Email marketing is one of the most popular digital strategies out there, thanks to its ability to provide value and build a strong relationship with consumers. When done properly, it can completely change your business. As the healthcare industry relies so much on a strong level of trust and familiarity between the healthcare professional and patient or customer, email marketing is a fantastic channel to utilize. There is no better time than now to start building rapport with potential patients and strengthening your relationship with existing ones!
Establish Your Goals
Before actually beginning the campaign, you need to carefully think about what you want to achieve, guiding the rest of the following steps. Here are some common goals that are set through email marketing in the healthcare industry:
- Increasing inquiries
- Increasing traffic to a website
- Providing useful content to customers
- Building a strong relationship with customers
- Encouraging people to leave reviews on your website
- Announcing new services
While it is possible to do these things through email marketing, you want to avoid achieving them all in every email. In addition, modern consumers don’t usually like to read through lots of content to process what is said.
Instead, you should set up a timetable of when you want to target each of these things, and then you can start to think about how you will achieve that. In the healthcare industry, customer service is everything, so start by providing useful content and building a relationship. Once you have an established list of interested in your content, you could start to focus more on increasing inquiries and encouraging reviews to help build your business.
Build Your Email List
Once you know the direction you want to head in, it’s time to build an email list, so you have someone to send the emails to! When you sign up new patients, ask if they would be happy to be contacted via email with useful information about your company and the industry and exclusive offers.
Then, you can also target existing customers by putting a notice on your website and in your place of work. For example, you could offer a 10% discount on the next check-up or service if they want to sign up to receive emails from you. But, again, make sure you don’t make this sound overly pushy; explain that the business wants to connect more with their customers and thank them with some discounts.
Decide What Your Campaign Will Be
Now that you have an email list and know the initial direction of the campaign, you need to start putting it together. The main things to remember, especially in the healthcare industry, are as follows:
- Provide valuable, factual information
- Provide a solution to issues people are facing
- Don’t overwhelm people with too much information
- Show you understand them and their needs
- Value their opinions
Let’s look at an example. If you are a dentist, you might organize your email list into age categories. Perhaps your subscribers aged 20-40 could receive an email about Invisalign, those aged 40-60 could receive an email about teeth whitening, and those over 60 could receive one discussing dental implants. This will show your subscribers that you pay attention to them, which will build a relationship, while the valuable information that comes in the email will prove you are trustworthy.
Research Popular Release Times
Once you have created your relevant and interesting campaigns, you need to decide when to send them out. First, you need to look at the best time to send emails to the particular demographic you’re targeting. This will give you the best chance of getting the desired outcome from the email.
Also, it would be best to make sure you don’t overwhelm your patients with too many emails, as that will make them much less desirable. Try to minimize your emails to once a month in the healthcare industry. Treatments and products tend to be more expensive and required less frequently, so once a month will keep the relationship between you and customers without overwhelming them with too much information. Make your email an event people look forward to!
Measure Results
Once you have sent out your emails, you can measure the results. You will want to look at the open rate click-through to your website, unsubscribe, and goal conversion rates. All of these things are vital to success.
The open rate is important as you need to read the content! If they don’t open it, you need to rethink your strategy for the subject line. Perhaps you will use an incentive to get people to open it.
Then, if people aren’t clicking through to your website, you will need to add something to the content that gives them a reason to head through to the website. This might be a discount code or some unique information.
If people unsubscribe, you might be sending emails too frequently or not quite hitting the correct demographics with the right information.
Finally, if people aren’t completing goal conversions, you need to develop a strategy to change that. This might be changing the page they land on from the email or providing a unique discount code in the email itself which gets them to open the email, click through to the website and then make an inquiry or purchase.
Final Thoughts
Email marketing is a fantastic way for any healthcare business to build trust and a strong relationship with customers or patients. When done right, it can transform your business. The most important thing to remember is to provide value to your readers, as your priority should be helping them. Increased inquiries or subscribers should soon follow. So whether you’re a private dentist or a cosmetic surgeon, give email marketing a go to provide your healthcare business with a new lease of life.
