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5 Healthcare Marketing Trends for 2024

Tuesday, January 2nd, 2024

Happy New Year! A new year brings new challenges and opportunities for marketers to take their strategy to the next level. Here are some healthcare marketing trends you should consider adopting to prosper in 2024.

 

healthcare marketing trends

Email Deliverability 

Thanks to Google and Yahoo, significant changes are coming for email marketers in the first quarter of 2024. As we’ve previously written about, Google and Yahoo are implementing new requirements for bulk email senders that will involve a lot of coordination and effort for marketers. Beyond the initial implementation of technical requirements like SPF, DKIM, and DMARC records, marketers must pay close attention to their spam rates in the future. Keeping your spam reports below 0.3% will be essential to ensure that Google and Yahoo aren’t blacklisting your emails. Marketers must keep their email lists clean, craft relevant campaigns, and use technology to remove unengaged contacts promptly. Over two billion people use Google or Yahoo as their email provider, so adopting these standards is not optional.

 

Artificial Intelligence

Healthcare marketers are also looking at ways to use artificial intelligence to save time and automate processes. 2023 was filled with experimentation with tools like ChatGPT, DALL-E, and Midjourney. Now, marketers are seriously evaluating tools that can assist with business processes like copywriting, graphic design, data analysis, and other functions.

 

However, it’s essential to carefully vet any artificial intelligence tool if you plan to use it in your marketing efforts. What data sets is it trained on? Are they biased? Some tools introduce legal compliance risks, and it’s essential to understand the risks thoroughly.

 

Trust is essential in healthcare marketing, and relying too heavily on AI tools can create a negative patient experience. AI tools should not replace marketers. At best, these tools can help marketers complete their work. Guardrails are required when it comes to AI tools, and healthcare marketers should be cautious to ensure their brands are well-represented by the output of these tools.

 

Automation and APIs

Another way to save time and measure results is using APIs and automation. Many marketers are turning to automation tactics to streamline operations in the face of increasing budgetary pressure. Advanced email marketers can use email APIs to trigger email campaigns when specific criteria are met and use dynamic content to personalize the email content. These tactics make email marketing scalable and ensure your audience receives the proper communications at the right time. 

 

APIs can also be used to organize the results of your marketing efforts. Email APIs can deliver data about your campaigns (delivery status, open and clicks, unsubscribes, etc.) back into your marketing dashboards and databases. This is a way to help you make informed decisions and improve your marketing results. Expect to see more marketers embrace automation alongside AI tools this year. 

 

Personalization

Personalization continues to be extremely important to successful healthcare marketing efforts. This is a challenge for healthcare providers because they must comply with HIPAA regulations in their email communications. Luckily, with the right tools and patient permission, it’s possible to personalize emails to create relevant campaigns. When healthcare marketers have access to zero-party patient data and the right tools to execute, they can go beyond practice newsletters to create email campaigns that deliver results.

 

One bonus personalization tip- create culturally competent emails and use the patient’s preferred language. Healthcare communications should not leave anyone behind. With the right tools, it’s easier than ever to segment your audience based on their language preferences and create alternate content that resonates. 

 

Proving Impact and Delivering ROI

Healthcare providers continue to face a challenging economic situation and may be forced to cut marketing budgets. Although some advertising channels may be forced to take a hiatus, email marketing should not be one of them. Not only do patients want to receive marketing communications via email, but email marketing also delivers one of the best returns on investment compared to other channels.

 

However, the way we track and measure the impact of marketing campaigns must also change. In 2024, open rates are unreliable indicators of marketing success. Apple Mail’s privacy features and the increasing prevalence of email filtering and spam tools mean that marketers will need to rely on different metrics to judge the success of their campaigns. Tracking the clicks and what actions users take in other channels after receiving the email is crucial to understanding the effectiveness of your campaigns. Also, keeping email lists clean and removing unsubscribed and inactive users is more important than ever to keep your IP addresses from being throttled. 

 

What tactics will you be testing out in 2024?

AI Threats to Email Security

Tuesday, October 17th, 2023

Artificial intelligence is a buzzy topic in the tech industry right now. Many experts are looking to AI to help solve some of the complex challenges of our times. However, besides this technology’s helpful and practical applications, there are some concerns that AI can be used for malicious purposes. In this article, we review some of the top threats to email security posed by AI and what you can do to prevent them.

person using ai tool

AI Threats to Email Security

In general, the biggest threat artificial intelligence poses to email is the ability to easily scale and increase the effectiveness of existing threats. The power of AI can be used to craft more effective phishing and business email compromise attacks and potentially cost businesses billions of dollars. Let’s review how artificial intelligence can increase the success of these types of cyberattacks.

AI and Phishing Attacks

In today’s world, phishing emails are often easy to identify. They are typically launched by criminals outside of the United States and use poor grammar, contain misspellings, or are poorly formatted in other ways. As a result, they are straightforward for the average email user to avoid. Artificial intelligence can help correct some of these common errors and make it easier for cybercriminals to create more convincing emails. As a result, we could see more phishing attacks succeed, wreaking havoc on our online security.

Let’s look at an example. Say a hacker from Russia wants to launch a ransomware attack on an American hospital. To do so, they need an email recipient to click on a link in the email that will install malware on their computer, enabling the hacker to gain access to restricted systems. The hacker does not speak English but has been able to launch attacks on other systems using an email drafted to resemble a password reset. Previously, he may have taken this email, ran it through an online translator, and then hit send on the email, unaware of any typos or strange translations that made it into the text. With AI, he can craft a much stronger email that will fool a busy hospital administrator into clicking on the link.

Some AI text generators have taken steps to prevent people from entering prompts that directly ask for prewritten phishing emails. However, artificial intelligence makes it incredibly easy to translate text from other languages in a grammatically correct manner. Scammers can create unique messages at scale that are more likely to fool email recipients.

AI and Business Email Compromise

Business email compromise attacks are one of the most effective email security threats. Still, because of the time and research they take to deploy, they don’t garner as much attention as phishing and ransomware. Artificial intelligence can help speed up essential research about a target to craft business email compromise attacks.

Let’s take another example. Say an individual wants to steal from a major corporation. The attacker decides to impersonate a company vendor and fool them into routing payments to the attacker instead of the legitimate contact. Artificial intelligence can reduce the time it takes to identify potential targets and possible attack vectors. Cybercriminals can use AI prompts to identify profitable companies, locate lists of vendors, and even research individuals in the roles that are likely to interact with the target.

AI can also use prompts like “generate an email asking for payment on a business invoice” to create legitimate seeming business emails. Using these technologies lowers the barriers to executing a successful business email compromise attack, meaning that more cybercriminals will likely attempt them more frequently.

How to Prevent AI Email Attacks

The good news is that the introduction of AI technology has not changed how we fend off these attacks. The first place to start is with policy and training. Business email compromise thefts are easily thwarted by having policies and procedures in place to prevent unusual cash transfers to unauthorized individuals. Ensuring your staff knows the types of threats and raising awareness of the risks can help protect your business.

Secondly, you can implement email filtering technology to help protect your inboxes from emails sent from suspicious sources. Although scammers can craft persuasive messages, they can’t hide their origin. Organizations can use email filtering software to quarantine or stop suspicious messages from reaching employee inboxes. This technology can prevent email domains without SPF or DKIM records from passing through your inboxes, alleviating a common spam tactic.

Conclusion

The threats to email security posed by artificial intelligence are quite serious. Nevertheless, organizations can take steps to protect themselves by implementing the proper defenses. Contact LuxSci today to learn more about our advanced email filtering solutions.