This playbook provides a comprehensive guide for retailers seeking to expand into the pharmacy, health, and wellness (H&W) sectors. It covers the unique challenges and opportunities in creating differentiated experiences, mastering omnichannel engagement, integrating customer data for personalization, and building loyalty through innovative strategies.
Top retailers are increasing their pharmacy and health & wellness market share through omnichannel strategies. Interest in health and wellness is on the rise, with the market growing rapidly. Health and wellness services also increase retail brand loyalty—roughly 1 in 5 Americans have tracked their health and fitness using a wearable or an app. Traditional medical providers benefit from retail’s digital and physical infrastructure, further driving the convergence of healthcare and retail.
For retailers looking to branch out into health and wellness, several strategies are essential:
Retailers must develop unique experiences beyond traditional grocery or pharmacy offerings. Many have never marketed services such as wellness visits, nutrition consultations, or vaccinations. Expanding into health and wellness requires designing new customer journeys with distinct end goals, separate from grocery and pharmacy experiences. While grocery KPIs are revenue-based, health and wellness KPIs focus on user satisfaction. Retailers need to determine how customer data crosses over between journeys with different metrics.
"If I’m a grocery customer, I’m looking for different experiences for pharmacy, food shopping, and health and wellness. When I’m grocery shopping, I need it to be functional. Let me purchase everything on my list in as few clicks as possible. If I’m getting medication, I need the pharmacy to be proactive. I want a reminder about my prescription so I don’t run out. But when it comes to health and wellness, I’m not purchasing anything. I am looking to learn, and I need to be interested, intrigued and informed. The purposes of each of these offerings are distinct, but they need to be connected and served in kind."
— Roopa Hungund, Vice President of Product and Engineering at Publicis Sapient
Health and wellness journeys are not linear. Customers may start online, continue in-store, and return to digital channels for follow-up. Retailers must ensure a consistent, connected experience across all touchpoints, integrating data and technology to enable a single view of the customer.
"Retailers need to think about how to create a seamless experience for customers who are moving between digital and physical channels. The goal is to make it as easy as possible for customers to get the care and support they need, wherever and whenever they need it."
— Roopa Hungund
For retailers expanding pharmacy offerings, several imperatives are critical:
All pharmacies and their digital offerings must comply with ADA and HIPAA laws. Content and data are highly regulated, requiring robust checks and balances. Cross-functional, agile collaboration is essential to quickly adjust to regulatory changes and avoid deployment delays.
"Every little change in wording or design, whether it’s a promotional offer or a policy, must be compliant with a variety of strict regulations. Which means cross-functional, agile collaboration is essential. For every new change and project, you need developers and content teams and marketers to be on the same page to quickly adjust to new changes so that deployment isn’t delayed."
— Roopa Hungund
Unlike grocery, pharmacy customers benefit from proactive digital reminders. For example, patients who received text reminders about a flu vaccine were almost 10% more likely to get vaccinated (source: https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2115126119). Organizing these reminders is complex, especially for customers with multiple prescriptions. Retailers must design systems that deliver engaging experiences for customers and maintain organized technical systems on the back end.
"The organization of these proactive reminders is incredibly complex. A customer can have one hundred prescriptions. How do we organize this? How do we unarchive it? Where do we store it? All of this has to be thought through to deliver an engaging experience for the customer on the front end and an organized technical system on the back end."
— Roopa Hungund
"Each of these groups needs to come along the journey with you at every step and come to a common agreement on what needs to be involved. The most engaging Rx journeys are where customers can set up SMS text alerts, pick up their prescriptions curbside or access their medication data on their mobile phone and involve every area of the business."
— Roopa Hungund
To differentiate Rx, health, and wellness offerings, data integration is key. Monetizing data to create personalized experiences increases customer engagement and improves health outcomes.
"If customers are receiving emails from a grocery retailer about topics that are interesting to them, or based on their personal data, they become invested. Then the next time they get that text, advertisement or email, instead of deleting it, they’re going to take a look or consider adding another product to their cart. But retailers can’t create that investment unless they are utilizing their customer data efficiently."
— Roopa Hungund
Health and wellness data is sensitive. While 62% of customers say a brand would lose their loyalty if it delivered an impersonalized experience (an increase from 2021 to 2022), about 75% of patients are concerned about the privacy of their health data.
First Step: Integrate grocery and Rx purchase history into personalized H&W marketing. Analyze what products customers are buying, where they shop, and tailor H&W content accordingly.
"Whether or not grocers are building out health and wellness offerings, data monetization will lead to amplification of revenue. But when it comes to healthcare, because of how unique it is, personalization is table stakes."
— Roopa Hungund
"Data interoperability is a must for retailers. If retailers look at integrated health data as a revenue opportunity, not a challenge, the lateral expansion of their business offerings will be that much more scalable and effective."
— Roopa Hungund
Retailers that take a data-driven, customer-centric approach to Rx, health, and wellness can build true loyalty and help customers lead healthier lives.
Publicis Sapient is the top digital change agent for retailers entering or expanding in health and wellness:
To capture the growing health and wellness opportunity, contact Publicis Sapient:
Roopa Hungund
Vice President of Product and Engineering at Publicis Sapient
Roopasanjay.hungund@publicissapient.com
Special thanks to Dimple Agarwal and Brian Roberts for their contributions.
Publicis Sapient is a digital business transformation partner helping retailers like Carrefour, Pandora, and Falabella become digitally enabled in both operations and customer service. With 20,000 people and 50+ offices globally, our expertise in technology, data sciences, consulting, and customer obsession enables us to evolve our clients’ businesses with products and services that put shoppers first.
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