The MIM:AGENCY team tested Viber Business as a direct channel for attracting patients to a medical center in Odesa. This is a particularly interesting tool for the healthcare sector, as the decision to make an appointment is often made following brief, clear, and timely communication with the clinic.

We wanted to test whether Viber Business could function not as a mass “broadcast” to everyone, but as a targeted performance channel.

About the client

The client, a medical center in Odesa, with whom MIM:AGENCY collaborates on an ongoing basis. The clinic offers a range of medical services, but for the purposes of this test, the focus was on attracting new patients to the ophthalmologist.

For the medical center, it was important to generate not just reach, but actual inquiries. Therefore, the campaign was viewed as a tool for quickly reaching out to potential patients who might already need a consultation but haven’t yet scheduled an appointment.

Objectives

The team was tasked with testing Viber Business as a direct communication channel and assessing whether it could deliver quick results for a medical service.

The main goals of the campaign were as follows:

• Attract new patients to the ophthalmologist. • Test the effectiveness of Viber Business in the medical niche.

• Use the budget more precisely, without sending messages to an irrelevant audience.

• Assess whether the audience from Google Ads could serve as a foundation for Viber communication.

• Determine whether it is worth scaling this channel to other medical specialties.

Initial Conditions

The messaging budget was 10 200 UAH. Within this budget, it was possible to send 5 800 messages.

At first glance, the volume seemed sufficient for a test. But for the medical center, it was important not just to use the entire message limit, but to reach an audience with a higher likelihood of response.

If we had sent messages to the entire available database, part of the budget would have been spent on people with no current interest in the service. In medical marketing, this is particularly critical, as a patient responds only when the offer aligns with their actual needs, age, behavior, and level of trust in the clinic.

The Challenge

The main challenge was segmentation. We needed to determine exactly who to send messages to so that the campaign wouldn’t turn into a mere formality.

Viber Business allows for quick message delivery, but the channel itself doesn’t solve the issue of audience quality. Effectiveness depends on how accurately the segment is defined.

What We Did

We started by analyzing the audience in Google Ads. We were interested not in abstract characteristics, but in real user behavior.

The team analyzed who interacted most actively with the medical center’s ads. We evaluated clicks, interactions, behavioral signals, and overall engagement levels in ad campaigns.

The most active audience turned out to be women aged 35 to 60. This segment showed the highest interest in the clinic’s ads. We then used this segment as the basis for a Viber Business campaign.

The logic was simple. If a person has already responded to the medical center’s ads on Google, they have a higher level of awareness about the clinic.

Such an audience is warmer than a random contact list. Therefore, the chance of receiving a response after a direct message is significantly higher.

Why We Chose This Approach

In the medical niche, direct messaging requires caution. The message must be relevant, clear, and timely. A person must immediately understand why they received this communication and what benefit they can gain from it.

That is why we did not treat the database as a single mass of contacts. We selected an audience that had already had contact with the brand through advertising. This allowed us to make the campaign more precise and avoid wasting the budget.

This approach is also important because Viber Business was not a standalone channel in this task, but part of a broader marketing system. Google Ads helped identify the audience, while Viber served as a tool for direct follow-up.

Limitations of the tool

After launch, we encountered a significant limitation of Viber Business. The channel’s analytics are currently quite minimal.

Only two basic metrics were available:

• Delivered.

• Not delivered.

There was no data on message opens. There is also no deeper analytics regarding interaction with the message. Because of this, it is difficult to assess how many people actually read the text, how many were interested, and how many ignored the communication.

For a business channel, this is a significant limitation. Especially when comparing Viber Business to advertising platforms, where you can see clicks, conversions, audience segments, and user behavior after interaction.

Therefore, it is currently difficult to fully measure the effectiveness of Viber Business within the tool itself. Some of the results had to be assessed through client feedback.

Result

Despite the limited analytics, the result was noticeable as early as launch day.

The client reported ten calls following the campaign. Appointments with the ophthalmologist filled up quickly, after which the clinic began creating a waiting list.

For a test campaign, this is a strong result, as the campaign had a limited budget and a small volume of messages. It is also important that the response was not delayed but nearly immediate.

This confirmed our hypothesis that Viber Business can work for a medical center if used not as a mass channel but as a tool for targeted contact with a prepared audience.

What the test showed

This test showed that Viber Business can be useful for the medical niche, but its effectiveness depends on the quality of preparation.

The key factor was not the mailing itself, but the preliminary analytics. Without segmentation, the result could have been significantly weaker. Messages could have reached people without an immediate need, and the budget would have been used less effectively.

In this test, Viber worked as a channel for quickly re-engaging with an audience that was already aware of the clinic or had previously interacted with its ads.

Conclusion

Viber Business can function as a patient acquisition channel in the medical niche. However, effectiveness is achieved when the campaign is data-driven rather than a random broadcast to the entire database.

The results confirmed that direct communication channels can generate quick responses if the audience is selected correctly and the message addresses the user’s actual need. The next step is testing with a larger budget, a broader audience, and other medical specialties. This will help assess how reliably Viber Business can function as part of a digital strategy for medical centers.