E-mail marketing a valuable tool for pharmaceutical companies
The company caters primarily to the medical and scientific communities through permission-based e-mail marketing programs. Most groups have used e-mail to market goods under the assumption that the content will be attractive to the recipient, said Mark Paris. The fear, of course, is that self-promotional e-mails will not be read or perceived as spam.'s We saw the need for coupling educational tools with promotional materials in such a way that it remains attractive to the target audience.
GeneBot's technology automates the process of running customized keyword searches against MEDLINE, a government-supported, Internet database of peer-reviewed medical literature. With the sponsorship support of pharmaceutical firms, GeneBot offers the e-mail-based search service to groups of physicians free of charge. Novel search results are delivered to participating physicians up to four times per week.
It's a win-win situation for marketers and physicians. Our sponsors have a unique opportunity to market their products, while providing a powerful service to prospective clients, Paris said.
Sponsors are given free reign of the space at the top of every e-mail via our sponsor control tools,'s he added. In this space, sponsors have 24/7 access to promote their products, provide links to internal Web sites and change their statements seasonally in order to establish a dynamic communications channel with their potential clients. Their messages are seen, on average, three times per week and their name is inextricably linked with, not only their promotional statements, but concepts such as physician education's and innovative technology.
The MEDLINE database is updated daily and is seeded, on average, with more than 40,000 new citations each month. Physicians rely on peer-reviewed publications as a primary source of medical information, Paris said. The technology allows physicians to maintain a current understanding of the latest information in their field without having to continually run manual searches of the database.
According to Paris, because so many physicians are either computer-phobic or too busy to run manual searches, they are enthusiastic recipients of the service promotional materials included. Put bluntly, our physician users love our service, gladly receive notices, on average, three times per week and read their e-mails top to bottom, Paris said. In fact, GeneBot's statistics show that nearly 85% of the e-mails are read in their entirety.
We'sve aligned ourselves with traditional marketing companies that have access to both pharmaceutical companies and physicians through conference staffing or physician education programs, Paris said. More than just resellers, they help us create custom, turn-key solutions for their clients according to marketing objectives. We happily have more than 3,000 physicians in sponsored programs and have recently passed the one year anniversary date since our first program.
According to Paris, more than 70% of physicians presented with the opportunity to sign up for the service do so. We have the ability to use an in-house physician database or we can rely on our third-party agreements to bring new physicians to the program, Paris said. In addition, we can reach specific physician subsets, such as urologists or cardiologists, in order to further strengthen the sponsorship impact.
GeneBot users can choose their own keywords and see only the results on topics they are interested in, Paris said. At the same time, we also give sponsors the ability to select separate mandatory keywords related to the products they'sre marketing.
The company is expanding the service and has recently added clinical filters to narrow search results, as well as access to ClinicalTrials.gov, a database of ongoing clinical trials. In addition, the service now provides a link next to each article listed in the e-mail that allows users to order the full text.
They also hope to expand beyond pharmaceutical marketing. According to Paris, the MEDLINE counterpart for healthcare administration, healthSTAR, was recently merged with MEDLINE, providing new sponsorship opportunities for groups interested in reaching hospital administrators.
Programs like ours are the future of electronic information distribution, Paris said. e-mail is every bit as dynamic as a Web page and easier to use. The concern, again, is content, and we think we'sve been able to provide our users with pertinent and timely information, which will keep them reading for a long time to come. Moreover, we have created the ideal environment for sponsors to dynamically communicate with their target audience.
For more information about GeneBot, visit the company's Web site at www.genebot.com.