Thirty Madison, a virtual-first healthcare company—with brands Keeps, Nurx, Cove and Facet—supports its patients’ lifelong health conditions through an innovative care model that’s personalized, affordable, and accessible. They have treated over one million patients to date, with care offerings across more than 20 chronic conditions, and a team-based care approach provided by affiliated medical groups of specialized clinicians and medical advisors. Thirty Madison has built beloved brands through an emphasis on high-quality care, patient-first decision-making, and smart and personalized patient experiences. 

Lead-to-Conversion Stalls: Marketing Seeks New Communications Lifeline

As a virtual-first company, Thirty Madison aims to optimize the digital, end-to-end patient experience to reach more new patients they can help and support in their health journeys. This often entails a new patient completing a consultation, connecting with a medical physician, and then receiving ongoing care and support. Thirty Madison saw potential in improving the patient journey and recognized that achieving an exceptionally tailored experience required rethinking engagement from a new angle.

Bringing SMS Into the Mix

First, they aimed to establish a more direct and personalized approach to engage with their leads, aiming to enhance overall acquisition. SMS was the ideal channel—with click rates typically 6-8X higher than email. However, when SMS opt-in was initially introduced at the end of the patient intake process, the second challenge was that only 6% of leads subscribed to the SMS channel. Thirty Madison hypothesized that if they could get more leads to opt-in to SMS, and then deliver personalized SMS and email communications in their patient journeys, conversions would increase.

By using Iterable—a solution that unlocks and maximizes cross-channel marketing for all of Thirty Madison’s brands—they saw stronger conversion and retention rates and higher revenue and, more importantly, a better patient experience. With a full suite of SMS tools native to Iterable, Thirty Madison is able to engage patients at the right moment, across a broad range of use cases—from lead-to-purchase to payment failure—in complete lockstep with email. And, with a multitude of AI and experimentation features as well as the ability to send deeply personalized cross-channel messages, they can now reach consumers on the right channel to forge stronger connections between health providers and patients.

Better First Impressions, Conversion Rates, and Revenue With Iterable’s A/B Testing, Cross-Channel Capabilities

Creating an account with a Thirty Madison brand involves an intake process where a patient completes a clinical consultation by answering questions about their lifestyle and medical history before a provider can review and recommend the most medically appropriate treatment. With some patients failing to complete this intake process, Thirty Madison’s marketing team hoped that by offering SMS opt-in earlier in this process, more people would ultimately complete the consultation. Thirty Madison also saw that they could leverage SMS communications to encourage completion of the intake for a treatment request and ongoing treatment.

To verify the impact of SMS communications, Thirty Madison used Iterable’s experiments to perform fast, comprehensive A/B testing where 50% of leads who opted in for SMS received a message in the lead-to-purchase flow and 50% of leads who opted in for SMS didn’t. 

It was quick, easy testing, thanks to Iterable, and Thirty Madison’s marketing team felt reassured that the right messages were sent at the right time, and on the best channels. The results of their tests were:

• By shifting the SMS opt-in step to an earlier stage in the sign-up process, SMS opt-in rate increased. Consequently, more potential patients began receiving crucial updates, thereby enhancing their experience with Thirty Madison brands.
• Among those leads who opted-in to SMS, more than 50% were more likely to complete their intake form when compared to holdouts who didn’t receive SMS. This streamlined process enabled them to promptly commence the care they required from Thirty Madison, simplifying and expediting their patient journey.
• When adding SMS to the patient purchase experience—which includes potential patients who have completed their intake form, the consultation completion rate grew double digits allowing Thirty Madison to facilitate the necessary treatment to their patients faster. 

Now, SMS opt-in appears early in the patient intake process for all Thirty Madison brands, and their marketing team uses cross-channel communications in other journeys as well.

AI-Powered Features Enable Worry-Free Patient Outreach

Thirty Madison uses Iterable’s AI Suite, which includes Send Time Optimization (STO)—a feature that applies machine learning to analyze historical engagement behavior and select an optimal, per-person send time for communications. STO, combined with custom event exit rules–which automatically remove users from a journey after they’ve completed a desired action or one of their user attribute changes—ensures that no patient will receive irrelevant messages or simultaneous emails or SMS when they’re in multiple journeys.

Lauren Gonzalez, Senior Manager, Lifecycle Marketing at Thirty Madison,  shared how using STO “is a great way to have an improved patient experience as a brand. We used STO in transactional communications to ensure patients are receiving communications at times that are most convenient to enhance their interactions with our brands and take any necessary actions within their treatment plans (and, as a result, most likely to drive the highest engagement).” By using STO they saw a nearly 30% increase in open rate and a 7% lift in click-through-rate.

Another Iterable AI feature, Copy Assist, enhances and expedites campaign copy. “It’s personally my favorite feature; it reduces time for our team to make copy edits and helps identify ways to test copy based on real engagement learnings. There’s a direct relation to patient retention—it’s a win-win for everyone,” explained Lauren. Marketing knows that suggested copy for email subject lines or pre-headers and SMS messages is now informed by and accounts for performance data, too.

Tips to Experience Healthier Business and Marketing Results

With the outcomes achieved through its partnership with Iterable—improved communications, engagement, retention, revenue, time savings, and more—Thirty Madison is able to deliver a better experience to its patients. Based on personal experience, Lauren shared these three recommendations for other marketers:

• Consider the holistic patient experience when introducing a new communication channel.
• Combine email and SMS to maximize strategic communication at optimal moments and harness interest and engagement from existing patients and leads.
• Continue to optimize marketing efforts by conducting A/B tests on both content and communication frequency to boost email conversion rates, all while harnessing AI-driven tools that benefit your lifecycle marketing strategy, patient experience, and business outcomes.