SUMMARY: Searching for online health information has become more complicated and is often wrought with bad health information. Pharma product websites need to evolve and become a credible source of inline health information for people who are often lost in bad information online.

Pharma product websites have always had one objective: get the website visitor to ask their doctor for an Rx. Today, that isn’t viable as it turns off online health seekers.

Most pharma websites have an unusually high bounce rate indicating that website visitors are turned off by homepages that look like ads from medical journals. To get closer to online health seekers, pharma product websites need to shift their thinking to engagement, a word that pharma pretty much has ignored.

What is the ROI of Engagement?

The key to getting pharma people onboard with enagement is to prove it helps the bottom line. Tying customer-focused initiatives to money and statistics show a better story than anecdotal proof. The ROI of enagement is actually quite staggering. Consider this:

• Customer-centric companies are 60% more profitable than companies that don’t focus on customers.
• Brands with superior customer experience bring in 5.7 times more revenue than competitors that lag in customer experience.
• 84% of companies that work to improve their customer experience report an increase in their revenue.

But Rich, we can’t compare pharma websites to CPG websites. That’s a false assumption. The philosophy of “our website is to generate a new Rx” is dated. Today your online interaction is part of your companies brand. A brand that doesn’t care about its patients can see those patients go to a competition.

I am starting with increased frequency is that online health seekers are helping each other by sharing resources for credible health information. Don’t you want to be part of that conversation?

But what does that mean?

1ne: Rethink your product website to balance health information with product information. Make your brand the “go-to” site for updated health information.

2wo: P L E A S E get someone to write content for your website so that it talks to visitors rather than selling them. Think of content as talking to someone with an 8th-grade education about your product/brand.

3hree: Delete pages that aren’t being read and experiment with pages with content your audience wants to read. It’s about them, not you.

4our: Redesign processes to speed content delivery to your website. Talking about something that was of interest to your audience two weeks ago doesn’t cut it today.

5ive: Make it easy for your audience to share your website content.

6ix: Address topics that may not be product related such as using certain prescription medications during the pandemic.

It’s time to rethink how we view online health seekers beyond just the standard template for pharma websites.