First Party Data is Driving Healthy Brand-consumer Relationships
Aaryan Kapur, Group Head - Digital Marketing at Medcare Hospitals & Medical Centres and Aster DM Healthcare speaks about how to show users value in sharing their data, and the consolidation of healthcare experiences
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In March 2022, Aster DM Healthcare which operates 27 hospitals in the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) countries, and 14 in India announced its move to launch a super-app to provide services on a single platform. In January this year, the myAster app unveiled its ‘full-fledged’ version promising UAE’s residents access to its hospitals, clinics, diagnostic centres and pharmacies with the aim to enable end-to-end care facilitation.
Martechvibe spoke toAaryan Kapur, Group Head – Digital Marketing at Medcare Hospitals & Medical Centres and Aster DM Healthcare about the teams putting this ambitious plan into action. “It basically means teleconsultation, booking in-person appointments with the doctor, maintaining your health records, as well as getting your pharmacy products delivered at home is accessible on one platform,” said Kapur.
Medcare Hospitals is a subsidiary of Aster DM Healthcare. The app aims to put all of Aster’s offerings under a single roof – building the largest healthcare network in the GCC. The digital transformation in healthcare has empowered all concerned stakeholders. For example, healthcare providers have an extensive view of patient health by significantly increasing access to health data. For patients, it has given them greater control over their health. The result is increased business efficiency, and improved medical outcomes.
Within the first six months of launch, the myAster app was able to scale to 1 million users.
We spoke to Kapur about how this access to data is fueling marketers moves to offer users more relevant products and services, and the challenges in making first party data count towards strategic business decisions.
Incentivise users to share their data
First, marketers need to identify the data the brand wants, and then work towards collecting that data. “Let’s you’re targeting an email, a phone number or demographic data such as personal identifiable information – there are strict rules that need to be followed in order to get the consent first, and then be able to collect that data.”
This is a common challenge for marketers across industries but healthcare has additional compliance issues that need to be considered. Consumers are more aware than ever before. Digital education has taught them that first party data is primarily used for marketing or to reach out to them. Everyone fears the irrelevant cross-sell.
Bug what if you incentivise users to willingly and emphatically share first party data? Explain how you plan to use this information, and show consumers the value it will bring them.
Use the data to offer personalisation without spamming users
Now that you have been able to capture the right kind of data you were looking for, what’s next?
All of this first party data is useless if you aren’t able to get the right insights to inform your marketing actions. “This is where teams need to merge marketing and data science.Identify and segregate users based on user behaviour, preferences, etc, and identify what sort of messaging, at what time and what day and on what channel works best to nudge them to take action.”
Measure incrementality to crack the mix
There will be so many activities running simultaneously that it can be difficult to attribute all of the incrementality to only one channel. Marketers need to identify unique identifiers, and measure CAC or LTV – for which they need to leverage first party data.
There are a few things one needs to keep in mind here. Beware of bad marketing data.
“Owing to the increasing cloud and storage costs, companies are prioritising what sort of data points they actually want to store. Bad marketing data is anything that can cause the cost to inflate,” says Kapur. The cannabalisation of the ad ecosystem is another possible cause of bad data where fraudulent data can mislead the marketing team to falsely believe inauthentic triggers.
Set baselines based on your current user behaviour, based on the industry standards, and put in place real-time alerts and algorithms to be able to identify the surplus. Once you can identify bad data, you can ensure that there are roadblocks in place to filter it out and eliminate it.
There is still a long way to go for marketers to find maximum value from first party data. The most common complaint among marketers is how to make sense of all the data from different sources – online and offline. For example, one may not enter a shop to buy something, they may want to browse. But the assumption for their marketing team would be that these many footfalls have been driven, and hence the revenue should follow.
But the potential of this data will only increase with trial, error and subsequent optimisation. “In the digital age, you need to take everything you have learned about your customer and use it quickly. Especially in a growing platform, these decisions have to be taken more frequently and you have to be more agile in their implementation,” says Kapur. Can your team, and your technology support this speed to act?
