• by Ray Schultz , Columnist, June 12, 2019

Let’s say an oncologist has a patient with dermatitis. What does the doctor need to know? B2B publisher Haymarket Media can shoot off a triggered email stocked with articles on the condition based on content the physician has viewed.  

The publisher is able to do this thanks to a relationship with email provider Maropost, says Joshua Storch, senior director of email and data operations for Haymarket.

Haymarket, which was also in the process of choosing a CDP, decided a couple of years ago that it needed a new email provider.  

“We weren’t in dire straits,” Storch says. “We were trying to reach medical practitioners expressing interest in a type of content. We needed someone to trigger and personalize better than we could.”

Typically, readers access content through a regular newsletter or on their own. If they viewed an article with a topic tag of diabetes, the challenge was to serve related material to them in a supplemental email.

“We couldn’t pull the 10 latest articles on diabetes into a newsletter,” says Chris Bubeck, VP marketing and digital operations at Haymarket Media. “We would have to manually curate them.” 

Haymarket has a database of medical practitioners numbering in the low millions, and 16 specialty brands that support these doctors, including Cancer Therapy Advisor, Clinical Pain Advisor, Neurology Advisor and Psychiatry Advisor.

Each of the products has a daily newsletter, and the group sends about 2,000 to 3,000 emails a month, with the volume reaching into the millions. Between 20% and 30% of those emails are triggered. 

Since starting with Maropost in March 2018, Haymarket has enjoyed a four- to five-time jump in click-through rates for those targeted newsletters. Open rates have seen maybe not as dramatic a lift.

Moreover, the segmentation criteria “are about the best we’ve seen,” Bubeck says. ”We can see who opened an email in the last six moths, or people who clicked on oncology content in the last 17 days.”

And how do the editors like Maropost’s loading tool?

“My perception for the most part is that it’s an easier product to use,” Storch says.

Has this newsletter cross-hatching led to individualized emails on hundreds of topics without any human intervention at all?

Not quite yet — the triggers are based on existing targeting parameters. “You might call it most of the way there,”  Storch laughs. “There’s a bit of human involvement.”

But he adds that with Maropost enabling additional automation and process improvements, "we're currently working on consolidating those email deployments and plan to drastically reduce the number of manual sends in the near future".