From Forbidden to Compliant: Retail Marketing Strategies for Healthcare
Marketers love to draw hard lines between industries—finance is finance, retail is retail, healthcare is healthcare. The playbook from one industry cannot be used for another.
But healthcare customers don’t see those lines. From their point of view, shopping for new clothes can be done from the couch, buying the latest iPhone takes seconds, calling an Uber is effortless—why should finding a doctor or scheduling an appointment be any different?
The pressure from consumers to provide that level of ease has been growing steadily since the pandemic, casting a dark, ominous cloud over healthcare marketers who’ve been taught the retail playbook is “off-limits.”
Thankfully, healthcare’s fear of retail tactics is no longer necessary.
Last month at House Call Chicago—an exclusive event for healthcare marketers at the forefront of privacy, performance, and ROI—a session led by Aaron Horowitz and Jennifer Hickman from the award-winning agency Rise and Quad proved once and for all that running compliant retargeting, personalization, and sequential campaigns is possible.
You may not have been at House Call Chicago this year, but if retail marketing strategies feel out of reach, you need answers. So we’ve broken down the exact tools and tactics healthcare marketers are using today to run data-driven marketing programs while remaining compliant.
Why Retail Playbooks Matter In Healthcare Now
Patients once had a trusted relationship with their local doctor. But today, they feel like a number in an expansive healthcare system. Researching services and booking appointments is impersonal, and patients are treated the same whether it’s their first appointment or their hundredth.
Meanwhile, brands in retail and other industries are delivering experiences that are fundamentally resetting consumer expectations. “Everything is becoming hyper-personalized, seamless in our experience journeys, and most importantly, it resonates with us emotionally based on our needs at that moment in time,” noted Aaron Horowitz, VP of Growth at Rise.
“Patients are increasingly behaving like empowered consumers,” Aaron explained, and their standards are changing—recent RedPointGlobal research found that patients name “complex or confusing experiences” as the number one reason they’d change providers, and that 62% of patients expect online communications to match in-person experiences.
Healthcare marketers need to catch up, and we’re not just talking about starting your emails with “Hey {{first name}}”. We must move beyond demographic-based personalization to individualized, predictive personalization and begin to create what Jennifer Hickman, Head of Healthcare Strategy Growth at Quad, referred to as “relationship memory”—tailoring patients’ experience to their needs as they engage.
"It’s like dating. If I have an interaction with you, and a relationship, I expect you to remember that,” Jennifer explained. “When I haven’t had an interaction, then I'm not expecting you to give me personalization. But once I do start to have an interaction, then I expect you to remember that we have a relationship."
For many healthcare marketers, things like “relationship memory” feel like a thousand miles away. But as Chinese philosopher Lao Tzu said, "The journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step."
So how do you get started?
How First-Party Data Unlocks Retail Strategies In Healthcare
Modern healthcare marketing teams are using first-party data to power personalized patient experiences, just like those found in retail. “Customers are expecting a certain level of experience, so how do we deliver that level of experience?” Jennifer posed. “The first-party data that we have is a gem, whether that's the provider side, the insurance side, or even in pharma and OTC.”
First-party data is information collected directly from patients, members, or website visitors through interactions like appointment bookings, portal logins, or website browsing behavior.
It enables you to:
- Create campaign audiences based on patient information
- Retarget patients based on how they’ve engaged in the past
- Measure how patients are responding to marketing programs so that you can improve over time
Healthcare organizations that use first-party data to deliver retail-inspired marketing experiences don’t just meet patient expectations, they exceed them. But as you develop your own first-party data asset, it’s your responsibility to make sure that data is collected, stored, and shared in a privacy-compliant manner. Otherwise you’re putting your organization at risk.
How Healthcare Marketers Can Run Compliant Retail Strategies
If your first-party data strategy doesn’t comply with state laws, federal regulations, and other privacy standards, it’s practically worthless. Class action lawsuits and media attention around patient data misuse are increasing, and a single misstep can undermine patient trust.
