The State of Customer Engagement in Healthcare

From therapist practices to fitness studios, companies across the health and wellness space have embraced the pivot to virtual visits and services. With no sign that the red-hot demand for digital-first experiences is going to diminish any time soon, pioneering brands in the industry are realizing that adapting to this new "business as usual" will require investing in a strategic approach to long-term customer engagement to bridge the experience between visits, appointments, and sessions—that is, an approach that's optimized for the modern end-to-end customer journey and built leveraging the powerful combination of personalized experiences and cohesive, cross-channel messaging.

The burden of bringing this new seamless digital customer experience to life falls squarely on marketing and customer engagement teams and their cross-functional partners. It's a big responsibility, but you're not alone. Countless other brands are in the same position, looking to achieve success.

That's why we've put together a new annual report, a first of its kind, all about the state of customer engagement in 2021. The Global Customer Engagement Review is here to guide you with insights about what industry leaders believe will be the top priorities and challenges for the year ahead and offers concrete steps you can take right now to increase customer engagement, lifetime value, and retention.

Here you will find some of the most important highlights from the Customer Engagement Review about the state of customer engagement, specifically within the healthcare industry.

Customer Engagement Benchmarks and Priorities for Healthcare Brands in 2021

Despite the race to embrace digital experiences, most health and wellness brands (71%) are worried their engagement metrics don't translate to business outcomes, according to a 2020 survey of 1,300 VP+ marketing executives conducted by Wakefield Research on behalf of Braze as part of the 2021 Global Customer Engagement Review. Another key challenge healthcare companies are focused on this year? Standing out in an oversaturated market.

The majority of leaders surveyed (51%) reported that they use customer satisfaction as a success metric. Our analysis found that when these brands invest in customer engagement strategies, such as cross-channel messaging, they can see major gains in terms of sessions per user, monetization and customer lifetime value (LTV), and retention.

Top Customer Engagement Opportunities for Healthcare Brands

#1: Increase app use and in-app conversions

In an increasingly mobile-first world, the healthcare sector is lagging behind average engagement benchmarks across all industries for two key types of conversions: App usage and completed purchases. At 21.85% and 2.29% respectively, health and wellness brands trail significantly behind the overall average performance for these metrics, which are 26.29% and 5.72%, respectively.

For healthcare brands that want to encourage new app conversions, website banners, emails, and in-browser messages can be used in concert to build out effective app download messaging campaigns. And to encourage current and new app users to go from installing your app to fully taking advantage of it, our guide Go From Browsing To Conversions With In-App Messages offers tactics that work.

#2: Add more channels to the messaging mix

Given that 71% of healthcare brands are concerned about tying their engagement metrics to business outcomes, adding more channels to the messaging mix—such as by expanding from emailing and texting customers to adding push notifications to the mix—presents an opportunity to not only meet and engage customers at scale but to drive purchases, repeat buyers, and average lifetime. In fact, our research shows that customers who received cross-channel messaging that included both in-product (e.g. in-app messages) and out-of-product (e.g. email) messages saw 94% higher customer lifetime value than customers who received messages in any two messaging channels.

How Braze Helps Healthcare Brands Deliver Best-in-Class Customer Engagement

Braze has teamed up with innovative health brands like HelpAround, PlushCare, and more to advance their personalized lifecycle marketing campaigns and cross-channel messaging to improve their retention rates, app engagement rates, email marketing performance, and other critical customer engagement KPIs.

Grab your copy of the full 2021 Global Customer Engagement Review to see first hand how Braze has partnered with international wellness leader Headspace and other top brands to generate growth across key measures of LTV, retention, revenue, brand awareness and social reach, and more.