Engaging Customers at Every Stage of the Customer Journey
Omnichannel marketing has clearly become an essential approach to prospect and customer marketing programs, and direct mail is a key tactic within those programs. While digital channels are still important, the impact of traditional marketing methods should not be underestimated. What’s become clear, however, is that combining physical and digital marketing can yield remarkable greater-than-the-sum-of-the-parts results. In fact, according to a recent study by the United States Postal Service, marketers can see a 40 percent conversion rate when they pair physical mail and digital tactics.
Further, omnichannel methods also have a big impact on retention. Businesses that adopt omnichannel strategies achieve 91 percent greater year-over-year customer retention rates compared with businesses that don’t. But, of course, to maximize omnichannel impact, you must make sure messaging is consistent. Ninety percent of customers expect consistent interactions across all channels, meaning that brand message, tone, and offerings must be uniform across your website, social media, and direct mail.
To further explore this topic, Jennifer Bellin, Chief Marketing Officer at PFL, recently hosted a virtual discussion on how to engage customers at every stage of the customer journey. Bellin sat down with Kristin James, Director of Engagement Marketing at Rx Savings (RxSS) Solutions, who has been partnering with PFL on direct mail programs for more than three years. She has been with Rx Savings Solutions for more than five years and has nearly 20 years of experience in the healthcare space. RxSS helps employers, health plans and members reduce prescription drug costs through a combination of clinical technology, member engagement, and concierge support.
Jennifer Bellin: Welcome, Kristin.
Kristin James: Thank you, Jennifer. I'm really excited to be here.
JB: Could you start off by telling us a little bit about how you got started with direct mail?
KJ: Sure. I love the slide about omnichannel success. Over the course of my 20 years in marketing—and specifically in healthcare marketing—direct mail has always been questioned: Is it the right channel? Is it a dying channel? While consensus has ebbed and flowed over that time, I have always seen the impact it can have and the power it can bring when you pair it up with other channels, digital and so forth.
And from our perspective here at RX Savings Solutions, we use direct mail as part of an omnichannel approach when we are trying to proactively reach out to members, our consumers, our customers, to ensure that they are aware of savings opportunities on any of their prescription medications, etc. So, we find great value in pairing direct mail with our digital-first approach.
JB: What are some of your goals and what are some of the campaigns you're running to achieve those goals?
KJ: We’re constantly looking at goal setting and understanding what success looks like. Part of that is to drive engagement strategies to get our members and customers to become more engaged with Rx Savings Solutions. So, for direct mail, we look at a spectrum. We're looking at, not only driving awareness to help build the member funnel, but also at how they're becoming familiar with Rx Savings Solutions in conjunction with our client's brand, which is the conversion part. Depending on the different types of campaigns or tactics we're running, we are going to be looking at it differently. How we're tracking and measuring that success and looking at how we’re able to bridge together and track behavior change. Because we are communicating directly to these members about opportunities to save on their prescriptions, we want to make sure our messaging is clear and that when tracking behavior changes, we're seeing a lot of that conversion.
JB: It's very helpful to see how you're thinking about this. Now, let’s transition to the customer lifecycle model for just a moment. I'd love for Kristin to share how direct mail fits into her team's omnichannel marketing approach.
KJ: Sure. Here’s a quick example of a member journey. We call our customers our “members.” And as I said before, we always start with digital. So, if we find that we have a way to connect with a member on a digital site or through email, then that's going to be our preferred choice to quickly get that messaging to the member. When an individual doesn’t respond to the emails we're sending over, that's when we turn to direct mail. Because even though we have that digital connection, there might be some other way to meet the member where they're at. This is where we work with PFL to automatically print, produce, and send over one of our ongoing savings notifications to the member.
Once the member receives that mailer, we often see some conversion. We weren't reaching them through email, but the direct mail effort got them to act. Maybe they register through our RxSS member portal, or maybe they call our pharmacy support, maybe they update their email when they actually activate their account. Then we can reach them again through the digital platform. But direct mail initiated that conversion. This is just one example of how we thoughtfully use direct mail in addition to other channels.
JB: Well, I really like your approach of sending email first because some people just want to engage digitally. But if they don't engage, following up with that direct mail can ensure that your direct mail programs are very efficient, they're cost-effective, and you're only reaching the people who really want to be engaging with direct mail. Could you tell us a little something about your campaign toolkits?
KJ: Yes. We’ve found that a lot of times we need something to just drive that brand recognition and awareness of who Rx Savings Solutions is on top of their benefits platform in working with our clients. So, we created a few different types of campaigns to run, and we call them our “toolkit.” This way can select and identify what subset of a population is right to receive a direct mail piece, a postcard that highlights who Rx Savings Solutions is and what action they can take. Our goals here are slightly different than they are for some of the more actionable conversion tactics that we have for direct mail because we're really trying to bring the member down the funnel.
And we’re not just doing postcards—we’ve started venturing into the letter space for our campaigns as well. We have realized that, while postcards are great, our clients weren't open to sending postcards to their members, so we decided to change our approach. We identified a way where we can still help build on that awareness but put it in a letter format. This allows us to have that same strategy, but with a slightly different tactic. We continue to evaluate this for driving awareness. Some of these campaign toolkit postcards or letters start to bridge into more of the conversion stage component, but it allows us to look at the whole spectrum and helps us be more strategic in how we're reaching our members and supporting our clients.
JB: That’s so interesting. You've evolved the program from being focused mostly on postcards to focusing more on letters. Has that increased engagement?
KJ: We are still in the early days of looking at the results, but we have seen greater adoption by our clients who seem to be more willing to send out that kind of direct mail. I think that's one of the benefits of trying different ways of reaching members and having those conversations with our clients. We're always innovating and looking at the feedback we get from both clients and members to identify what new things we can do. Maybe it's a trifold, maybe it's a different type of creative element, but we are always open to investigating, especially when we're talking about this type of approach to add to our campaign toolkits.
