Using a CRM To Build a Multilayered Campaign at Johns Hopkins

Suzanne Sawyer, senior vice president and chief marketing communications officer, Johns Hopkins Medicine

Connecting the dots. That’s the value provided by a customer relationship management (CRM) database, a tool health system marketing and communications leaders increasingly use to deliver precision marketing to consumers and calculate accurate return on investment (ROI).

Yet having a CRM is only one part of the digital marketing puzzle. Hospitals experiencing the highest level of success with CRM use it as part of a MarTech stack that includes multiple digital tools designed to develop, execute, and measure digital marketing campaigns.

Johns Hopkins Medicine, a six-hospital system with campuses in Maryland, Florida, and Washington, D.C., had been running brain tumor-focused digital marketing campaigns since 2012. But in March 2017, the system’s marketing team partnered with its CRM vendor, Healthgrades CRM, to build its first multichannel campaign that included a patient journey.

“Maryland is an all-payer state, which means revenue is capped for in-state patients,” says Suzanne Sawyer, senior vice president and chief marketing communications officer for Johns Hopkins Medicine. “So we used this campaign to target brain tumor patients who might have a propensity to travel for care in the mid-Atlantic and Northeast states.”

To build the campaign, Sawyer and her team first gained insights into current patient volume through the system’s Epic electronic medical records and claims data. Then the team studied other systems’ brain tumor messages and optimized keywords for the Johns Hopkins campaign.

“We set a goal of bringing in 10 qualified leads per month, with an 8 to 10 percent lead-to-appointment ratio,” Sawyer says. “We tracked leads, lead-to-appointment ratio, cost-per-patient acquisition, clickthrough rates, and click-to-call.”

The campaign achieved its goals, earning nearly 11 million impressions, more than 500 guide downloads, more than 1,200 calls and a 9 percent call-to-appointment ratio.

Read the full story now: How Three Health Systems Used Their MarTech Stack to Improve Patient Experience and Drive Growth

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