Digital engagement of HCPs without physical access
Before the events of 2020, many sales reps relied on face to face interactions with customers to excel at their jobs and had to pivot to a digital strategy due to Covid-19. This was true for Bayer’s Middle East division. During lockdown, Bayer reps in the Middle East lost the physical access to pharmacists they had become accustomed to. They needed to find a way to maintain communication and engagement with their customers without making on-site visits.
They came up with an approved email strategy which made it possible to manage the communications while maintaining compliance with safety regulations. Bayer’s existing Bigtincan multichannel engagement platform preconfigured with their CRMS made it simple to get started.
This approach proved incredibly effective and enabled our medical reps to maintain the communication with our customers in a compliant way.
Empowering medical reps to reach customers
Pre-covid, in-person meetings had been the primary way for medical reps to engage HCPs in the Middle East. The pandemic forced them to rethink this engagement model. In four weeks, a new approach was developed. The new approach included collecting customer contact information and consent, and developing new HTML content for approved emails, and training trainers to embed the solution with the field force so they can follow the impact on dashboards.
Having a library of approved emails enabled Bayer reps to keep up communication with their customers throughout lockdown and helped them to reach 91% of their targeted pharmacists across the Middle East.
Direct data access to easily measure the effect
The integration between the Bigtincan Life Sciences platform and Bayer’s CRM made data automatically flow between the systems. This enabled tracking of customer engagement with email content (opens, clicks, conversions, content access) across countries in the region to understand best practices and share experiences internally.
It also enabled Marketing to review content and decide what was working and what wasn’t so they could further optimize their content and email strategy and continue maximizing digital engagement with customers.
