From omnichannel to optichannel: Redefining personalised engagement in life sciences

Life science marketing is changing, and with it our need for personalised engagement strategies. While omnichannel marketing initially appeared to be a solution to keep up with changing consumer expectations and behaviours, cracks soon started to appear. A lack of personalisation often led to healthcare professionals (HCPs) and customers feeling bombarded with information, compromising campaign success.

These problems were exacerbated during COVID-19 when limitations on personal promotion led many companies to use whatever digital channels they could to send materials to HCPs. A lack of communication and coordination led to asset fatigue and HCPs unsubscribing. Today, most HCP engagement still remains unsynchronised across marketing and sales,¹ and most pharma leaders say omnichannel has little to no impact on customer engagement.²

However, the era of omnichannel has taught us a crucial lesson: it is not about the quantity of engagements, but the quality.

This is where optichannel presents new opportunities. It layers in a deep understanding of customer behaviours and preferences to enhance performance and effectiveness on the optimal channels for your audience.

Building quality engagements

To get quality engagements and execute effectively from a channel you need three tools. First and foremost are clinical decision triggers, like data coming from claims or labs. This will help you identify the right HCP to target and the right time to reach them. For example, you may want to target communications before HCPs make a treatment decision, when they are completing an initial diagnosis or when they are testing for a genetic mutation. Triggers can also include behavioural data or predictive models, especially in more complex or second-line indications.

The second tool is affinity data from sources such as email, endemic display, social media, electronic health records (EHRs), and field reps. This will tell you where, when, and with what message to target the HCPs.

Third, you need integrations across a network of data sources and channels. These allow you to deploy in real time, to communicate across channels in real time, to share with sales reps in real time and, finally, to measure in real time.

Real-time updates

Real-time monitoring is a crucial component of effective optichannel strategies. Rather than waiting months or weeks for updates, customer engagement leaders want to understand very quickly what is working and what is not working. Real-time monitoring allows you to identify trends quickly, monitor their impact, and make immediate changes to optimise your media plan.

This responsiveness is critical as it allows us to optimise spending in an era of restricted budgets and an artificial intelligence (AI) revolution. If data is static, rather than dynamic, it might not be valid six months from now. The life sciences industry needs to keep up with changing audience behaviours. Having real-time engagement data at our fingertips allows us to quickly shift budgets and business rules or triggers, so that ultimately we can be proactive instead of reactive.

Bridging historic silos

To be successful, campaigns must bridge the gap between field, sales, and marketing teams. There are two core ways to do this. The first is to make sure you quickly share the real-time data that is being collected with sales reps. Secondly, make sure you train the reps, so they know what the data means and what they are being asked to do with it.

This is an area where we can quantify the value of optichannel versus omnichannel approaches. When we sync data into platforms and share information on engagement or triggers on an hourly basis we can, for example, tell the sales rep that a specific HCP has just clicked on an email or engaged with a banner. The sales rep can then come in and either reinforce that message or send an RTE or discuss the next message and the cadence the HCP needs to hear.

Overcoming budget constraints

Budget constraints are a challenge, and we expect to see continued flattening and even cuts in 2026. There are two ways to tackle this challenge: do more with less, and focus on the quality of engagement, rather than the quantity.

If you are on a tight budget, it’s hard to build the tools needed for proper optichannel orchestration: the robust data ecosystems, the integrations, the infrastructure, the people. Instead of taking that on, find existing tools that can do some of that heavy lifting for you. That applies whether you are at a small biotech and have a limited budget, or you are at a large pharma company and have been told to find efficiencies.

In terms of quality, optichannel marketing is all about finding the optimal channel mix for a specific audience based on real-world, real-time data. That means your message is much more likely to break through the noise when you serve it somewhere where you know a HCP is likely to click and engage. At scale, that leads to cost savings across the board. On average, optichannel approaches lead to 20-30% cost savings compared to traditional, always-on media.

Optichannel can also help to build on the ‘surround sound’ of always-on campaigns. Always-on campaigns help to ensure HCPs know your brand exists. When you bring in the triggers of optichannel, you know a specific HCP has an eligible patient for your brand, allowing you to optimise reach and frequency at those places where you know the HCP is going to engage and when they have a real need for relevant information.

Incorporating artificial intelligence

AI helps to create hyper-personalised journeys and increase return on investment (ROI). The first part of the technical integration is seeing where HCPs are going and where they are engaging. This helps to aggregate large datasets into HCP affinity profiles, which AI then helps us to orchestrate.

For example, we know from affinity data that a specific HCP frequently engages with endemic display ads. Instead of sending that HCP an email as the first contact, I would target them on the optimal endemic display vendor. Then, if their second preference is email, send an email. AI helps us deliver communication in real-time in an orchestrated way and with one-to-one personalisation at scale in ways that have never been achievable in the past.

We also create AI-based banners. This can ingest a brands content and pull out messages that are already MLR approved to put new assets out in a way that meets regulations. The next step will be layering on that AI content piece to affinity data to make sure you can truly diversify that next best message from a creative asset perspective.

Integrating optichannel across customer types

Effective segmentation is key for integrating optichannel across different customer types. Are you looking at different specialists? Are you trying to reach medical doctors or nurse practitioners? Do you need to build lookalike audiences to maintain compliance?

Once you understand the segment you need to understand where audience members are spending their time. Once you identify affinity, look at which channels they are going to, then the vendors they are going to and then, taking it a step further, what content they are most likely to engage with.

Ensuring you tailor the content of messaging to your specific customer type is critical to ensure you are getting that optimal engagement. And if you have dynamic data and feedback loops built into your system, performance data can be fed back in iteratively as it learns about audience members over time based on more engagement.

Optichannel strategies to maximise results across the product life cycle

Optichannel is effective no matter which part of the product life cycle you are in, whether it is launch or a more mature brand. It can be particularly useful at launch, resulting in up to three times predicted revenue for the first-year post launch.

No matter when you are using optichannel, strategy and data remain at its core. It is essential to determine who your audience is, what the optimal channels are, and the specific requirements of your campaign. For example, are you in a second line therapy, which means you need predictive analytics to engage HCPs when a patient is about to progress? Are you in a competitive indication, which means you need to fight for share of voice? Do you need to prime the market for a disease state or testing awareness campaign?

Optichannel goes beyond just omnichannel connection. It ensures you invest in the set of channels that make the most sense for your audience based on not only channel performance, but also the real-time preferences and behaviours of individual customers.

The success of optichannel is based on this hyper personalisation, as it improves customer experience, focuses limited resources, and maximises campaign relevance, efficiency, speed, and ROI.

References

About the author

As an optichannel engagement director at PharmaForceIQ, Saraiyah Hatter partners with biopharma clients to deliver branded and unbranded campaigns that drive strategic, data-driven patient and provider engagement across complex therapeutic areas, including neurology and oncology. Previously, she held consulting roles at EVERSANA and Syneos Health, supporting global life sciences clients in commercial strategy, launch planning, and marketing analytics. Hatter holds a Master of Business and Science in Biotechnology from the Keck Graduate Institute, combining scientific expertise with business intelligence to navigate the evolving healthcare landscape. Beyond her corporate career, Hatter is the founder of a non-profit organisation focused on empowering women and girls from underserved communities, with the goal of creating lasting, equitable impact.