ePharma Summit 2012 - Day 1

In Blog Posts By Eric Portelance, Digital Strategist

Several Klick employees are attending the ePharma Summit this year. After the first day, we thought it would be great to provide a quick summary of some themes and talks that resonated with us.

Email Marketing Isn’t Dead

Two talks today stressed the importance of email marketing as part of an integrated marketing strategy. In fact, the correlation between email marketing and business ROI seems to be very strong. Here are some key points:

• Best Practice: Ensure your call-to-action is prominent and immediately visible. If your email is coded in HTML, make sure you’re not using white text on a background image. If the image can’t render on a user’s client, the text won’t be visible and your CTA will be lost.
• Consumers make a judgement call within three seconds of opening your email about whether or not the content is important to them.
• 40% of mobile use is email. For every hour of time spent on our mobile devices, we spend 25 mins on email.
• Yahoo’s email servers reject 8 message for spam, for every 1 message it accepts.
• It’s much better to have a prominent unsubscribe button that users can click on than having them report you as spam (which negatively affects your delivery capabilities). Don’t bury the unsubscribe button.
• Timing is critical. People expect an auto-response within 3 minutes of people signing up to your campaign.
• 72% of physicians are reading their emails primarily on a PC/laptop. Apple dominates mobile w/ 23% mobile email views. Only 3% of physicians are reading emails on Android devices.
• Don’t assume physicians prefer rich HTML emails. 50% prefer plaintext. Include MIME text version, test vs. HTML.

Mobile Opportunities

• We need to move the needle in mobile web design for pharma by considering responsive designs vs. separate mobile website.
• Xavier Petit from Shire Pharmaceuticals wondered if anyone pulled out their phone during a 30-sec Super Bowl ad to scan a QR code? Probably not. Context is important.
• We need to move the needle in mobile web design for pharma by considering responsive designs vs. separate mobile website.
• When considering a mobile-optimized site, don’t forget to include higher-resolution graphics for retina displays. Although the majority of users are still not on high-density displays, it’s importnat to be forward-thinking.
• Pharma is now up-to-par with other industries on mobile-optimized sites (19%)