Drip campaigns are a series of personalized, automated messages designed to be sent out along a certain timeframe. They remain one of the most effective ways to boost your clinical study’s patient engagement, especially when utilizing mobile technology and SMS campaigns in addition to the traditional email approach.
Why do drip campaigns work?
Drip campaigns are a key element of managing clinical trials, as they offer variety to your patient communication with significantly less effort. The “drips” can begin with a welcome email, introducing your company and providing basic onboarding information. Then, a follow up message can be sent according to your study timeline, along with further communication assisting them through the rest of the clinical process and keeping them interested and engaged in your study -- automatically. This is far preferable to less organized methods that can involve repetitive messaging reiterating the same information about your company over and over.
What’s more, drip campaigns keep potential leads in the loop of your research. By contacting people who have expressed interest in your clinical study but maybe haven’t made the jump yet, you can gradually offer helpful information and nurture your leads. This helps to appeal to those potential patients who aren’t ready for immediate action, and allows them to consider your study on their own time.
Drip campaigns also keep your company relevant to anyone you hope to work with, patients and sponsors alike. Think of it this way: How many emails do you get per day? How many of them slip through the cracks of your overcrowded inbox and get ignored? Now, imagine how many of them you’d actually pay attention to if they came into your inbox regularly (but not incessantly), and with fresh content each time. That’s the point of a drip campaign.
How do you implement a drip campaign?
The easiest way to get started with drip campaigns is to work with patient recruitment services that integrate them into their process (yes, that includes us!)Your campaign can then be customized to suit your specific needs, including everything from lead nurturing to patient onboarding. Here at Citruslabs, we use automated email and SMS campaigns to cover all of our bases and ensure that the communication you have with your patients is comprehensive, but not over the top and annoying. The process of customizing your campaign can be broken down into a few simple steps:
1. Identify your target audience.
If your goal is to reach out to prospective and existing patients, you’ll need to identify their needs in order to create content they’ll actually care about.
2. Identify the goals of your campaign.
This varies study-to-study, but generally falls into one of two categories. Either you’re reaching out to prompt your recipient to do a specific action, or you’re doing it to gain more information about them. If it’s the former, you’ll want your content to drive towards some specific action, and you’ll need to make it as easy as possible for your recipient to do what you want them to do. So, if your goal is to direct them to your study’s website or any connected social media, encourage them to visit the relevant links.
3. Craft your message, and plan out your timeline.
Here is when everything you’ve decided on becomes concrete, and you’ll now work with your team to devise messaging that suits your audience and satisfies your goals. You’ll also need to decide when is best to reach out to your audience, and how often. From there, it’s a matter of automating the campaign to send out the messages you want in the order that you want them. (Hint: If you’re using a patient recruitment company, they’ll be part of the team that can give you more insight into how best to go about all of this.)
Need help setting up a drip campaign to boost your recruitment?
Our platform seamlessly incorporates drip campaigns into your study, giving you all of the benefits we’ve discussed without any extra hassle. We can help you accomplish your recruitment and engagement goals using our automated email and SMS campaigns.
Citrus is a fully integrated recruitment and retention software that fits any clinical trial and simplifies the implementation of patient engagement in your clinical trial. Whether you are already working with CTMS systems or not, Citrus is the perfect add-on to make patient interaction effective.
Since 2015, our team has been hard at work raising awareness of clinical trials across the globe. A Forbes ‘30 Under 30’ company and a graduate of the renowned Techstar program in New York, Citruslabs is at the forefront of patient recruitment and retention technologies. With over 3 million patients now recorded on our databases, our patient recruitment dashboard is fast becoming the most efficient method of trial recruitment.
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