If you’re going to communicate with HCP prospects via email, you need a well-thought-out campaign, the right deployment tactics, and a clean physician mailing list.
Maintaining clean mailing lists will improve targeting, enable you to use open rates as a true metric of HCP engagement, and decrease the possibility of spam reports and blocklists, which will make future campaigns not only easier to deploy, but more effective.
Even the best email lists degrade by approximately 22.5 percent each year, so you need to periodically audit yours. Otherwise, you could be marked as spam and your messages suppressed, or you could be emailing HCPs who aren’t interested in your campaign, wasting valuable time and resources.
Here’s how to check if your physician mailing list is clean.
Meeting Healthcare Compliance Standards
HCP marketing has requirements above and beyond CAN-SPAM Act regulations, which require email marketers to advertise honestly and allow recipients to opt out.
If you’re going to market to HCPs, you need to adhere to HIPAA, the Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America (PhRMA) Code on Interactions with Health Care Professionals, and even standards set by private health systems.
Authenticated Lists
Your email lists should be authenticated by a third party to ensure you’re compliant with CAN-SPAM and healthcare-specific requirements. Most companies do so through a proprietary subscriber database authentication service, such as nonprofit BPA Worldwide, or a biotech analytics firm such as IQVIA.
Using an authentication service will ensure you’re not only compliant with the law of the land, but only sending well-targeted emails that will increase your ROI by minimizing wasted resources.
Physician-Provided Data
Physician-provided data is the golden standard of HCP email data gathering. Gone are the days of crawling and scraping sites to find emails and domain assembly, wherein you identify the email format of a healthcare system and create lists of HCPs based on those formats.
Using physician-provided data is the best way to ensure you meet industry standards and legal requirements, and only market to HCPs interested in your messaging.
Regularly Scrubbed Lists
Regular, consistent scrubbing is the best way to guarantee that your lists are clean. Regularly audit your lists for lack of engagement, duplicate addresses, incorrect data, and privacy standards unique to particular healthcare systems. When your open rates start to fall and hard bounces begin to rise, it’s usually time to clean house.
One example: Integrated managed care consortium Kaiser Permanente has extremely strict measures in place when it comes to emailing their HCPs, so you’ll likely want to work with an agency that scrubs for Kaiser so you don’t get spam reports.
Double Opt-In
One means of meeting healthcare compliance standards and ensuring you’re emailing the right targets is to use double opt-in lists, so whenever an HCP signs up, an email is sent with a confirmation link.
Work With an HCP Communications Agency
Even when you have your own authenticated lists, working with an HCP communications agency such as PDQ grants access to exclusive, well-segmented, and clean HCP mailing lists. That means you can increase your targeted audience without worrying about the headache of compliance authentication.
We utilize our more than 20 years in healthcare communication to deploy at the right time, in the right way. With access to verified lists and above-average open rates, our approach has been proven to increase engagement and dramatically increase ROI.
Ready to discuss how you can leverage PDQ’s exclusive HCP lists? Contact us today.
