An important part of optimization is to take a critical look at how you’re executing your campaigns. Think of campaigns as opportunities to learn and grow - every time you run one, you can find key learnings that will help you improve next time round.

Let’s imagine you’re working on a campaign plan for a webinar. Your aim is to attract HCPs who are interested in a new drug therapy. Any successful plan around a webinar is split into three phases: before, during and after. Each phase will have its own goals and key performance indicators - or KPIs - to measure success.

So, before the webinar, your goals might be to get your target HCPs to register, and for them to attend on the day. Your KPIs could be the percentage of those HCPs who registered for the event, and the percentage of those who actually registered and attended.

During the webinar, your goal could be for the attendees to engage with the content, speakers, and with each other. You could measure engagement by how much they participate in any polls and Q&As. You could also aim for all attendees to stay for the entire webinar, which you could measure through your retention rate.

Finally, there’s the post-webinar phase. You want to keep your audience’s interest and not lose them once the event is over, so one of your goals might be to have a follow up conversation with your customer, and measure it by the percentage of follow-up calls actually achieved within a specific timeframe. Then, you might also aim to achieve some kind of behavioral change, which could be measured through the percentage of customers intending to do something new, such as prescribing your brand for the first time.

So, we’ve laid out the goals and how you’re going to measure them. But in order to achieve them, you’ll have to carry out a few tactics. Let’s go back to our example, to explore what these might be.

During the pre-webinar phase, you might decide to send tailored email invitations to HCPs who’ve shown an interest in this new drug therapy. You might create a landing page with compelling content about the webinar, along with reminders to attend, through a series of email or text messages at certain intervals leading up to the event.

When the webinar is actually taking place, you might create a simple link that allows customers to attend without having to download anything. You might also create a countdown to the start time with music to reassure early attendees that everything is running as planned, and they’re in the right place. And let’s not forget you’ll want to be collecting valuable data - while making people feel included - so you could open a poll and a Q&A chat.

Then, once the webinar is over, you’ll likely send follow-up emails to attendees - and even to those who registered, but couldn’t attend. These emails might provide additional resources and a summary of key takeaways, including a call-to-action to speak with a sales or medical representative.

Ok, so that’s the campaign planning. Now let’s get to the optimization bit. Even the smallest parts of a campaign can be made better, so you’ll want to take a critical look, and find opportunities for improvement. For example, is the reminder campaign that’s advertising your event being sent to your audience at the right frequency and via the right methods of communication? Are you testing the landing page for registration to make sure the bounce rate is low before you direct lots of traffic to it?

Finally, during the follow-up phase, you might want to keep things as personal as possible. So for example, you might have your reps send emails to thank attendees and book a promotional sales call using the eDetail aid. As it’s tricky to cover all attendees within a small time frame, you could decide internally on a specific period for reps to follow up with attendees via email. That way, those that aren’t contacted can then be filtered into one central email communication, to ensure no one gets left behind.

Customer Engagement in Practice

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