For example, if your organization is subject to HIPAA, you must:
- Be able to identify which data constitutes as protected health information (PHI) among the data you are collecting
- Sign Business Associate Agreements (BAAs) with any third-party organizations that PHI is being shared with
- Block PHI from being shared with any third-party tools with which you don’t have a BAA in place
Until recently, trying to market with first-party data without violating patient data regulations seemed like a fool's errand. Platforms like Meta released updates putting data management liability on healthcare organizations, and organizations like HealthPartners and BlueCross Blue Shield found themselves at the center of class action lawsuits.
But speakers at House Call shared that they’re now using tooling with a privacy-first design to activate first-party data without compromising compliance. Like Freshpaint, which makes it possible to collect data as patients engage, strip that data of any PHI, and send it to leading marketing, advertising, and analytics tools, just like your friends across the fence in retail.
One speaker put it well—“Instead of knowing John Smith has diabetes, you know User X visited five diabetes-related pages. That’s enough to run compliant retargeting, lookalikes, and sequential messaging.”
3 Retail-Inspired Strategies Healthcare Marketers Can Use Today
With a modern patient data infrastructure, healthcare marketers can deliver experiences that meet modern patient expectations and perform at levels they’d forgotten were possible. Let’s dive into some specific retail-inspired use cases teams are running today.
1. Taking advantage of closed-loop measurement
Marketing without closed-loop measurement is just a guessing game. As Jeff Teitelbaum, VP of Client Partnerships at Rise noted, “today a lot of what we do is throw all the balls in the air and see what hits. That method can be very disturbing, specifically for a customer."
With a first-party data foundation, healthcare marketers can understand exactly how campaigns are driving revenue events. Not only does this lead to better conversations with leadership, but it also enables you to assess campaign performance and improve over time, turning a broken loop into a marketing flywheel.
The numbers speak for themselves—teams that replace bookings with “attended appointments” as their optimization metric have driven a 17-22% reduction in customer acquisition costs.
2. Knowing when to retarget (and when not to)
People rarely book an appointment after first exposure to your brand. In reality, you need to continue engaging patients to progress them through the funnel.
Retargeting campaigns re-engage potential patients after their initial interaction. Say, for example, someone comes to your website and browses pages on urgent care services. Include that patient in a display campaign promoting urgent care services, and if at any point the patient is in need of urgent care, your organization will be top-of-mind. Retargeting results can be transformative—teams have achieved performance gains of 75–200% from simply re-engaging website visitors who didn’t convert the first time.
Equally important, however, is knowing when not to retarget. The easiest way to frustrate a new patient is to treat them like you’ve never met them before. Jeff put it aptly—“We talk to ortho patients like they're cardiology patients. That’s shame on us. An audience-first approach means using the data to prove we actually know them." An effective retargeting program means using first-party data to re-engage strategically, with the ultimate goal of building stronger patient relationships.
3. Going beyond just Google Ads
As healthcare marketers develop a privacy-first patient data strategy, they can move beyond channel-level tactics and design campaigns across multiple platforms. That means conducting an orchestra, not managing a group of soloists.
Jennifer Hickman suggested taking the “honeycomb approach.” “Everybody does journey maps. But most of the time they’re linear things, and that’s not how people behave. To make a seamless experience, put the patient at the center, and then build a honeycomb of communication around that to push and pull along the way.”
Healthcare marketers that are able to coordinate messaging across multiple channels see notable results. One organization achieved a 92% improvement in conversions when compliant display campaigns were layered onto existing channels, and another saw a 20-40% uplift from CTV when paired with display advertising.
Make Retail-Inspired Strategies Part of Your 2026 Playbook
The retail marketing strategies that consumers know and love aren’t out of reach for healthcare marketers. But they do require a new way of thinking about data and tools.
If you’re interested in learning more about how leading healthcare organizations are adopting retail-inspired strategies, we’ve put together a complete recap of all the topics and use cases discussed at House Call Chicago. You can access it here.
Or you can subscribe to Freshpaint 5 and be the first to hear when we’re hosting a House Call event in your city next year.
