Below, you'll find a great article to share with your direct medical clients, from dentists to psychologists and new practices. Philip Jay LeNoble, PhD

COMMENTARY

Nurx Looks Beyond The TeleHealth Boom

• by Steve Smith , Staff Writer @popeyesm, 3 hours ago

How much of the digital business surge this year is the result of temporary lockdown culture and how much is attributable to your native marketing genius? Granted, this is a first world problem, but many marketers are starting to think about how best to retain the business that dropped in their lap since March. The path back to real life interaction is unpredictable in most categories, but is especially acute for the telemedicine sector where the hands-on doctor/patient experience is as old as Hippocrates and the days when Shamans made cave calls. Nurx CMO Katelyn Watson has been thinking ahead and is already calibrating her media buys and content with the expectation the wave of telehealth activity will ebb and diffuse eventually. Nurx is a vertical telehealth provider, offering patients online connections with their own doctors as well as prescriptions, ordering, delivery and follow-up. She is a veteran of startup marketing, with previous marketing roles at IfOnly and Kabbage. You can listen to the entire podcast here.

MediaPost:  But there are a number of players in the space. What key value propositions does Nurx bring to market, and how do you really differentiate yourself? 

Katelyn Watson: A couple different ways. So we're really end-to-end health care, primarily for women. We’re very female-centric. And we focus on the full journey of healthcare. You get to chat with our providers, getting your prescription, if appropriate, getting that delivered in very discreet packaging directly to your home, processing your insurance as well. And then being there for you when you have questions, whether it's migraines or birth control or testing. A lot of people will have side effects or questions after they get their medication and they're able to come back to our providers for an entire year to ask any types of questions.

MP: Is that highly verticalized structure the direction telemedicine brands are taking? Convenience-directed? 

Watson: We make it a point to accept insurance for all of our services. Just within the last couple of years we've added testing, herpes treatment, migraine treatment within the last two months. And we accept insurance for all of these services, which is highly complicated but very important to us as being a real healthcare company. So that is a core differentiator. And I think a lot of companies want to do that, but it is very time, resource, policy, legal, etc. the list goes on, intensive. That's why a lot of companies have chosen to go cash only. So I think that going cash only is empowering as well because getting to scale and keeping cash prices low is important. But the reality is that patients who have insurance, want to use it. 

MP: Since you mentioned performance marketing, are you following the typical DTC playbook, or are you leaning into different channels? 

Watson: We've been surprised by some channels that are a little more app based. We aren't necessarily app-first. But some people like to make their requests through the app and do their chatting through the app. So we've seen some of the app acquisition-based channels perform better than they have, for me at least in other different types of retail and other companies. We've leaned into TV pretty heavily, a combination of linear, as well as OTT. That really ramped during the pandemic. We had the perfect storm of really cheap media, customers that were kind of ready to go, and people were also paying attention. So TV kind of came in as a bigger channel for us during the pandemic and has continued throughout. 

We're starting to go into more conditions- based areas like migraines. Birth control is sort of relevant to most women within a certain age group. So we can use performance marketing or actually go into pretty untargeted media and do pretty well in those areas with optimizing creative and all of that. But some of the newer channels that are more focused on conditions really bring in the data aspects of people who've said they have a certain condition. But also things like herpes, things like migraines, areas that are very community based. So I won't specifically call out the channels, but different channels where people are asking questions and going back and forth within a community about their conditions are areas that we've been experimenting with that maybe didn't work as well for broader base subjects. Once the subject matter gets a little tighter on a specific condition, it has a lot more promise