The monthly newsletter goes out. At the top, the new distal radius plate system; in the middle, a knee arthroscopy course; at the bottom, an invitation to a spine congress. It goes to the whole list: surgeons, surgical technologists, distributors, and residents who signed up for a workshop two years ago. A spine surgeon opens the email, sees a wrist plate, and closes it. The knee course would have interested another contact, who didn't open it because the subject line was about the plate.
Email marketing tools are built to segment by job title, company, or buying stage. In a medical device contact list, job title says little: nearly all healthcare professionals are listed as “physician” or “surgeon,” and what sets one apart from another is their specialty and the type of content they came looking for.
Two dimensions: specialty and interest
The first dimension is specialty, and at many companies, subspecialty: within orthopedics, knee, shoulder, spine, trauma, and hand each have their own products, techniques, and congresses. An email about an anchor system is useful to someone who does shoulder surgery and irrelevant to nearly everyone else.
The second dimension is interest, which in this industry usually falls into three groups:
- Product. A new system, an added size, an updated surgical technique, a newly available document.
- Education. Courses, cadaver labs, webinars, educational material the company produces with its medical team.
- Events. The congress where the booth will be, the symposium, a product launch day.
The same surgeon can be in all three. A resident is usually only in education. A distributor gets more out of product and events than out of the program for a specialist course.
What needs to be known about each contact
A few fields, and ones someone can maintain:
- Contact type: healthcare professional, surgical technologist, distributor, internal team. Each one reads about the same product for a different reason.
- Specialty and subspecialty, from the same fixed list as the company's catalog. If the catalog is browsed by anatomical region, the list can use the same regions.
- Country, because what can be communicated about a product changes depending on where it's registered. What gets sent to each country is defined by the company's regulatory team.
- Language, if the company communicates in more than one.
- Source: how the contact joined the list. A course, a congress, a documentation request, or the form on a product page says something about what that person wants to receive.
A field nobody fills in becomes useless within a few months. Five reliable fields are better than fifteen half-complete ones.
Audience segments without a huge list
A small list of surgeons who know the company is more useful than a large purchased one. The work is building the groups from what already exists:
- What the person has already done. Someone who signed up for a shoulder course has declared a specialty and an interest without anyone asking. So has someone who requested the technique for a spine system.
- A single question at sign-up. On the website form, the QR code at the booth, or a course registration, ask for the specialty from a fixed list. One question gets answered; five don't.
- The clicks on each email. If the newsletter has separate sections by topic, each click signals an interest. After three or four emails, the list starts to sort itself out.
- The Sales team. The rep knows the specialty of each surgeon they work with. That information is usually on their phone and not in the list.
That's enough to start with a few groups and add others when there's content to send them. A segment without its own material ends up receiving the same email as everyone else.
One topic per email, on different days
When SAI, an Argentine orthopedic manufacturer and distributor, launched its new website, the newsletter didn't go out as a single piece. First a general email; then, on different days, one dedicated to products and another to medical education, each one short, with a single message and a single link. Follow-up emails came next, each showing a different part of the site. Since then, every new course or product update has been its own email leading to its own page.
Separating topics has an advantage that doesn't depend on the size of the list: each email leads to a place on the website, and what happens next can be read separately. If the education email leads to the course page and the product email to the product page, it becomes clear which topic people in each specialty open, and the next email is decided from there.
Make the link lead to the content
A segmented newsletter that leads to the home page wastes the segmentation. The email about the anchor system links to the system's product page, with the technique and documents alongside it; the course email links to the course page, with the program and registration. If the content doesn't have its own page on the website, the email will end up relying on an attached PDF (we cover this in Launching a medical device).
For what a course or workshop leaves behind once it's over, the material that can feed several emails is covered in A two-day cadaver lab, six photos, and an article.
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