Walgreens Clinic Acquisition

Situation

In 2015, SSM Health – St. Louis acquired 26 clinics inside Walgreens. These clinics had been operating for several years, run by Walgreens stores. They had low satisfaction scores, and the management of the clinics by the stores was adversarial.

​

Task

My role was to introduce the clinics as part of the SSM Health brand, SSM Health Express Clinic at Walgreens, grow volume into the clinics, and ultimately align users with the SSM Health system. In addition, all implementation strategies required close communication with Walgreens stores.

​

Action

Day 1 of managing the clinics, we delivered cake to every single store with a clinic to show our excitement for the partnership and a new beginning.

 

Knowing satisfaction scores were low, we waited six months before we actively promoted the clinics. We wanted all operations to be settled, turnover completed, and relationships rebuilt.

​

During those six months, we researched and brainstormed. We connected with the Walgreens marketing team to learn everything we could about retail marketing and their promotional schedule. We researched the most common diagnoses every month in the clinics. We mapped out every billboard closest to each clinic.

 

Finally, we developed a year-long, "always-on" integrated marketing campaign, focused on six seasons. Each season included online and offline marketing, including geofencing each store, directional billboards, and appointment scheduling directly through Google search.

​

Each person who visited the clinic was asked if they had a primary care provider. Everyone who selected “no” was invited to schedule an appointment with one of ours.

​

Result

More than 1,000 patients a month had a subsequent encounter at an SSM Health – St. Louis location. These were brand new patients into the system.  

The search engine marketing ads have the second highest click-through-rate for the entire SSM Health system to date.