How We Turned 942 Swiss Doctors
Into 46 Referring Practices
13.8% reply rate • 3,146 emails • 3 new clinic locations • German and French
Referring Practices
Reply Rate
Doctors Contacted
Emails Sent
Where The Referrals Came From
Referring physicians are named individuals, so no practice is identified here. This is the regional split of every doctor we contacted and every referral relationship that came back.
Bern und Umgebung
Grenchen und Solothurn
Montreux und Romandie
Target profile in all three regions: Hausarztpraxen, Gruppenpraxen and Ärztezentren in the clinic's own catchment area.
The Challenge
Who is Dolomed?
Dolomed AG is a Swiss pain medicine group, founded together with the Spitalzentrum Biel and opened in June 2024. Its physicians treat chronic pain with interventional diagnostics, neuromodulation, infiltrations and long term pain management across Biel, Bern, Grenchen and Montreux.
Pain Points
- •A pain clinic does not sell to patients. It lives on referrals, and three brand new locations meant three catchment areas of doctors who had never heard of Dolomed
- •A referral is a trust decision. A GP hands over their own patient and stakes their reputation on the outcome
- •Swiss physicians run HIN encrypted mailboxes and publish almost no direct addresses, most practices show only a single info@ or a HIN inbox
- •Doctors are the most outbound fatigued profession in Switzerland, pharma and medtech reach them every single week
- •Two language regions, two clinical cultures and two completely different levels of outbound saturation
Our 3-Campaign Approach
One campaign per new location. Every email was written and signed by the physician who would personally treat the referred patient, never by the clinic and never by a marketing address.
Bern (Zuweiser-Outbound)
Practices in and around Bern, addressed by the two physicians on site
Grenchen und Solothurn
Practices around the new Ärztezentrum location, signed by the physician on site
Montreux und Romandie
French language campaign, signed in the first person by the female medical director of the new site
Campaign Performance
| Campaign | Contacted | Replies | Reply Rate | Referring Practices |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Bern | 443 | 66 | 14.9% | 21 |
| Grenchen / Solothurn | 237 | 19 | 8.0% | 8 |
| Montreux / Romandie | 262 | 45 | 17.2% | 17 |
| Total | 942 | 130 | 13.8% | 46 |
The Romandie Finding
The same offer, the same four step structure and the same physician led signature ran in German and in French inside the same window. French won on every metric that mattered.
French (Romandie)
German (Bern)
What This Told Us
German speaking Switzerland is the saturated half of the country. The Romandie is not, and a French language sequence signed personally by the physician on site outperformed the German equivalent by more than two points on reply rate off a list 40 percent smaller. Most Swiss B2B outbound never leaves the German market, which is exactly why the French market still answers.
The Results
By The Numbers
Key Achievements
- 46 referring practices signed up across three catchment areas in roughly 10 weeks
- Only 16 of 942 physicians declined outright, 35% of every reply was a qualified referral conversation
- Three new clinic locations opened with a referral base already in place
- French language campaign delivered the highest reply rate of the engagement
- Bounce rate cut from 16.2% on the first list to 2.2% on the rebuilt Bern list
A pain clinic that opens three new sites has one real growth lever, the doctors around it. Akquire built that referral base before the doors opened.
Why It Worked
1. Doctor to Doctor, Never Clinic to Doctor
Every email came from the named physician who would actually see the referred patient, Dr. med. Rik Wepfer and Dr. med. Zdenek Nemecek in Bern, Dr. med. Cristian Dragalina in Grenchen, and the medical director on site in Montreux. A GP referring a patient is putting their own reputation behind a colleague, not behind a clinic brand. The signature had to match that.
2. A Real Trigger with a Real Date
Three new locations opening in May and June 2026 gave every sequence a concrete, checkable reason to write. Effingerstrasse 77 in Bern, the Ärztezentrum in Grenchen, Avenue de Belmont 19 in Montreux. Nothing about the opening was manufactured, and physicians can verify it in seconds.
3. The Ask Was Two Test Patients, Not a Meeting
Asking a busy GP for a 30 minute call is asking for the one thing they do not have. The second email asked instead whether two or three test patients would be worth a try. The commitment is small, reversible and inside their normal workflow, a short email with the clinical picture and nothing more.
4. Plain Text, No Tracking, No Links
Open tracking and click tracking were switched off across all three campaigns and the emails went out as plain text with no links. A HIN protected medical inbox treats tracking pixels and embedded links as red flags, and the first list taught us the cost of getting this wrong. Solothurn practices publish HIN only addresses and that list bounced at 16.2%. We rebuilt the extraction for the following waves and the Bern list landed at 2.2%.
Want Similar Results in Your Market?
Let's discuss how Akquire builds German and French language outbound into Swiss healthcare, from physician level contact extraction to sender identity that a doctor actually trusts.