Digital Healthcare Marketing

Stop Buying Lists. Start Buying Data.

Stop Buying Lists. Start Buying Data.

Buying a list of healthcare contacts from a vendor should not be part of anyone’s marketing strategy. It doesn’t matter how tempting the offer sounds – just say no. On the other hand, marketing data that can help you better identify potential buyers or hone your message is worth its weight in gold.

The Offer

As marketers, we have all gotten this email (and if you haven’t, I guarantee you’ll get one soon):

Dear Marketing Leader
I hope you are doing well. Would you be interested in acquiring a list of Healthcare Information Conference Attendees for 2021? The list includes: Company Name, First Name, Last Name, Address, Phone Number and A Verified Email Address.

The list has over 47,083 who have opted in to receive the kind of valuable email that your company sends. Cost: $1,500

[Please note, the above is an example, actual emails of this type usually have grammatical mistakes]

Do not hesitate, just press DELETE. These lists are never worth it.

Several years ago, I kept all these emails in a special folder. After 6 months there were over 75 emails.

Expensive Lesson

To put it simply, most people trying to sell you a list are looking for quick cash. The lists you get are of dubious quality and 99% of the time the person has not actually opted in for anything.

How do I know this? Three times in my career, I’ve been forced to buy a list of this type by someone higher up in the food chain. In every case, the list we ended up with was garbage. The best had a 40% bounce rate and a 35% single-email-unsubscribe-rate. One list was so bad we got black-listed by our email provider for too many bounces.

After all three disasters, I randomly called 10 people on the list to ask them if they remember signing up for an opt-in email list – no one ever remembered signing up for a list BUT they do remember dropping a business card in various fish bowls at healthcare conferences.

The silver lining was that I had another list-offer email forwarded to me by a senior leader or anyone on the sales team. I just wish I didn’t have to waste $$$ to prove a point.

Questionable Quality and Use

I cannot stress this enough: these lists are of dubious quality.

Further proof of this happened last year. I got an email (which I kept) from someone who offered to sell me a list of 500 names of people attending the 2020 HITMC Conference. Think about that for a second. It’s pretty bold to sell a list of attendees for a conference that didn’t happen to one of the organizers of the conference.

One of the most important things to consider is how you intend to use the list. If the answer is “outreach” (aka cold calling or cold emailing), you should pause. GDPR rules for EU citizens, CASL rules for Canadians, and numerous other laws in other countries prohibit sending unsolicited emails to recipience with whom you do not have a business relationship or who have never met/spoken to. Using a purchased list, therefore, comes with a lot of risk.

Don’t do it.

Data not Lists

I have a completely opposite opinion when it comes to buying marketing DATA.

Healthcare marketing data is much more than contact information. It means financial information, claims data, referral patterns, ownership details, published papers, social network reach, etc. This rich set of information can be extremely helpful in honing your marketing message or creating new target personas.

IQVIA’s OneKey database is one example of this valuable data.

According to Barry Ward, Sales Director at IQVIA, the database has:

  • Over 10 Million healthcare providers
  • Almost 700,000 healthcare organizations
  • Information about hospital affiliations
  • Treatment/claims data
  • Prescribing information

Not only can it be used for outreach, but also:

  • Relationship mapping
  • Market penetration analysis
  • Resource planning
  • Compliance & Validation

Here’s an example. Say you were targeting physician practices. Knowing which practice is independently owned vs who is owned by a hospital will drastically change your marketing tactics. Independent practices have vastly different hot buttons vs those owned by hospitals. For hospital-owned practices you may need to change your targeting away from the practice itself and over to the person responsible for all the practices at the hospital.

Having this type of data is extremely valuable for marketing…and most fly-by-night list sellers don’t have this type of information.

For more on the value of healthcare data and why it’s important to look at the vendor behind the data, check out this HITMC Lightning session by Barry Ward from IQVIA.

About the author

Colin Hung

Colin Hung is an award-winning Marketing Executive with more than 15yrs of healthcare and HealthIT experience. He co-founded one of the most popular healthcare chats on Twitter, #hcldr and he has been recognized as one of the “Top 50 Healthcare IT Influencers”. Colin’s work has been published in the Journal of the American College of Radiology, American Society for Healthcare Risk Managers, and Infection Control Today. He writes regularly for Healthcare Scene and here at HITMC.com. Colin is a member of #pinksock #TheWalkingGallery and is proudly HITMC. His Twitter handle is: @Colin_Hung.

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