Pharma #005 - Reach your target market for less with e-fulfillment and direct-mail

Pharmacies, family doctors and other healthcare professionals need content and products for their customers and patients. E-fulfillment and direct mail can help them get their content, products and communication easily using a material service or webshop.

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Reach your target market for less with e-fulfillment and direct-mail

Think of content and products like training kits, placebo's, instructions about certain health topics, leave-behinds, pencils, notepads and/or literature, both digital and/or physical.

I will discuss e-fulfillment and direct-mail in pharma. Both of these tactics are valuable tools for the marketing department. Direct-mail can provide better Return on Investment (ROI), but it could be a pricey tactic to begin with. E-fulfillment on the other hand, is more cost-effective and allows marketers to track which segments are responding to their campaigns.

What is e-fulfillment?

E-fulfillment includes everything that happens in the warehouse after an order comes in from your audience.

You can think of order picking, packaging products in a shipping package, the printing of a shipping label, product returns and some of these companies even do personalized targeting and printing. In addition, your product catalog is stored directly in their warehouse for optimal order to delivery.

The approach to managing the distribution of content and products using a few clicks within your application, platform or website to communicate with a e-fulfillment company to deliver your content and products to your audience doorstep.

What is direct-mail?

An effective advertising medium for pharmaceutical campaigns. Direct-mail campaigns are one of the most cost-effective ways for pharmaceutical marketers to generate leads and awareness for their products, with high response rates ranging from 1-20%.

The key to a successful pharmaceutical campaign is to balance the elements of timing, message and offer.

The combination of direct-mail and Pharma360 personalized login codes have shown the highest response rates since 2010 ranging from 70-90% this is because of the high levels of trust, personalization and ease of access.

The most important thing to remember about this form of marketing is that the customer needs to be prompted to act on the message they see. Make use your creative imagination and test among colleagues, friends and family.

Also make use of basics such as correct font size, font type, color and logo placement to increase your brand recognition, it takes less than a second for your audience to decide to open your direct-mail or throw it in the garbage bin.

Need customized direct-mail campaign templates? We can help you using our dedicated pharmaceutical design team with more than 15 years of experience in the healthcare and pharmaceutical industry!

What are the benefits of using e-fulfillment for Pharma?

Flexibility

Flexibility is a major factor when choosing an e-fulfillment provider in the pharmaceutical industry. Normally, the decision is made between a company's current e-fulfillment provider or an external company. Dedicated e-fulfillment providers are likely to have the greatest level of flexibility.

They can integrate with any current systems (e.g. shipment partners such as PostNL, DPD, DHL or UPS or Customer Data Platforms (CDP) such as Adobe, Veeva or SalesForce) they can implement different customer tracking systems, and they are more likely to tailor their systems to fit the needs of the customer.

This flexibility is crucial for pharmaceutical companies, as they often have to share customer data with external companies. The external company also needs to be flexible with the company's compliance.

E-fulfillment can set pharmaceutical companies free from the confines of having to send representatives to healthcare professionals and allow them to send content, items and/or devices needed for running their business and providing accurate content for their patients directly to the hospitals and other care facilities where patients were located.

Efficiency

An e-fulfillment integration has the power to make a pharmaceutical company's life easier, for them and their customers. One way pharmaceutical companies are able to save time and money with e-fulfillment integration is through using the tools that it provides.

These tools can generate reports that help identify any areas that still need to be adjusted.
This can also cut down on hours that are spent manually doing that work.
The ability for it to increase revenue and have real-time insights to stock. Online orders, in particular, save a company time and money by boosting efficiency using a fulfillment partner. A company can easily track inventory levels and fill orders quicker than ever before.
E-fulfillment companies have better contracts with shipment providers, lowering the cost per order and have automated processes that normally would be manual labour.
This makes e-fulfillment integrations a better ROI in pharmaceuticals where there may not be a dedicated logistics department for the delivery of products like training kits, placebo's, etc.

Pharma360 has the ability to ship (using qualified e-fulfillment and logistics providers) to you directly, your colleagues, or to your healthcare professionals, eliminating the need for you to go out and look for the products that you need, and help themselves anywhere and everywhere.

An integration with e-fulfillment companies grant healthcare professionals, patients and your colleagues the ability to order the required content, items or healthcare devices from their computer, tablet and mobile phone using our e-fulfillment and direct-mail integration.

Are there any drawbacks or limitations of using e-fulfillment or direct-mail?

Simply put... Yes. There could be some drawbacks or limitations. Though this does not compare to all the benefits you would get from partnering with good e-fulfillment or direct-mail companies for the processing of your content or products.

Your company could be less in control of the process in e-fulfillment such as order picking, inventory management, packaging, shipment etc., less personalized or the ROI could not be good enough because there might be too many products (storage cost) with too little orders from your audience.

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