SK&A Blog
Mary Waldron
The Dirty Truth About Pharmaceutical Marketing Data
by Mary Waldron
November 13, 2009
Maintaining an in-house database of physicians is no easy task. Life happens. Healthcare companies and providers move and physicians get new jobs, retire, and, eventually, die. All the while, you’re busy juggling developing a new product-launch strategy, managing the current campaign and accounting for last quarter’s campaign.
Did it ever occur to you that your pharmaceutical-campaign strategy and execution may not be the deciding factors in your success? It’s the list of contacts you’re planning to use to deploy the campaign that really matters most.
The most important element in a direct-mail campaign is the contact database. According to John Coe, author of “The Fundamentals of Business-to-Business Sales and Marketing,” these contacts account for 60 to 70 percent of a campaign’s success.
It’s easy for marketing and advertising professionals to get lost in the messages and creatives behind campaigns—it’s their job—but without a clean and reliable database of healthcare-provider names and addresses, those beautiful, four-color brochures about heart disease and the cholesterol drug Lipitor won’t mean squat.
The truth of the matter is that many companies—even large, global pharmaceutical and medical-device powerhouses—don’t even realize that they have issues with their data.
Missing the mark on healthcare-data accuracy for pharmaceutical and medical-device campaigns is becoming a prevalent cause of wasted marketing and advertising budgets. SK&A’s Irvine, Calif., Research Center provides a data-cleansing service for companies to tune up existing lists before campaigns, using its sophisticated match-identification technology and research-based manual resolution. In a recent study, SK&A reported that 12 percent of the healthcare contact data it verified through its data-cleansing service so far in 2009 was incorrect in some way, with a majority of errors existing in mailing addresses.
In a recent survey sponsored by Pitney Bowes and Silver Creek Systems, a variety of North American and European companies with annual revenues over $1 billion were asked about their own data quality. The results of the survey were startling, reporting that:
- 63 percent have never made any attempts to measure the cost of poor data quality or its impact on their businesses.
- 17 percent thought their data quality was less than good.
- 37 percent have a data-quality initiative in place.
- 17 percent have no plans to start a data-quality initiative.
“The typical cost of poor data quality is actually in a range closer to 10 times or more than what survey participants believed,” said Katherine Hamilton of Pitney Bowes.
The U.S. Postal Service estimates that 5 percent of all mail is undeliverable as addressed, which results in several billion dollars wasted on postage alone. In fact, the Data Warehousing Institute estimates that U.S. businesses pay out more than $600 billion each year for poor data-quality costs. This cost can mean a loss of 15 to 20 percent of revenue for an individual business, according to the Insurance Data Management Association.
With the USPS reporting that address data decays at a rate of 17 percent, companies with in-house databases must have a system in place to update these constant changes. Take a look at your current healthcare database and imagine how much wrong information is probably lurking in there right now…
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