Marketers are under increasing pressure to reach high-value audiences in trusted environments that extend beyond the limitations of web display.
High-performing channels, such as eNewsletters, can help meet this need. eNewsletters deliver premium content in a medium that endures as other channels and platforms evolve. In healthcare especially, newsletters offer a direct line to your audience that feels personal, informative, and credible. This helps build trust and brand awareness—all while driving traffic to your website.
eNewsletters provide a powerful way for health brands to advertise. Targeting healthcare professionals (HCPs) through endemic eNewsletter advertisements can provide healthcare brands with a way to advertise in a place where HCPs are present to learn about information related to their jobs.
Despite the benefits eNewsletters provide, publishers lack access or creative flexibility to support the activation of this channel programmatically. To ensure engagement and performance, pharmaceutical marketers must have access to trusted, clinically content-rich newsletters where HCPs are actively engaged. Equally important is choosing a platform that not only vets publisher credibility but also enables seamless advertisement activation across multiple premium eNewsletter environments at scale. Let’s explore what eNewsletters are, the benefits and ways of executing advertising well, and what to look for in the right platform partner to optimize outcomes.
What is Email Advertising for Healthcare?
Email is often considered an owned marketing channel, where brands send text-based content to their existing customer relationship management database. However, email advertising is a little different.
Email advertising is a paid advertising method that allows marketers to reach and engage target audiences, either in addition to or outside of their existing contact lists. In the healthcare space, marketers can access premium ad inventory in well-regarded publisher newsletters, such as Healio, Haymarket, and MDLinx, and target new and existing HCPs in trustworthy environments that command attention. Targeting HCPs through healthcare eNewsletters allows marketers to share valuable information and promote new treatments.
Of critical importance in HCP eNewsletter advertising is ensuring that the ad inventory within the newsletter itself is of high quality. This requires access to endemic eNewsletter inventory—content specifically relevant to your audience. Tapping into an endemic media network ensures that your advertising message aligns with the existing interests of your target users and the context in which they encounter your ads.
Benefits of Using eNewsletter Advertising for Health Campaigns
In an industry marked by complex compliance standards, HCP eNewsletter advertising offers a trusted, opt-in communication channel. There are several additional benefits to targeting HCPs through healthcare email newsletters with premium advertising:
- Enhancing Direct Communication: HCP eNewsletter advertising provides a direct means of communication with your target audience, enabling personal and informative interactions that foster trust and strengthen relationships.
- Increasing Website Traffic: Health marketers can utilize e-newsletters to share new services, health tips, and events, along with calls to action that drive traffic to their website or healthcare facility.
- Providing Consistency: Email is here to stay. Other media channels are beholden to platform changes or consumers’ evolving preferences. eNewsletters, on the other hand, not only provide a consistent communication channel but can be scaled to reach a wider audience.
- Measuring Immediate Impact: HCP e-newsletter advertising is generally a cost-effective way to reach a large audience, and you can track key metric click-through rates to measure success.
- Enabling Omnichannel Alignment: eNewsletters can extend reach to relevant HCPs beyond display advertising, social media, connected TV, and other programmatic channels. As a channel with high interaction and engagement, email integrates well with different channels and can be positioned across touchpoints in the digital health environment.
- Lowering Saturation: HCP e-newsletter advertising is an environment that is less crowded than other channels, allowing ads to stand out more effectively.
- Relying on First-Party Data: Although third-party cookies are likely to remain in place for now, first-party data remains a critical gold mine for health advertisers. Email addresses serve as the identifier for HCP e-newsletter advertising, enabling pharma brands to expand their first-party healthcare data footprint.
Ways to Buy HCP e-newsletter Advertising
As with any type of paid media, there are several ways to purchase HCP e-newsletter advertising. Each has its pros and cons. What’s important is to consider an HCP e-newsletter advertising provider that can access premium media-buying methods so health brands can run their ads on premium inventory.
An open exchange is a public media-buying auction, where any advertiser can bid on any inventory without a direct relationship with a publisher. This approach to media buying is more cost-effective, with lower cost-per-thousand (CPM) rates. However, because the open exchange encompasses any type of ad inventory, it can place your brand in non-premium environments.
Programmatic Guaranteed (PG), on the other hand, is a form of healthcare programmatic marketing that requires a direct relationship, or buy, with a publisher to buy the inventory. Marketers can purchase programmatic endemic advertising through a guaranteed deal, in which the advertiser is promised a set number of impressions over a specified period for a flat, predetermined fee. PG deals typically include more exclusive newsletter inventory at a higher CPM and offer greater control over where ads appear.
Private marketplace (PMP) deals are a form of healthcare programmatic marketing that also involves a direct relationship with a single publisher—except that it’s a one-to-many, not a one-to-one approach to programmatic endemic advertising. PMPs enable a group of health advertisers to compete for a single publisher’s fixed inventory within an exclusive environment. This requires access to healthcare programmatic marketing, which medical publishers provide by directly adding health advertisers to their marketplace. PMP media buying differs from PG in that health advertisers can secure premium inventory more quickly and often at a lower cost.
Curated markets are an evolution of PMPs that provide instant access to scaled, turnkey, pre-negotiated supply strategically assembled to optimize to specific campaign outcomes. Unlike advertiser-sourced PMPs, curated markets contain supply that is sourced, negotiated, and maintained directly between the platform and publisher, eliminating the need for advertisers to negotiate each deal manually.
When it comes to guaranteeing premium eNewsletter content, PMP and curated market deals are the way to go. Securing premium inventory and placing ads alongside endemic content can significantly impact the success of a digital advertising campaign. Premium inventory ensures that ads are seen in a quality environment, reducing the risk of brand safety issues and increasing the likelihood of reaching a more engaged audience. Both ways of media buying require assistance from the right partners who have direct relationships with supply-side platforms or premium publishers.
Programmatic Access to Premium Endemic e-Newsletters with PulsePoint
PulsePoint recently enhanced how to run programmatic ads in healthcare newsletters on its platform. By expanding our market-leading endemic media network to include programmatic healthcare newsletter advertising, health brands can now simplify their engagement with a verified HCP audience in trusted content environments.
Healthcare marketers can now consolidate endemic newsletter inventory in display and eNewsletter buys, running them programmatically with advanced audience targeting, creative personalization, frequency controls, and synchronized messaging. This new capability for programmatically adding display ads to direct endemic healthcare newsletters integrates directly into PulsePoint’s infrastructure for omnichannel healthcare campaigns, ensuring brands can reach a verified HCP audience across the digital health environment. Benefits of programmatic endemic e-newsletter buying through PulsePoint include:
- Direct endemic health publisher integrations that include private marketplace (PMP) and curated market access, giving advertisers premium inventory prioritization and consistent brand-safe delivery
- Extension to omnichannel healthcare campaigns across display, native, online video, social, electronic health records (EHR), CTV/OTT, audio, and now inbox
- Exclusive programmatic access to Medscape eNewsletter ads—the largest HCP destination in the U.S.— which offers unmatched programmatic endemic advertising scale and quality
Want to learn more about how to activate programmatic endemic advertising in eNewsletters? Get in touch with us today.
