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Nursing Database Tutorial: What To Look For In Nursing Databases
By Jenna Fischer ·
Nursing Database Tutorial: What To Look For In Nursing Databases
A common mistake for novice marketers is to fail to differentiate between the quality of the nurse databases they are choosing between, selecting based of total size or price when that is the least relevant metrics to their bottom line. More savvy nurse marketers understand that the nature of the nurse database in question is the most important factor to the effectiveness of their marketing campaign. Here we will look at two common types of nurse databases and what to look out for when selecting your source of nurse leads. As always, feel free to contact us if you are interested in a custom nurse database.
RN Database/LPN Database
State nursing boards will often maintain databases of licensed nurses and provide them to nurse employers (or really anyone claiming to be hiring nurses) at a very low cost. These databases typically contain addresses and phone numbers but not email, meaning they are typically used as a mailing list or a nurse phone database. These databases will often need post-purchase processing, to correct addresses (use USPS address changes) and filter off the “Do not call” list but will have a high margin of error in the data (wrong numbers and addresses).
Campaigns that tend to work well for nurse license databases are campaigns that are broad and do not need targeting. Generic nationwide nursing campaigns will tend to work better than targeted local employment offers. Make sure to do something very special to stand out from the others, as these cheap databases are widely circulated and many others are marketing through the same channel.
Note: There are many companies that resell these databases, after purchasing each state database they offer data services on top of the same data to nurse employers. Make sure not to purchase from both these companies as well as from the state board directly, as you will be paying for the same data.
Nurse Publication Databases
Nurse magazines often sell nurse data to their advertisers. Sometimes this data is collected as subscriptions to their publication and other times it’s a database that was collected and purchased from multiple sources. Typically these will be more accurate and up-to-date than the state databases as there are many who will maintain a nurse license but who are not active in the career at the time while print publication costs force some consideration of value against volume.
Watch out for free publications, as these “subscribers” are far more casual (sometimes even unwilling) and the readership is sometimes inflated, representing aggressive distribution instead of real readers. Sometimes these publications are distributed by dropping them off in hospitals for whoever might want them or by blindly mailing them to the state nursing board’s nurse lists and there is little guarantee your message will be actually read or seen by anyone.
