providers of knowledge that better reflect their customers' specific needs.
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Where next?
Explore Agnitio’s customer engagement software, designed specifically for the life sciences. Our technology enables personalized interactions via powerful, flexible and data-driven tools.
Rainmaker e-detailing for HCP engagement
Impactful face-to-face engagements with full data capture
Rainmaker multichannel CLM software
Compliant, consistent and engaging communications across channels
Rainmaker remote for virtual client engagement
One-to-one remote meetings, webinars and content on demand