E-commerce in the Healthcare sector

The healthcare industry is a major component of every national economy and growing rapidly as populations age and spend more on combating the consequences. Over-the-counter medicines, herbal alternatives, supplies for physical therapy and much more — they’re all selling more and, significantly, they’re all selling online.

The rise of e-commerce in the Healthcare sector mirrors the rise of e-commerce more generally, demonstrating that anything that can be sold online can sell more online when conventional marketing automation tools are applied.

In some ways, Healthcare is a latecomer to the online sales revolution. Whereas things like shoes, electronics and clothes were the ‘early adopters’ of online sales, many consumers are just now becoming used to getting their vitamins, muscle-building supplements, knee braces and more via the internet.

The upside of this for retailers is that most of the key lessons on e-commerce have been learned through trial and error already and vendors in the Healthcare sector enjoy the advantage of starting much further ahead than their counterparts in other areas.

The numbers show that e-commerce in the Healthcare sector is taking off, a fact that is reflected in the performance of several edrone clients active in this industry. To illustrate just how much marketing automation has helped them, we’ve compiled a few statistics to paint the picture.

The data comes from edrone clients operating in Brazil and Poland and everything has been aggregated and averaged for privacy reasons. All data comes from the first half of 2021.

The numbers tell the story

Let’s start with the big picture. The numbers from our clients show that nearly a quarter of all revenue comes directly from features that are part of the edrone platform. This is a massive jump and absolute proof that companies that do not use marketing automation are leaving money on the table.

More proof comes from the repeat rate. There are few better indicators of effectiveness than getting customers to come back to make more purchases than they otherwise would without marketing automation.

Below, the clear bar shows customers not engaged by edrone solutions, the yellow shows those who were:

Another key indicator is growth in your subscriber base, which gives you the opportunity to engage directly with some of your most loyal customers. Building a subscriber base is a slow process that can really pay off over time.

In just six months, our clients were able to increase their subscriber lists by an average of almost 15%, based on an average list size of nearly 50,000 addresses.

Automated scenarios are among the most powerful tools in marketing automation. edrone offers a long list of ready-made scenarios, allowing our clients to save time and resources. Bear in mind that the products in this field are different from others in meaningful ways. For example, many products in Healthcare don’t have the same psychological mechanisms behind the purchase decision. You don’t have to convince someone that they need or want something — customers get interested suddenly when the need naturally appears.

Still, that doesn’t mean that marketing activities don’t have an effect. There is still a lot of competition selling identical goods and it’s necessary to somehow stand out and provide a better customer experience. This means adopting many of the same policies and strategies found in other areas of e-commerce, like generous return policies (but still adapted to the unique circumstances of health-related products), loyalty programs, personalized content, etc.

Here are the results our clients got with automated scenarios:  

Also, these were the top 5 most-used automated scenarios among our clients:

1. Recover Abandoned Cart
2. Restore Viewed Products
3. Restore Customer
4. Recommended
5. Newsletter Subscription

Speaking of the last item on that list, the familiar newsletter is still the backbone of customer communication. Using it as an effective touchpoint is key to e-commerce success. Once you have a substantial subscriber database, you can benefit from the advantages of scale and turn your newsletter into a reliable revenue generator. Here’s what our clients in the Healthcare sector did with their newsletters using edrone:

This brings us to maybe the most important number of all, the return on investment (ROI) gained by our clients in the Healthcare sector. What better proof could there be of what you get in return for investing in the power of marketing automation, regardless of sector?

There is still massive potential yet to be realized in e-commerce in the Healthcare industry. While the nature of many of the products demands special care due to their sensitive, personal nature, they are still subject to the same rules for success that govern the sale of other items online.

Applying the many of the same techniques that have made clothes, shoes and other more familiar online purchases part of our everyday lives can also greatly impact the sales of items in the Healthcare industry.

Want to learn more about how edrone can turbocharge your online operations in Healthcare or anywhere else? Drop us a line at hello@edrone.me