Perceptions

Email's decentralized nature has allowed it to evolve and address market and user demands. What was once a basic communication platform is now a universal ecosystem. Other than "don't send an email to everyone you possibly can," not all email marketing rules have been written yet. With particular consumers and massive amounts of data, email marketers can write the new rules.

CEO of ITR Research, Brian Beaulieu, aggregated a compelling case during the winter Vision Council meeting that suggests that focusing on “Marketing to Millennials” represents a misallocation of scarce marketing resources. Although some of Mr. Beaulieu's figures are hard to dispute, the potential to earn the loyalty of Millennials, in my opinion, is worth the investment.

Do the docs really drive and shape purchases as emphatically as conventional wisdom claims? Last summer, we put the “doctor first” marketing paradigm to the test by asking ophthalmic staff how purchasing worked in their offices for equipment, software, pharmaceuticals, and “disposables.”

Sponsored webinars emerged in 2015 as a mainstream marketing tool as a means of reaching national engaged and qualified audiences. Marketers, particularly in the vision care industry, have begun to identify and grasp the inherent broad reach and efficiency that a well-managed event delivers. Evidence of this came when PentaVision doubled its number of webinar productions for the third consecutive year in 2015. At roughly the same cost associated with producing one local live seminar, a webinar delivers both content marketing and lead generation programs with polling, surveying, question-and-answer session, post-event archiving, and advertising to national audiences. This trend of burgeoning sponsored webinars illustrates that this marketing tool's time has come.