A few months back, my husband and I were sitting on the couch, nonchalantly talking about buying a home treadmill. Later that evening, treadmill advertisements popped up in my Instagram feed. Similar creepy moments — “Was my phone listening to my conversation?” — have become ubiquitous over the past several years, yet my email inbox is bombarded daily with generic messages completely irrelevant to me. Most days, I quickly scan my inbox, select all 50 messages on the page, and delete them without opening, reading, clicking or caring.
Some of those emails might come from my pets’ veterinary hospital, an emergency vet we visited, a pet microchip company or a pet food brand that somehow got my email address. The majority of them aren’t meant for me. Sometimes, they target kitten or puppy owners. (My two dogs and one cat are 8 years old.) Or they seek out people who live in wet climates. (I live in dry Denver.) Or people who go camping and hiking with their dogs. (I don’t camp.) Or people with allergic pets. (Nope.)
Why don’t I receive relevant emails? How can social media ads target us precisely while email marketers miss the mark by a mile?
While reading a recent Forbes article that highlighted 2024 business trends and stressed the importance of customer experience and personalization, I couldn’t help but think about veterinary medicine and how powerful it would be if practices customized their client communications.
“Wouldn’t it be cool,” I thought, “if a clinic could send a cute email just before Halloween to all clients who own black cats?” The practice could share a poem about the plight of black cats and remind owners to schedule their black cats’ exams. Poems like these:
Dear <Cat Name>, underappreciated one
Being a black feline can be no fun
Misjudged by myths, unfairly feared
Yet by our team, you’re endeared
So dear <Cat Name>, with purrs so sweet
It’s time for your checkup, from whiskers to feet
Remind your human to give us a call
Because prevention is the best medicine of all
That kind of marketing shouldn’t be too hard. Just have your practice management software run a quick report to find all black cat patients. Right?
To find out whether my idea would be as simple to execute as I imagined, I turned to my LinkedIn connections, many of whom I knew had in-depth knowledge of what most PIMS are capable of.
Within minutes, my connections began commenting.
- “I do believe it’s too specific. However, could you run a report for feline clients exported to CSV? Maybe there’s a color option. Filter accordingly and record the emails.” — Veterinary consultant
- “Most do not have the functionality to do that. Segmenting is a huge area lacking in most PIMS. With many, you’re lucky if you can segment dog vs. cat.” — Veterinary marketing consultant
- “Most can’t, that I know of, but you could probably have that data pulled through a secondary service like Power BI to get more granular.” — Veterinary leadership mentor
- “This is something I’ve told every PIMS [company] to do forever. The marketing options could be epic with way more segmentation, but nope, vet med likes to live in 1999 forever.” — Veterinary brand strategist
- “For marketers, querying by patient history en masse is what we’re all looking for and find ourselves frustrated and doing a lot of stupid lookup work in Excel.” —Veterinary marketing executive
- “With anything that goes beyond signalment, you’d run into issues on how this data is recorded in the first place. Even with color and breed but even more so with medical data. Records are usually incomplete and full of acronyms, and hardly anyone is recording lifestyle, diagnosis and their resolution/status.” — Veterinarian, surgeon, speaker
- “Color isn’t a choice for data options. However, age, diagnoses codes, service/product purchase codes are all usually options.” — Veterinary marketer
- “Heck, I was trying to figure out how many dogs over 120 pounds, and I can’t do that.” — Veterinary practice owner
Several other comments were from company representatives telling me their particular client engagement and communication solutions could do it if, of course, their products integrated with a practice’s PIMS. Some told me they’re working on it. Another person said, “Black kittens are the cutest.”
Yes. Black kittens are the cutest.
A few days later, I found myself on a Zoom call with Ryan Leech, a veterinary industry consultant and the host of The Bird Bath podcast. He has worked with multiple PIMS companies and has a well-rounded and robust knowledge of all things veterinary business. I was confident he could guide me in the right direction.
But even Leech’s answers were more complex than what I was looking for. He said things like “software integrations” and “export the data.” Turns out, you can customize and personalize your client communications, but it’s not typically as simple as “Run a quick report in your PIMS.”
Focus on Your Data
“It’s really all about putting good data in to get good data out,” Leech stressed. “If you have one person at the practice typing ‘brown’ and another typing ‘chestnut,’ your data will be inconsistent.”
While a patient’s color might not seem all that consequential, diagnoses certainly are.
“If you put 15 veterinarians in a room and have them enter the same disease into the PIMS, you’re probably going to get 10 different ways that the same disease is entered,” said Doug Brooks, the chief operating officer at ABC Intelligence, which powers the VetGenus suite of data-driven products.
Brooks used the example of osteoarthritis, which a veterinarian might enter as “osteoarthritis,” “degenerative joint disease,” “OA” or “osteoarthritis of the [body part].” You might use another designation.
