2013 Silver Pharmaceutical

Client MSD

How did the campaign make a difference? This was a strategic global eCRM programme to sign up, engage and maintain engagement with 2.1 million healthcare professionals in 40 countries. It drove 126 million business-to-business (B2B) engagements per year for MSD, the world's second largest pharmaceutical organisation.

What details of the strategy make this a winning entry? Univadis is a comprehensive online medical portal for healthcare professionals (HCPs). MSD collates and supplies a continuous source of costly medical content from hundreds of content providers globally, providing thought leadership. Members sign up online or after visits from medical reps, using the portal to find trending medical and specialty (e.g. cardiology or neurology) content. Univadis supplies everything from pharmaceutical indications to self-assessment educational certification programmes, offering mobile-enabled engagement content that can be read on the go or from a computer. The global communication strategy is to deliver tailored content and drive HCPs to the Univadis portal daily. To this end a highly personalised programme of emails were designed and automated, covering the whole B2B customer journey (get, grow, engage, keep and reactivate). The strategy is to collate, ramp up, excite and support HCPs in their practice, in 40 countries and in 14 languages.

How did creativity bring the strategy to life? Sales reps offered highly stylised detail aids in both print and iPad format, while existing members were targeted with email that teased cutting edge content and functionality upgrades. Timely, relevant and personal emails bring to life the incredible wealth of content available to support and simplify the routine daily activities for HCPs. For example, the medical calculator allows an HCP to measure a patient's Body Mass Index or even blood pressure accurately, freeing valuable time and eliminating the risk of error. Members were nurtured with email presenting such highly specialised content features at each touch point. For lapsing engagers, retention comms takes the form of regular dynamic newsletters, distilling key content from world leading medical providers based on the member's specialty.

Results Univadis has a 3% monthly growth rate for membership, with most countries retaining over 97% opt-in. In countries like Spain, where there are few alternative content sources, there are regularly open rates of 32%; while Italy consistently achieves action rates of 30%, due to the localised nature of Italian content. In emerging markets, like China, open engagement can reach 37%. France, Italy and China have the most visited portals and exhibit some of the most loyal engagement levels.