Webinar recap: The personalized patient journey—From acquisition to retention

What’s a bigger priority for your company: Customer acquisition or retention?

That’s the question I led with at our February 2024 webinar, “The personalized patient journey: From acquisition to retention.” Around 57% of respondents said they prioritized acquisition, while just 14% favored retention. Another 28% claimed both functions were equally important to their companies.

So, who’s making the right choice? Is there even a right choice?

The short, somewhat frustrating answer: It depends—but personalization matters either way.

To uncover the more nuanced, complicated answer, I talked with experts from AtlantiCare, Hartford Healthcare, and Keck Medicine of USC. Each panelist brought unique perspectives, experiences, and strategies to the discussion.

Here’s what we learned.

Acquisition is expensive, retention is tricky

While our off-the-cuff poll suggests a deeper divide in priorities, the results were directionally similar to a formal survey by Invespro, which showed around 44% of companies focused on acquisition compared to 18% on retention.

Interestingly, acquisition tends to be more expensive than retention and delivers a lower return on investment. Invespro estimates acquisition to cost about five times as much as retention—however, even a 5% improvement in retention can drive a 25-95% boost in profits.

Making retention even more lucrative is the fact that about 60-70% of current, engaged customers will return for additional service, as opposed to 5-20% of those newly acquired.

While retention looks like a no-brainer investment, the reality is that many organizations say it’s more difficult and data-intensive than the process of acquisition. It also tends to be trickier to measure retention outcomes: Net-new acquisition is a simple metric to track, but understanding the total contribution margin across a patient’s journey requires the analysis of multiple datapoints.

Finding the right balance is a matter of understanding organizational needs. Less-established providers, for instance, will especially need to focus resources on building their new patient base. And both processes are improved by incorporating data that allows you to tailor outreach to specific audiences.

All-payor claims data provider context around historical trends and can be used to feed predictive models that determine the types of services consumers are likely to need. Healthcare and consumer behavioral data, media channel preferences, and other market insights can help you personalize your engagement efforts to reach patients where they are and speak to their unique circumstances. This might mean targeting patients by disease propensity for appropriate service lines, building marketing campaigns around the concerns of certain communities, or running language-specific campaigns.

It may be getting harder to understand your patients

According to Twilio’s State of Personalization report, 85% of businesses believe they’re delivering personalized customer experiences, but only 60% of actual customers say that’s what they’re getting.

Is this a case of marketers being cocky? More likely it’s a matter of overconfidence in data quality. Organizations that rely solely on internal patient data, survey results, and website user activity to guide marketing strategy are missing significant parts of patients’ stories: How they engage with other providers, the channels they turn to for information, and their habits as consumers outside of healthcare are all crucial details.

But as privacy becomes a greater priority for consumers, it’s getting harder to obtain and leverage certain insights into their behavior.

Cookies and tracking pixels are being phased out in certain jurisdictions, leaving healthcare organizations to seek alternative perspectives into consumer web behavior. Providers feeding patient data into internal CRMs to inform personalized marketing campaigns will need to stay up to date on regulations around data transmission and storage to remain compliant.

For many providers, partnering with a healthcare-focused data vendor is the best way to fill in the gaps in your CRM datasets with third-party insights while ensuring safe, compliant data management throughout your systems. A specialized vendor may also have access to data that you’re unlikely to be able to source yourself: All-payor claims across markets, clinical propensity models, and media channel engagement preferences are all valuable sources of consumer insights (and all very difficult to source manually).

Of course, the more data you have, the more complicated it can be to work with. You’ll need analytical tools and know-how to derive insights from data and integrate them into your workflow. But it’s worth the effort. Once you understand your existing and prospective patients, you can highlight the services that truly differentiate your organization and improve both acquisition and retention efforts.

Ultimately, personalization isn’t just about driving revenue—it’s about helping current and future patients to get the care they need.

Capacity and demand generation are a balancing act

Your marketing team wants to maximize demand and engagement, your board of directors wants to maximize revenue—but does your clinical team have the capacity to take on additional patients?

To identify the service lines best equipped to accommodate more volume, start with in-depth conversations between marketing and service line leaders. Use data on utilization, wait times, and call center conversations to establish meaningful goals for each line and align the various functions responsible for executing them. Historical claims data can also be used to size your total addressable market.

Marketers can’t control your capacity, but they can influence how your brand is seen and sought out. If you want to drive traffic to certain service lines, run highly targeted campaigns for specific ailments or surgery types using paid search advertising. On the other hand, if you’re looking to promote more general services, push content through channels like social media, blogs, and newsletters.

Patient testimonials, tech announcements, and media appearances can also help to build overall brand awareness without necessarily stressing capacity. Even if your teams aren’t ready to provide increased volume, keeping your brand top of mind is crucial for retaining current patients. Consider using clinical propensity models to guide programmatic advertising and make other marketing tactics more effective, too.

Sheer patient volume isn’t everything. Some service lines may need candidates for studies, others may prioritize increased satisfaction or adherence. More often than not, you’ll be running multiple campaigns with distinct goals simultaneously, so clear, data-driven KPIs (and frequent communication) are a must for keeping everyone in sync.

Get the right data to demonstrate empathy

Whether acquisition or retention is your priority, demonstrating empathy is key to building trust, engagement, and loyalty. Consumer demographics, psychographics, and behavioral data are all invaluable for narrowing segments and connecting with patients in more meaningful ways. Understanding how these datapoints change over time makes it easier to identify trends and speak to both the present and future needs of the communities you serve.

Pair these consumer market insights with other forms of commercial healthcare data—like social determinants of health and clinical propensity models—to identify opportunities for outreach and engage patients who can most benefit from your services with highly personalized campaigns.

Definitive Healthcare offers all these types of data—along with all-payor medical and prescription claims, reference and affiliations data, and powerful analytical tools—empowering your teams to personalize every step of the patient journey.

You can drive success and reduce unnecessary spend across your organization by integrating our intelligence and analytics into your workflow. Get your complementary consumer market assessment today and see how our insights can help you make more impactful strategic decisions.