CME marketing or Continuing Medical Education marketing has evolved quickly in the past few years, with digital and email channels being flooded with content. While this has happened, some savvy marketing teams have discovered how to scale up a tradition channel, direct mail, with new technology, to turbocharge their lead funnels.

Healthcare professionals constantly need information about medical breakthroughs, new treatment techniques, and a myriad of other topics connected directly to patient care. In the fast-moving medical world, textbooks, articles, and even online resources can be perpetually out of date. When doctors and nurses take their required examinations to achieve or maintain their board certifications, their medical knowledge must be current. The health worker’s right to practice depends on the certifications and patients expect their health professionals to be up to date.

As a leader in licensing preparation and continuing education for the medical community, BoardVitals provides a valuable service on which their customers depend. The company composes question banks covering over fifty different specialties for doctors and nurses. BoardVitals sends timely reminders to customers so they may subscribe to the service and prepare for their upcoming exams. Additionally, BoardVitals provides doctors and nurses with specialty related online activities that satisfy licensing requirements for continuing medical education (CME).

CME Marketing Challenge: Timing And Targeting Of Direct Mail

Certifying boards conduct exams across the country, in countless medical specialties. The requirements for when professionals must re-certify differ as well. The ideal time to contact a medical professional about exam preparation depends on their profession’s recertification requirements and when the exams will be conducted. CME marketing is also time driven. Many times, healthcare employers offer a stipend to pay for employee continuing education. The expiration dates for stipends are factors in determining the best time to send a CME offer to medical professionals.

With so many variables, mass mailing approaches do not work. BoardVitals had attempted to manage outreach campaigns by working with local print service providers, but found the arrangement to be costly and time-consuming. The company needed a solution that handled all the variables that control the timing and targeting of their campaigns.

The Solution: CRM Driven Triggers & Easily Modified Direct Mail Templates

BoardVitals established an account with Postalytics to run direct mail campaigns triggered by a complex set of conditions managed by their CRM system. The system also sends special offer postcards to lists of medical professionals who have not previously subscribed to BoardVitals’ services and for special promotions, such as Black Friday. The Postalytics network of print/mail service providers handles all the details associated with postcard printing, addressing, and mailing. QR codes and pURL’s printed on the postcards link the physical mailpieces to digital landing pages where customers can subscribe to the BoardVitals service.

“With automated direct mail we can adjust the copy to relate to each specialty, which allows us to target more effectively. We offer specific discounts aimed at certain specialties”

Chris Langone, BoardVitals

Besides the direct mail production services, BoardVitals relies on Postalytics for comprehensive tracking and metrics, allowing them to monitor their direct mail efforts and measure campaign effectiveness. “We use the intelligent mail barcode data reported by Postalytics to track our postcard delivery. Because of the set times for exams, mail arrival dates are extremely important,” said Chris Langone, Digital Marketing Specialist at BoardVitals.

The Results: Highly Targeted, Well Timed Nationwide Mailings With Minimal Effort

Like many CME marketing team, prior to finding Postalytics, BoardVitals was unable to exploit the benefits of direct mail. They’re now able to scale their marketing efforts far more effectively by using automated processes and the nationwide print/mail network. The company’s creative team prefers to design the postcards with Adobe® Creative Cloud®. They upload them to Postalytics and run the campaigns—all from a desk at BoardVitals.

Health professionals receive offers for 30-, 90-, and 180-day subscriptions to BoardVitals question banks. Medical experts on the BoardVitals staff ensure the material in the question banks cover up-to-date topics. Learning can take place on desktop computers or mobile devices.

The company monitors delivery data, page views and conversion rates and tracks website activity of prospective customers all via highly detailed campaign dashboards. The dashboards pull together detailed information on the mailing status of each mailer via the USPS Intelligent Mail Barcode system, and the pURLs and QR Codes collect individual recipient response data.

What’s Next? Growing With A/B Testing

BoardVitals has developed learning materials for dental professionals and have begun using Postalytics to promote their services to this new audience. As with the medical community, direct mail is playing a major role in marketing the dental programs. The company plans to use Postalytics to run A/B tests and refine the messaging as they onboard this new application. “We are ramping up our direct mail sends this year,” said Langone, “We’re seeing how it results in sales, so we want to do more.”

Conclusion

By it’s very nature, CME marketing is complicated, event-driven and time-sensitive. Communication requirements like that of BoardVitals are well-suited for Postalytics. Managing these projects with traditional semi-manual direct mail workflows is difficult, time-consuming, and prone to human error.

Why? The local approach often requires constant attention, and many print service providers do not supply the level of tracking and accountability most companies need. As a result, continuing medical education marketing organizations like the BoardVitals team often shy away from direct mail. They neglect a proven lead-generation communication channel because it’s just too difficult to do.

The Postalytics system takes the work out of direct mail and makes it possible to administer even a complicated application like medical license exam preparation and continuing education services. Thanks to Postalytics, BoardVitals now considers direct mail their most valuable source of new and repeat business.