One way to clean up your data is to implement the AAHA Chart of Accounts and create standard operating procedures for data entry. That way, team members will consistently enter data and descriptions into your PIMS.
Cleaning up your data and using it to precisely target clients might seem daunting, but you don’t have to do it alone. The veterinary space offers several data service and client relationship platforms that integrate with various PIMS.
“We’re able to look across all of the data for the patient — structured or unstructured — to harmonize and enrich the data and facilitate the lens through which a practice is able to view their data,” Brooks said. “We want to help practices monetize their data, and monetizing it doesn’t mean selling it. A practice can monetize their data by using it to more specifically target their clients with relevant messaging.”
At petdiseasealerts.org, pet owners and veterinary professionals can view maps that forecast infection rates for heartworm, Lyme disease, anaplasmosis and ehrlichiosis. The county-specific maps are updated monthly. The map above shows a high risk of canine heartworm disease in Rio Grande County, Colorado. The risk is also higher than normal. Local veterinary practices could use the advisory to target pets overdue for heartworm testing and preventives.
Using Data for Client Outreach
Customized marketing is about more than adding a name field to an email subject line and spamming your entire client list. You must segment.
In addition to the typical ways of segmenting — think species, breed and age — here are three ways to use your data to reach the right clients with the right messages.
1. CONDITION-SPECIFIC OUTREACH
When a new treatment hits the market or a drug manufacturer needs clinical trial participants, you can use your data to target only those patients who would benefit and then send relevant messages to their owners.
Let’s consider osteoarthritis. Search your data for all OA patients. Again, if your data is inconsistent because the service providers classify or describe OA differently in the PIMS, a data company can use artificial intelligence and algorithms to scan your practice software and each medical record to find anything related to osteoarthritis.
“It’s not just searching the diagnosis code; it’s searching the entire PIMS. It creates a much bigger pool from a marketing opportunity perspective,” Brooks said.
Sending messages about a pet’s condition nurtures your relationship with its owner and can improve patient health and your practice’s bottom line. And when you only send relevant messages, clients will be less likely to think you’re spamming them and less likely to delete your practice’s communications automatically.
2. LOCATION-SPECIFIC OUTREACH
The Companion Animal Parasite Council updates its forecast maps monthly to inform the public about disease risks and outbreaks in every U.S. county. The forecast maps differ from CAPC’s prevalence maps, which are found at capcvet.org and indicate county-specific positive test rates for heartworm disease, intestinal parasites, tick-borne diseases and viral diseases.
The forecast maps posted at petdiseasealerts.org use highly accurate statistical methods to predict the risk of heartworm disease, tick-borne diseases and fleas in each county over the next month. Veterinary practices can sign up for alerts. When they receive one for their county or a neighboring county, they can use their internal data to inform clients who would benefit from a warning.
Let’s say your practice is in Rio Grande County, Colorado, which, according to my recent visit to petdiseasealerts.org, had a high heartworm infection forecast rate. You can search for patients past due on heartworm tests and clients who haven’t purchased heartworm prevention over a designated period and then message the owners to report your county’s newly discovered disease risk.
3. PRODUCT-SPECIFIC OUTREACH
By leveraging data, you can carry less inventory and make it easier for clients to get therapeutic pet foods. You can run a report of counter sales of food in your practice and contact those clients. Instead of buying the food in your practice, pet owners can have the food shipped to them through some manufacturers’ home-delivery programs. And you can earn a percentage of the sales.
Don’t be the sender of automatically deleted emails in your clients’ inboxes. Send customized, thoughtful communications that pet owners will open, read, click on and care about because the messages are relevant to them.
BONUS REVENUE
Launching a veterinary medication is expensive. “Every month that drug is delayed costs the manufacturer millions of dollars. And one of the biggest reasons for delays is the manufacturer can’t find patients for the final clinical studies,” said Doug Brooks of the data company ABC Intelligence. “That manufacturer has a significant financial interest in finding the right patient population for clinical trials.”
That’s where veterinary practices and their patient data come into play. Under ABC Intelligence’s VetGenus umbrella is a solution called ResearchGenus, which helps researchers access PIMS data and connect with the patient populations they seek.
“If a practice or a corporate group has control of its data and makes it easy to identify specific patient populations, it creates additional revenue streams,” Brooks said. “There are contract research organizations and manufacturers that will pay to have visibility to aggregate views of patient populations that have specific conditions, and so there are clinics that make significant revenue streams by participating in clinical trials.”
Not only does this option provide additional revenue for the practice, but Brooks said it can also:
- Improve relationships when veterinarians can offer the latest innovations to clients and patients.
- Potentially prolong the lives of pets participating in the clinical trials.
- Help get drugs to market faster.
LOTS OF DIGITS
According to The Wall Street Journal, “Google doesn’t provide a specific measure of how many searches it handles, saying only it is in the trillions per year.”