Getting full value from your Optimizely investment in pharma and life sciences

Digital investment in pharma and life sciences has never been higher. Companies now spend up to 20% of their earnings on digital programmes. 

More than half of all interactions with healthcare professionals take place via digital channels. And 68% of pharma executives say they are investing in AI-powered insights to keep pace with rising engagement expectations.

Yet the quality of digital experiences in this sector is going in the wrong direction.

The global pharma Customer Experience Quotient fell from 58 to 54 in 2025. Trust, relevance, and simplicity all declined simultaneously for the first time since COVID-19. Only 27% of HCPs feel pharma companies communicate with them in a relevant, personalised way, despite being accustomed to the highly tailored experiences delivered by consumer platforms.

The investment is there. The platform capability is there. The gap is in how organisations are actually using what they have paid for. 

 Here is where we consistently see that gap, and what the organisations closing it are doing differently.

1.  Compliance is creating a content bottleneck and your platform isn't being used to solve it

In pharma and life sciences, every piece of digital content requires review and approval before it can reach an HCP or patient. That process, navigating medical, legal, and regulatory sign-off across multiple markets, is the single biggest operational drag on digital programme performance. It creates slow approval cycles. It forces teams into lowest-common-denominator content decisions. And it means the personalisation, experimentation, and dynamic content capabilities already inside your Optimizely licence sit largely unused.

Survey data from 100 senior pharma digital leaders in 2025 identified inconsistent data, siloed systems, and slow approval cycles as the primary barriers to delivering personalised omnichannel experiences. Maintaining consistency in style and tone (50%), time constraints (37%), and quality control (37%) are cited as the top content production challenges.

But the way most organisations respond, by limiting digital ambition to match what the approval process can handle, is self-defeating. Optimizely's content workflow, governance, and version control capability is designed to bring compliance into the platform rather than work around it. Structured approval workflows, content scheduling, modular content design for rapid MLR adaptation, and full audit trails are all features that directly address the compliance bottleneck. In most organisations, they are barely activated.

What to do: Map your content approval process end-to-end. Identify where Optimizely's workflow and governance features could remove manual steps, reduce cycle times, and give compliance teams the visibility they need without slowing down content production.

2. HCP engagement is generic and HCPs are disengaging because of it 

The expectation gap between HCPs' experience as consumers and their experience engaging with pharma companies is widening. Nearly 70% of HCPs are digital natives. 70% feel current engagement methods don't fully address their needs. And 40% of physicians say they are less likely to engage with pharma content that isn't personalised to their specialty and context. 

The commercial consequence is direct. Firms that create tailored digital educational content for HCPs see a 2.5 times increase in treatment uptake compared to those relying on phone calls or generic communications. The personalisation gap isn't just an engagement problem. It is a commercial performance problem.

Optimizely's personalisation capability is purpose-built to close this gap at scale. Segment HCPs by specialty, therapeutic area, engagement history, and channel preference. Serve different content journeys to oncologists versus GPs, or to prescribers with existing product familiarity versus those who haven't engaged yet. Test which content formats, messaging frameworks, and calls to action perform best across each segment, all within a governed, compliant environment.

Most pharma Optimizely implementations have none of this activated. The platform is being used to publish content, not to personalise it. 

What to do: Start with a single high-priority therapeutic area and build a simple personalisation framework around HCP specialty. Even basic segmentation produces measurable engagement improvements and creates the internal proof point for broader activation.

3. You're producing more content than ever but it's reaching fewer people effectively 

The volume of digital content produced by pharma and life sciences organisations has risen sharply since 2020. Research shows a 20% increase in digital educational content creation. Yet despite more content being produced, HCP engagement quality is declining, because content volume without relevance creates noise, not value.

Separate research shows life sciences companies trail cross-industry leaders in digital maturity by a factor of two to three times across every key dimension including strategy, culture, organisation, and capabilities. Only around 20% of pharma and medtech companies have moved beyond "doing digital" to genuinely "being digital." The rest are producing content at scale into channels that aren't configured to deliver it in a way that lands.

Teams in this sector are balancing scientific rigour, brand consistency, regulatory compliance, and the need for genuine personalisation, often simultaneously and with limited headcount and tight timelines. Optimizely's content management, AI-assisted creation, and multi-channel delivery capability is designed exactly for this environment, but only delivers its potential when configured around your actual workflow, not a generic publishing process.

Our work with AstraZeneca demonstrates what's possible when the platform is properly activated around complex, multi-audience content environments.

What to do: Audit your content operation from briefing to publishing. Identify where the platform could automate, streamline, or accelerate. Pay particular attention to localisation workflows where content is being manually reworked for different markets, channels, or audiences.

4.  Your digital investment is significant but the ROI conversation is getting harder 

Pharma companies are spending up to 20% of earnings on digital programmes, and 68% of executives expect revenue growth from that investment. Yet confidence in delivery is strikingly low. Only 13% of senior pharma digital leaders say they are "very prepared" to deliver AI-driven customer experiences, despite significant AI investment.

Most pharma digital programmes lack the measurement frameworks to connect digital activity to commercial outcomes. Engagement metrics such as email open rates, page views, and webinar attendance don't tell the story the business needs. What does? Treatment uptake trends. HCP engagement depth and progression through educational journeys. Field force productivity amplified by digital. Content performance by therapeutic area, specialty, and market.

Optimizely's experimentation and analytics capability is built to surface these connections, but only if the implementation is set up with commercial outcomes in mind. Without that, the board sees a digital programme spending heavily and generating data that doesn't connect to the metrics they care about.

What to do: Define the commercial outcomes your digital programme is expected to contribute to, including treatment adoption, HCP engagement depth, patient education completion, and field force amplification. Then ensure your Optimizely analytics configuration is set up to track and attribute them. 

5. Your platform is powerful. Your programme around it probably isn't

The most common failure mode we see in pharma and life sciences isn't a bad implementation. It's a thoughtful implementation that was treated as a project with a delivery date rather than a programme with a performance trajectory.

The platform went live. The team moved on to the next initiative. And over time, as therapeutic areas expanded, new HCP segments were added, and patient engagement expectations evolved, the platform failed to keep pace. Not because it couldn't. Because nobody was running the optimisation programme that would make it.

Life sciences organisations that are genuinely extracting value from Optimizely run the platform as a product. They have a rolling experimentation roadmap. They test content formats, journey paths, and engagement triggers continuously. They use Optimizely's Opal AI capability to accelerate content creation and campaign testing within their compliance framework. And they work with a partner who brings strategic challenge alongside technical support, not just a helpdesk. 

What to do: Establish a quarterly digital performance review that evaluates content performance, HCP engagement depth, and experimentation results across your key therapeutic areas. If your current partner isn't bringing a proactive optimisation agenda to those conversations, not just responding to requests, that's worth examining.  

How to address the problem

The pharma and life sciences organisations getting the most from Optimizely have moved beyond publishing to genuine engagement. They have built content operations that balance scale with personalisation, and compliance with speed. They measure what matters commercially, not just what is easy to count. And they treat the platform as a continuous performance programme, not a completed project.

The gap between rising digital investment and declining HCP experience quality doesn't have to widen. But closing it requires more than the platform. It requires the strategy, operating model, and partner to activate it properly.

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