Coloplast boosts customer engagement and retention with Oracle Cloud

Coloplast A/S, founded 1957 in Denmark and operating globally with about 14,000 employees, is a world leader in developing products and services that make life easier for people with intimate healthcare needs. The company’s five business areas include ostomy care, continence care, wound and skin care, and interventional urology, and voice & respiratory care.

To design the best products, Coloplast has always been focused on listening to users’ needs, their struggles, and their successes. This curiosity and in-depth knowledge also powered the development of a service program called Coloplast Care. The program was designed to address users’ key issues and concerns. Also, the company recognized that many users were not treating their medical conditions optimally, due to lack of training and product information, leading them to deviate from optimal care and changing routines.

Because the company operates in 41 countries and sells its products in 139 countries, Coloplast needed to deploy a global master service program in multiple languages that could scale worldwide as quickly as possible. The company also has sales and manufacturing subsidiaries in more than 50 countries and a presence in more than 80 countries through distributors.

A critical driver was to ensure integration with key systems used by Coloplast, including customer relationship management systems like Salesforce and Oracle Siebel CRM. The global program would have to be flexible, scalable, simple to roll out, and easy to maintain in order to accomplish the core objective—to drive value by engaging with existing users.

An Oracle Eloqua Marketing Automation user since 2014, Coloplast has consistently implemented marketing automation to achieve engagement levels well above healthcare industry averages. It has also created personalized programs to support ostomy and catheter users.

“Oracle Eloqua has allowed us to implement a one-stop solution for our end users with the opportunity to make a real difference in people’s lives. This way, we are much closer to our users, we are up-to-date on their situation, and we can deliver personalized support. And as a bonus, we were able to increase internal efficiency, which led to better service and increased chances of retention,” says Tine Jensen, senior consumer engagement manager for consumer sales.

Using Oracle Eloqua Marketing Automation, the company built a trusting relationship with every user through the service program. As a result, users are in close dialog with Coloplast on their condition and health, and how to live life with an intimate condition. They are always offered the latest products that best suit their needs, along with instruction on how to use them. Essentially, the company helps users achieve better health outcomes and manage their medical conditions in the best possible way. Coloplast Care delivered high program engagement.

The program used multiple communication channels, including email, web, direct mail, and phone to engage with existing customers. More than 500,000 users subscribed to Coloplast Care, with tens of thousands more joining every month. The best-performing emails were opened by more than half of recipients, and the company reduced the unsubscribe rate to less than 0,5%.

Oracle Eloqua, part of the Oracle Advertising and Customer Experience suite of applications, provided actionable, data-driven insights for optimizing the campaign. Coloplast retained users by providing service and support to thousands of users through Coloplast Care and gained an excellent global satisfaction score of 93%. Overall, the company delivered a personalized experience that transcended the boundaries of marketing to become part of the standard care for the treatment of intimate medical conditions.

Based on the success of Coloplast Care, the company launched a Promotional Engagement Program (PEP) to build a trusting relationship with every user in the database. It allowed the company to ensure that people are using the products that fit their body and needs through tailored product recommendations.

Using Oracle Eloqua, the PEP campaign’s personalized email communication turned out to be one of Coloplast’s best-performing digital channels, with high opening, click-through rates, and conversion rates. With PEP, Coloplast delivered more than 1.8 million emails with an average unique open rate of 34%, a unique click-through rate of nearly 10%, and thousands of product samples sent to users.