Healthy Skepticism Library item: 14050
Warning: This library includes all items relevant to health product marketing that we are aware of regardless of quality. Often we do not agree with all or part of the contents.
Publication type: news
Roner L.
Lessons in e-detailing
eyeforpharma.com 2008 Jul 28
http://social.eyeforpharma.com/story/lessons-e-detailing
Full text:
Janssen-Cilag has learned a lot about its customers through its use of e-detailing. Irina Osovskaya , senior e-marketing manager for the company in the UK and Ireland, says its forays into e-detailing have taught her company much about what healthcare professional s want and need and how to better correlate e-detailing campaigns with sales rep activity.
Janssen-Cilag launched its first e-detailing pilot in 2002. It was a live, phone-based effort that targeted UK healthcare professionals.
Although uptake was low, the program was not integrated into the company’s overall marketing mix and the effort conflicted, at times, with the focus of Janssen’s large sales force, customers were curious, Osovskaya says.
From this initial effort, Janssen-Cilag moved to linear, text-based e-details, where content was hosted on the company’s sites and on independent physician portals and linked to continue medical education online, webcasts and other interactive content. By 2006, this approach was being used with 36,000 healthcare professionals in the UK.
“We felt, however, that our customers didn’t want to follow that single linear approach,” Osovskaya says. “They wanted to choose which content they wanted to see, so we came up with the idea of offering ‘multi-path’ edetails that allowed people to pick and choose order and preference of content.”
The approach gave Janssen-Cilag the opportunity to analyze usage and healthcare professional interests, leading to better follow-up campaigns, Osovskaya says.
The company has now evolved its e-detailing efforts to a segmentation and targeting based approach linked to its CRM system, something other industries have been doing for some time. But Osovskaya says the effort comes with some logistical challenges, including difficulties with email permissions, finding the right partners to provide e-access that ensures trusted and lasting relationships, and some technical challenges, including HCP data integration and ensuring ease of access while maintaining the ability to track individual user activity.
Using this approach, Janssen-Cilag launched an e-detailing campaign for a primary care, late lifecycle product in three “waves” to 18,000 general practitioners in the UK. The format was a short, linear e-detail with links to eCME opportunities and key opinion leader webcasts. The campaign also included call-back requests and prescribing intent questions at the end.
As a result of the campaign, 1,200 eCME offerings were completed and 1,500 call-back opportunities were identified. Osovskaya says that one thing they learned is that running a campaign in multiple waves works, because more than 10% of the target audience has been repeatedly exposed to the message. This led to improved message recall by the healthcare professionals involved in all three waves, she says. An extra 6% of the target group was recruited during the second and third waves.
Osovskaya says the right target group is reached through e-detailing and that the activity is complementary to sales rep activity. She says they have also found that general practitioners don’t need to be visited on a frequent basis to motivate them to participate in e-details. In fact, 80% of the doctors participating in e-details had not been visited in the preceding three months.
Janssen-Cilag also finds that e-detailing can be a good alternative for hard to reach doctors and is complementary to other marketing media. Osovksaya ways one-third of doctors not open to direct post mail can be reached via e-detailing.
The company has found that e-detailing is not negatively influenced by the fact that doctors are already visited by sales reps and that almost all doctors participating in e-detailing allow sales rep visits. E-detailing, therefore, she says, simply expands the sales rep’s tool kit.
IMS analysis of Janssen’s three wave pilot found an average increase of 1.7 prescriptions per month for each healthcare professional completing an e-detail, compared to a 0.2 prescription decline per month prior to the e-detail. Depending on the wave and other variables, IMS concludes the return on investment from the e-detail campaign was 230% to 400%.
Osovksaya says the tremendous potential of e-detailing for the pharma industry is clear from recent data (Q4 2007) collected by Manhattan Research. According to the group, 15% of doctors it surveyed have participated in an e-detail in the past 12 months, while 23% had not, but were interested in doing so. Another 45% had no familiarity with e-detailing.
It is an approach Osovksaya says that holds much promise and is getting easier to execute. New online technologies are no longer “bleeding edge” and are characterized by more choices, lower cost and more established suppliers, practices and standards, she says.
New technologies enable sophisticated targeting and segmentation strategies and support differentiated messaging, Osovksaya explains. “We must be sure that we’re getting the right balance between the adoption of existing capabilities and building new capabilities,” she says.
With the rapid development of Web 2.0 technologies, there is a great emergence of “expert” patients, Osovksaya says, and therefore, pharma companies must provide easy access for healthcare professionals to get the latest product data and information to help them effectively meet the needs of their information savvy patients.
And new e-detailing technologies and strategies, including on-demand product webcasts and peer-to-peer content, will help pharmas deliver what doctors need. “It’s not just about showing our products, it’s about creating a dialog and fully integrating e-detailing with the rest of the marketing mix,” Osovksaya says.
