AI and personalization are rewriting the rules of pharmaceutical marketing, and that was the topic at the forefront of discussions at DigiPharma Connect 2025. Throughout the conference, marketers were encouraged to embrace these powerful tools to enhance the patient experience, rethink how to approach patient engagement, and craft meaningful, personalized experiences by understanding individuals' needs.
Let’s examine how AI can help marketers analyze and draw insights from vast data sets, and use personalization to change their tactics from everyday to game-changing!
Intelligent Audiences Fuel Personalization
To create personalized campaigns, you first need to define whom you’re targeting. AI transforms this critical step by identifying and refining intelligent audience segments, ensuring outreach efforts are aimed precisely where they’ll make the most impact.
- Diagnosed Patients: AI can pinpoint those recently diagnosed who are actively searching for treatment options, enabling timely, empathetic communication.
- Patients Likely to Switch: Behavior patterns reveal those open to treatment changes, allowing you to share tailored content that resonates with their unique concerns.
- Non-Adherent Patients: AI identifies patients at risk of leaving their treatment plans and opens opportunities for re-engagement using personalized nudges.
Using such insights, pharma marketers can shift from broad messaging to highly specific, meaningful engagement. For instance, Swoop ran a campaign targeting newly diagnosed patients likely to visit specialists in 90 days that resulted in a 3x increase in the visit rate.
Valuable Actions Drive Impactful Personalization
Personalization isn’t just about knowing who your audience is. It’s knowing who they are and how to create meaningful actions for them as a result. AI simplifies this by ensuring that every action aligns with the patient’s unique needs and preferences.
- Customized Messaging: AI tailors content formats and messaging styles to fit the audience, whether it’s a comforting tone for newly diagnosed patients or more assertive info for those ready to switch treatments.
- Dynamic Content Adaptation: AI personalizes website experiences by offering relevant medical resources or symptom management tools, making campaigns truly supportive.
- Nurturing Adherence Through Communities: Patients falling off their treatment plans can receive supportive, emotionally resonant content through online communities.
These actions, when personalized and driven by insights, produce measurable results. One agency, for example, fostered deeper engagement within online communities and saw improved adherence rates by 29% and prescription refill rates by 27%. Every interaction becomes a step closer to better outcomes.
Journey-Based Personalization Supported by AI
Patient journeys aren’t linear. Personalization ensures patients are met where they are. And with AI, marketers can dynamically adjust campaigns to mirror these journeys, creating seamless and relevant experiences.
- Acquisition Journey: Personalized outreach to newly diagnosed patients emphasizes care options with empathy and clarity, resulting in significant increases in specialist visits.
- Conversion Journey: By understanding the hesitations of patients on competitor treatments, personalization enables the delivery of specific trust-building content. Successes often include market share increases during switching campaigns.
- Retention Journey: For patients at high risk of not adhering to treatments, AI helps share actionable, personalized reminders and encouragement.
These insights have driven significant adherence improvements for orgs who have tried them, including Swoop's 29% boost in adherence rates through targeted campaigns.
Each patient’s medical and emotional needs evolve, and personalization maps content to each critical juncture, creating a strategy that feels human at every step.
Data Fuels Personalization
AI’s real power lies in its ability to harness vast amounts of patient data and turn it into actionable strategies. By integrating zero-party, first-party, and third-party data, marketers can build comprehensive patient profiles to guide hyper-personalized engagement.
- Zero-party data provide direct insights from patients through surveys, giving more control to the audience in shaping their interactions.
- First-party data are essential in capturing behaviors across patient touchpoints and forming a clearer engagement picture.
- Third-party data complement insights with external patient and HCP trends.
AI synthesizes these data types to create campaigns that not only respond to but also anticipate patient needs. For instance, AI-driven predictive personalization ensures that the timing, tone, and format of messaging are always just right, putting the patient first.
AI and personalization together represent the future of omnichannel pharma marketing. Leveraging intelligent audience segmentation, delivering tailored campaigns, and focusing on journey-based strategies allow you to meet patients where they are with the support they need. These efforts lead to more than business results—they deliver better care, stronger loyalty, and meaningful connections.
With AI powering personalized experiences, pharma marketers have the tools to build campaigns that feel less like marketing and more like a partnership.
Now is the time to lead with intelligence and empathy, creating moments that matter for every individual.
MERGE is continuing to test and share best practices around AI. Get in touch to talk!