American Well, whose app connects people with doctors over secure video, used Fiksu?s app-promotion systems to drive high-value registrations and conversions at lower costs through an optimized campaign on social channels, most notably on Facebook. The results come as major pharmacy brands such as Walgreens dive into the growing mobile health space and the public grows more comfortable with sharing critical health information across the healthcare field.

American Well?s app, launched in October 2013, provides around-the-clock live video access to U.S. board-certified doctors, nutritionists and therapists from a mobile device for $49 per visit.

Fiksu?s optimization on Facebook and Twitter helped American Well drive 15 times more registrations per week, lower cost per registration by 80 percent and lower cost per unique paying visit by 64 percent.

American Well?s target audience primarily includes 30-to-40-year-old young mothers, 25-to-35-year-old health-oriented men who find doctors? visits inconvenient, and those over 65-years old with chronic care conditions.

As a fast-growing company often adjusting its goals, American Well?s marketing strategies need to be flexible. Moreover, scaling the user base of its niche app is a challenge. 

Telemedicine?s being a relatively novel concept affects costs. While most in-app purchases are often less than $5, American Well?s $49 price tag for a doctor visit means higher costs to acquire paying users.

American Well?s ability to leverage customer data is restricted due to protected health information and compliance rules under the federal Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act of 1996.

Fiksu?s actionable data was key to helping American Well identify specific audiences to target, most notably via Facebook.

By creating custom audiences from data accumulated through Facebook, Fiksu was able to develop lookalike audiences similar to existing American Well users. 

Facebook became one of the top performing sources for American Well, with three times higher conversion rates than other channels and 3.5 times more active users from Facebook.

Fiksu was also able to achieve success for American Well on a variety of other channels by leveraging its programmatic reach. In addition to Facebook, American Well was able to effectively build its user base via Twitter and video networks.

As American Well?s strategy has evolved, retargeting has been key to driving users further down the funnel. These retargeting strategies have been aimed at users who opened the app within the last 30 days, or between one and three months ago. As a result, retargeting campaigns on both Facebook and real-time bidding have had 10 times lower cost per visit compared to new user acquisition.

The results come as a survey released by the Society of Participatory Medicine found that nearly 75 percent of American adults believe it is very important that their critical health information should be easily shared between physicians, hospitals and other health care providers.

The survey also revealed that 87 percent of respondents are overwhelmingly against any fees being charged to either healthcare providers or patients for the transfer of critical health information.

In addition, nearly 20 percent of Americans surveyed felt that they, or a family member, experienced a problem receiving medical care because their health records could not be shared between different healthcare providers. Yet according to a survey conducted by PriceWaterhouseCoopers, 60 percent of providers face delays accessing current patient data and cited these limitations as a major barrier to effective use of health care information. 

In January, a poll conducted by Harris Poll for American Well showed that 64 percent of Americans would welcome video-enabled doctor visits and that 7 percent, or 20 million people, would switch primary care doctors to ones that offer telehealth visits, suggesting that mobile video deserves a prominent spot in health marketing plans.

Moreover, 63 percent believed that live video visits were more likely to yield an accurate diagnosis than phone or email alone, according to the poll.