JB: Great. Now let's take a look at something that's in the consideration and conversion stages--the savings notification letter. Tell us about this one.
KJ: This is an always-on tactic for us. Once we have applicable data running through our system, we can trigger the data via PFL to get messaging to our members in a very quick fashion through direct mail letting them know about a savings opportunity. This is a little bit more complex. We have a lot more data pulled into this piece, and, again, it's automated and always-on. It's something that we know through our data points and our CRM that we are mapping out at the right time and making sure we're getting that messaging to our member when applicable.
JB: Have you had any tweaks or “aha’s” with this campaign?
KJ: Yes, this is one that we continue to evaluate. We continue to hear feedback from members, and it's through different survey mechanisms, whether it's NPS scores, feedback directly from clients, or just confusion points. That's where we continue to modify what the copy says, how we're displaying it, pulling in different data attributes to allow us to be more prescriptive and ensuring that we're helping drive success. And, over time, we continue to modify and update this template to ensure we're reaching the member at the right time with the right message.
JB: I love hearing about the testing and learning. It's so important, and some folks just don't take the time to do it. What about the personalized savings report?
KJ: Yes, this is our much more detailed mailer that we do with PFL. A member might receive this one time a year. It's very targeted, but it involves bringing a lot more data elements into the mailer, allowing us to be much more personalized in how we're communicating through this direct mail channel. We've seen great success with it as we continue to really drive that member, again, down that funnel of awareness all the way through conversion. This is a great tool to help us give that member multiple ways to take action so we can measure success—both from, again, registering with Rx Savings Solutions, calling our pharmacy support, or even looking at all the information they have access to and taking action themselves.
JB: I've noticed on all of these different pieces, there are some pink boxes. Can you tell us a little bit about the personalized data that you're leveraging?
KJ: That is the data we house within our CRM. Being able to work with PFL to bring that in so we can tap those unique personalized attributes within the mailer is terrific. But when it gets to the member's doorstep, they don't see that pink. They see elements that are personalized to them, creating a more connected and personalized feel.
JB: Lots of great personalization in there. Now, while you’ve obviously had some great successes with direct mail, have you seen some mailers that maybe didn't perform as you had hoped?
KJ: Great question. I would say that we learn from every mailer we produce, every type of tactic, but we might enhance upon it. Continuing to modify, not necessarily from a success standpoint, but continuing to drive this channel in a successful way is what’s important. That way we get the adoption, and we can continue to deliver to members in the right form, so they react. We're continuing to learn and continuing to modify our established direct mail pieces, and we grow from there. Even if something isn't meeting our success goals, we just adjust our goals and we continue to learn.
JB: That’s a great segue into the importance of metrics. Obviously, there are many ways to measure the impact of your programs, no matter what part of the customer lifecycle you're focused on, and it's important to start with appropriate metrics. Goals and metrics really do help to determine the type of campaign to send, what your calls to action might be, the format, the messaging, and so on. And, of course, in the end, it helps you to know if your campaign was successful or not or what sort of tweaks you need to make. So, Kristin, how are you monitoring your direct mail performance and measuring impact?
KJ: I think the most important thing to do is ensure that we understand the goal we're trying to accomplish. When we think about the spectrum of how and when we're reaching those members and what messaging we're serving to those members, it helps us establish what measurement we need to look at. When we talk about our awareness in bringing the member down the funnel versus conversion, we're going to look at registration within our member portal, as well as call-in rate to our pharmacy support team or even our behavior change. We monitor all that.
JB: Makes perfect sense. Let’s talk about direct mail maturity for a moment. Because PFL is both a marketing technology company and a printing company, we have customers that are at all different stages of the maturity curve. We use this tool all the time with our customers to gauge their program's maturity and help them move up from basic, occasional printing and maybe a little bit of mailing, all the way to Stage Five, where their programs are highly optimized and automated and personalized across their entire company and across the entire customer lifecycle. So, Kristin, could you share a little bit about some of your programs and where they are in the maturity curve and how you've progressed?
KJ: At RxSS, we really leaned into that digital-first approach to start, and then we realized that direct mail was a channel where we wanted to invest more time. We quickly worked to move from that one-off manual transactional side to creating integrated components and becoming more automated. This allowed us to have different ways to trigger when we felt a mailer needed to go out. This was in addition to reaching members through some of those other digital channels. We moved very swiftly and quickly to ensure we were able to utilize those data points to drive some of those more personalized communication in an automated fashion.
JB: What advice do you have for someone who is just starting to build this kind of program?
KJ: I love this question. The main answer is something I harped on earlier—you must really understand your goals. How do you want to see direct mail aligned with the other ways you're communicating to your consumer? I think that’s so important because it will help you establish and understand and communicate to the different stakeholders that you have across your company. It will help everyone involved understand the value of direct mail in driving successful engagement.
JB: Stakeholders really can make or break the ability to continue any program, and I think that, sometimes, we marketers get a little siloed and we forget to communicate the success or tell the story.
KJ: Most definitely.
JB: So let me briefly summarize some of what we’ve heard today. First, we’ve seen how every part of the customer lifecycle can benefit from the addition of direct mail. Second, it’s important to get creative, and make tweaks along the way to continually improve your results. Third, goals and metrics are critical to your success, so definitely start with the end in mind. And, last, find a knowledgeable partner who can offer strategic advice and help you to scale your programs. We at PFL, of course, can do all that for you and with you. We have experts and technology that will help you to simplify, personalize, drive engagement, and measure all of your direct mail programs at scale.
