We interviewed Maikel van Kampen, Head of Digital Engagement, to find out how Novartis Netherlands reaches higher conversions and understands their visitors' needs better with giosg solutions. In this article, we cover how the giosg platform adds flexibility to the Novartis website – a great advantage for larger organisations that are centrally managed.
About Novartis
Novartis is one of the largest pharmaceutical manufacturers in the world that produces medications for different diseases. Its headquarters is in Basel, Switzerland, and it has an office in every mid to large-sized country it operates in.
Maikel van Kampen leads the Digital Engagement team that is responsible for the digital engagement strategy and execution for Novartis Netherlands. The organization's online marketing experts support the brand teams with optimising and executing the brand marketing plan and reaching marketing objectives.
"It’s sometimes challenging to work in a larger organisation where systems are centrally managed. This is a reason why we looked into giosg’s solution. One of our core tasks is to focus on how we can increase the engagement with healthcare professionals.”
Maikel van Kampen, Head of Digital Engagement, Novartis
Background
Novartis wanted to improve online communication, reach and engagement with its core target audience: healthcare professionals. To better serve its target audience, Novartis launched new engagement channels to share information about new studies, medications, educational events, and patient support.
Understanding the customers' needs and providing them with the right information at the right time is crucial. Novartis wanted to further optimise and add interactive elements to its website to take another step forward in its digital transformation.
Novartis' most important new engagement channel is the HCP portal, a website dedicated to healthcare professionals. The implementation of giosg offered Novartis Netherlands more flexibility and freedom on top of their centrally (HQ) managed website.
The Challenge
The Pharma industry is heavily regulated, and therefore many businesses are not at the forefront when it comes to innovation. These regulations mandate that in some cases, Novartis needs to validate whether the visitor is a healthcare professional or not.
Healthcare professionals are Novartis' most important target group, but they are very hard to reach. The main priority for Novartis' Digital Engagement team is to reach healthcare professionals and engage with them through online channels. There is a strong need to get the attention of healthcare professionals and share relevant messages that help serve them better.
“The pharma and healthcare industry was lacking innovation and digital marketing if you compare it to other industries.
When I started at Novartis 6 years ago, we did not have a website with relevant information for healthcare professionals. The challenge we had was to reach them at the right moment, share the right information and then, of course, have the highest impact.”
Products & Services
Giosg Interaction Builder fit Novartis' requirements and needs perfectly. The team was able to put an extra layer on top of the Novartis' website to add relevant pop-ups that would activate at the right time and for the right visitor. Maikel says that it was relatively easy to set up; the script just needed to be implemented to put the interactions live on their website. After that, they had it up and running. “That was definitely an advantage”, he adds.
“We can do a lot of things with Interaction Builder which is really cool from my perspective. We can trigger pop-ups when a visitor is on the site. We also use it a lot to show a pop-up when someone clicks on an element on the page, for example, a CTA button.”
Thanks to the giosg solution, Novartis has more flexibility and freedom to focus on conversions and attracting healthcare professionals. Since giosg comes with Salesforce integration, Novartis can also collect and store valuable healthcare professional data easily.
From the start, the Digital Engagement team wanted to use the giosg platform internally, meaning they did not want to rely on the giosg support team. After some testing, Maikel and his team felt that the right approach would be to let giosg’s creative designers and UX team create the interactions for them. This way the results would be as innovative, responsive and visually pleasing as possible.
The Results & Key Factors
Maikel says that user experience has seen the biggest improvement after Novartis implemented the giosg platform. The organization has improved the user experience with giosg on all devices. Giosg drives up the quality and the conversions on tablet, mobile, and desktop.
To give a more concrete example, he explains; “We have a webshop on our website, but it’s quite overwhelming to browse through the entire webshop and select the right items. It is a lot of going back and forth. We really wanted to improve the user experience and offer a more user-friendly way of ordering a selection of materials.”
He continues: “To make it more simple, we created a webshop pop-up with only six or seven items that we believe are most relevant for HCPs. With a single click, HCPs immediately have an overview of these materials. The HCP can simply select the amount of each item that they would like to order, while in the webshop – it would be more complex to order those kinds of materials. It could also mean that the visitor might exit during the whole process”.
Christian Lelo, Customer Engagement Manager at giosg is working regularly with Maikel and the Digital Engagement team at Novartis to support them and create value in the best way possible. The Novartis team has been happy with the outcome. Here are some of the results for the calendar and event interactions Novartis has on its website:
The Collaboration
Giosg’s Customer Engagement team has played a big role in supporting Novartis. They provide fast and excellent support, Maikel says.
“They have done really well. I think they are fast. They deliver, and I am happy with the designs. I’m impressed with what they do with the limited input they receive and deliver what is needed to meet our brand guidelines. Throughout all applications, it’s handled really well. Giosg has the right people in the right place in their organisation. Sometimes we get help from Chris and sometimes it’s one of his colleagues, but in the end, it always gets solved. I am happy with the support we are getting.”
“I immediately saw the flexibility that giosg’s solution could give my team and our marketers. I thought it would add value on top of our current website and really increase insights and the number of conversions."
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