Strategic advantage: Optichannel engagement drives ROI across the product lifecycle

Traditional pharmaceutical engagement models are yielding diminishing returns. HCPs expect information tailored to their specialty, patient mix, go-to platforms, and even preferred time of day. Meanwhile, patients want streamlined, personalized healthcare experiences like those they see every day from tech and consumer brands.

This consumerization, along with information overload, channel fragmentation, and tightening budgets, means omnichannel—coordinating across all channels—doesn’t deliver meaningful engagement. In fact, despite years of investment, nearly 8 in 10 pharma leaders reported seeing little or no impact on customer engagement from omnichannel in a 2024 survey.

The solution to truly personalized engagement lies in moving beyond just connecting channels. Optichannel marketing is a precision-based strategy centered on using real-world data (RWD) to dynamically select, employ, and optimize engagement across channels and tactics that make the most sense for a specific audience—based on their individual preferences.

This maximizes personalization and effectiveness, as well as delivering cost savings (20% or more) and measurable ROI across the product lifecycle.

The efficiency imperative

When you leverage real-world signals to be more precise, you can spend less but achieve more than traditional engagement models–finally fulfilling the ‘do more with less’ imperative.

Accurate data provides actionable intelligence on patient and HCP behaviors, preferences, health activities, and more. When integrated with optichannel principles, this data enables an adaptive engagement model. RWD informs, AI/ML predicts optimal channels and actions, and integrations enable execution at the right moments via the right touchpoints. The results continuously refine future outreach in an iterative process that shifts the industry from static campaign planning to a highly efficient, agile, and results-driven approach.

Optichannel creates efficiency through several mechanisms. By integrating granular audience, platform, and clinical data, you can achieve precise campaign targeting and delivery that reduces irrelevant communications, trims spend on platforms that won’t reach the audience, and enhances the impact of each interaction.

With live data feeds, dynamic measurement also helps identify what's working rapidly and enables agile optimization now, versus spend adjustments months later as in traditional media buying cycles.

Optimizing across the product lifecycle

Optichannel strategies bridge personal and nonpersonal efforts from early pre-launch planning through brand growth, enabling a balance between touchpoint quality and frequency as well as cross-functional coordination.

As a product approaches launch, optichannel enables a more successful, precise, and efficient market debut. RWD helps identify patients and their treating HCPs to reach with disease state-related educational messaging, even without an ICD code—key advantages in therapeutics with small target audiences. Optichannel can drive efficient Medical Affairs programs to audiences on the platforms they’re most likely to engage with to establish unmet needs, extend the reach of publications, personalize learning experiences, and equip field teams with insights to support HCP engagement.

Marketing teams can deploy personalized HCP and DTC awareness campaigns precisely to both prime the market and gather audience insights before launch, using data to maximize the value of every dollar invested in this critical window.

As commercial teams take the lead at launch, RWD-triggered branded media can engage HCPs more effectively on their go-to channels (across digital, field, and peer-to-peer). This can dramatically boost results compared to traditional ‘always-on’ campaigns. One recent optichannel launch campaign used complex trigger rules to help a first-to-market brand team align with sales, engage in the right moments before treatment decisions, and deliver more than triple the expected revenue in year one compared to analyst forecasts.

For established brands, RWD-driven optichannel strategies are a highly-cost effective solution for sustaining growth, avoiding plateaus, supporting label expansions, and defending market share. A mature brand in a competitive indication that transitioned from an always-on model to a trigger-based optichannel campaign successfully cut their media spend by 35% YoY while growing engagement and increasing market share by 3%.

A new strategic imperative

The future of pharma customer engagement is undeniably data-driven. By embracing optichannel strategies, marketers, medical affairs, and other leaders can achieve substantial ROI including educational impacts and measurable script lift. This transforms outreach from a reactive, ‘spray-and-pray’ approach into a proactive model that is timely, useful, and respectful of HCPs' and patients' time to foster deeper, more meaningful, and more impactful interactions.