Pharmacy Chain Increased Sales by 87% via Rich Messaging and by 34% via Email with Personalized Triggers

Money can't buy health, but we all go to the pharmacy sometimes. A personalized approach to customers plays a special role in retention and loyalty management for pharmacies – you just need to find the right tools.

With the pandemic's start, many pharmaceutical companies focused their marketing on digital. Some brands moved in this direction even earlier and now develop online customer communication channels. This case study is about such a company.

Company

ANC Pharmacy is the leader among pharmacy retailers in Ukraine. Its group includes three national brands as well as three local ones. The company constantly increases the number of outlets and expands its geography.

ANC chain became the first (and so far the only) in Ukraine with robotic pharmacies. This allows to serve visitors easier and faster, so they don't have to wait long in line.

In addition to the site, the company uses the following channels:

• Mobile app;
• Social media;
• Email, SMS, Rich Messaging;
• Chatbots.

The ANC team decided to make customer communication more effective with personalized triggers and asked our marketing agency for help.

Pharma has long been one of the last large industries that weren't digital. Offline, our company was number one in the market, while online, we were a lagging player and had to change that. Three years ago, the management decided to pay due attention to ecommerce, develop the site and omnichannel communication. I worked with Yespo on other projects and knew its capabilities, so I just extrapolated my experience here. Digitalization, automation and triggered customer communication have always been beneficial for business. That’s why we decided to implement it with Yespo for ANC.

Roman Yentts, Head of Ecommerce at ANC

Tasks

Our experts, together with the client, compiled a list of essential triggers and omnichannel campaigns:

1. Abandoned cart
2. Abandoned view
3. Price drop for products in cart
4. Price drop for viewed products 
5. Reactivation

Then we added an email with the results of online diagnostics by the ANC.Doc service to the list.

Solution

Omnichannel CDP Yespo supports the transfer of data on customer activity both offline and online to your account. Several methods are available:

• API resources, including JSON events;
• Integration through external sources: Google Sheets, PostgreSQL and BigQuery;
• Web tracking, which is most often used in ecommerce.

We chose the last method to send personalized messages to the ANC online pharmacy customers.

You need to upload a product feed to the account to substitute data in messages containing favorites, viewed or cart items. It also allows to display personal recommendations on emails and the site.

Launching behavior-based triggers consist of the following stages:

1. Installing the script and setting up web tracking on the site.
2. Uploading the feed to Yespo.
3. Preparing messages and configuring dynamic content.
4. Creating and testing campaigns.

The company doesn't list product prices in promos to avoid misleading, as it depends on location. So we decided to specify only the size of the discount in triggered messages.

Abandoned Cart and Abandoned View

ANC database contains more contacts with a phone number than with email. Therefore, it was necessary to consider the logic of sending notifications given that.

We’ve determined the following sequence of messages in the campaigns:

1. Web push and email. ANC didn't send web push notifications and planned channel launching after transferring the site to a new domain.
   We prepared pushes and added them to the workflow. After the domain change was completed, the client only needed to set up a web push subscription to run browser notifications.
   It takes some time to grow the token base, so the campaign includes both push and email.
2. Rich message. This triggered notification is sent after two hours if the subscriber hadn't read it in other channels. These messages cost more than web push and email, so budget-friendly channels go first. At the same time, rich messages are sent before SMSes (which also cost less) for several reasons:
   • The channel is very popular among the ANC audience;
   • Marketers can use emojis and much more text;
   • It supports adding an image and a button.
     
3. SMS. The last reminder is sent to the subscriber in a day if they didn't open previous notifications.
   

The same person never receives the Abandoned cart and Abandoned view message simultaneously. Each trigger launches for one contact no more than once a week.

Emails contain up to 3 abandoned items from the cart/view and up to 6 recommended products.

Price drop for products in cart and viewed products

The message order is similar to the previous triggers: web push and email go first, followed by checking whether the recipient opened the message and optionally rich message sending. SMS is not involved in these campaigns.

For the experiment, we divided the recipients into two equal segments:

• The first group receives an email with recommendations;
• The second group receives an email only with a list of products whose prices have dropped, without recommendations.

This A/B test explains what is more important for customers: to get a specific health product with a better price or choose something among alternatives.

A special block in the workflow builder randomly divides the subscriber group into segments in the required proportion. You can see the results in campaign reports: opens, clicks and income.

Reactivation

Taking into account the sensitivity of pharmacy communication, we decided to avoid personalization in reactivation messages. Instead, we return customers with offers that may interest the majority.

Every month the company selects products from different categories for the Year of happiness with ANC sales campaign: headache pills, band-aids, sunscreens, etc. Discounts on these items reach 40% and are wanted by most customers. We created reactivation messages based on this promo. In addition to deals, we added category icons with corresponding links.

The segment of inactive subscribers consists of those who haven't visited the site for 60 days.

Launching emails from ANC.Doc

ANC.Doc is an online service on the ANC website that analyzes symptoms and finds their possible causes. After a small survey, the respondent receives a preliminary conclusion, including

• list of possible diagnoses with percentages,
• recommended specialist,
• suggested consultation format.

This report is provided for informational purposes; the user must contact a doctor for qualified assistance. The service allows making an appointment with the button and getting the diagnostic results by email.

To implement this trigger, the ANC developers set up data transferring from their site using the API resource v1/event.

ANC typically communicates with customers in Ukrainian but has two site language versions. They decided to send ANC.Doc emails in the language the user chose for the survey. Therefore, the workflow contains block checking the language variable from the event. After it, the workflow is split into two paths with different language versions.

The email doesn't contain any product recommendations to protect customers from self-treatment. Instead, all configured triggers have buttons to contact the pharmacist by phone and web chat.

Results

Yespo's behavior-based segmentation proved to be effective in the first month. Rich messages performed the best: they generated 90% of all sales from new triggers. The share of sales by email was 4% and by SMS was 6%.

The highest conversion had rich messages with abandoned carts, which brought 43.6% of sales. The results of the rest are as follows:

• Abandoned view – 16.9%
• Reactivation – 7.9%
• Price drop for products in cart – 15.7%
• Price drop for viewed products – 15.9%

Conversion of triggered emails:

• Abandoned view – 16.8%
• Abandoned cart – 25.5%
• Reactivation – 6.7%
• Price drop for products in cart – 22.6%
• Price drop for viewed products – 28.4%

On average, five personalized campaigns increased online sales by 3% in two months, with rich messaging revenue up 87% and email revenue up 38%.

ANC.Doc's non-sales emails showed a high level of audience interest. Their Open Rate was 53-55%.

The highest Open Rate, among other triggered emails, had price-drop messages, reaching 69% (against the regular abandoned carts/views OR of 40-44%).

We are very pleased with the performance of the rich messages. The emails are converting less so far due to the list volume. We collect our base organically and expect sales to grow with the number of subscribers. If we scale the current conversion rate to a larger base, our triggered email and rich messaging campaigns are quite successful.

Roman Yentts, Head of Ecommerce at ANC

The ANC team plans to unify customer data on offline purchases and on-site behavior. A single profile allows to analyze the client’s history in depth and create even more relevant personal offers. Omnichannel CDP Yespo has practical tools to provide data unification, which could be ANC digitalization's next big step.

ANC has also already launched a web push channel and added notifications to their triggered workflows. So we are waiting for a new case study.

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