Email marketing is one of healthcare businesses’ most underrated digital marketing solutions. It’s time to learn how to make it work hard for you.
This blog post shares email marketing benefits for healthcare and the five strategic steps to let it drive traffic, boost leads, and increase conversions for your company.
What Is Email Marketing?
According to Digital Authority Partners (DAP), healthcare marketing requires a combination of different digital marketing strategies to see results quickly. Any plan should include email marketing.
Email marketing is the process of sending promotional messages or announcements to a group of people via email. It’s an inexpensive way to reach out to your target market and build relationships with potential and current customers.
One of the advantages of email marketing is that it’s highly customizable. You can segment your list of contacts into smaller groups to send more targeted and relevant messages. This process helps improve click-through rates (CTRs), leading to more conversions.
Healthcare organizations should also consider email marketing because:
- It is easy to set up and track. You can automate emails and personalize them at scale.
- This strategy is cost-effective. You don’t need a big budget to get started with email marketing.
- It reaches a large audience quickly. Emails have a global reach, and many tools help you push notifications easily.
- It generates leads and drives conversions. When done right, email marketing can generate a massive return on investment (ROI) that fares better than most digital marketing campaigns, including social media.
Grow Your Healthcare Email Marketing Campaigns with These Steps
Email marketing can do wonders for sales and even client retention, but only when you do it correctly. How do you make the plan as seamless as possible?
Consider the five steps below.
1. Define Your Brand
What do you want your healthcare organization to be known for? The answer will help you develop targeted messaging and a voice for your email marketing campaign.
Your brand is more than your logo or company name. It includes everything from how you answer the phone to the colors you use on your website. Your brand is your promise to your customers. It’s the reason they choose you over your competitors.
You can set the right brand tone and voice with these ideas:
- Analyze your competition. See how they’re positioning themselves in the market.
- Conduct customer surveys and interviews. Find out what patients want and expect from a healthcare provider.
- Determine your company values. What do you believe in? How will those values shape the way you do business?
- Use data to create a unique selling proposition (USP). What can you offer that your competition doesn’t?
2. Know the Laws That Can Impact Email Marketing Strategies
Healthcare is a highly regulated industry. Some laws may influence many aspects of your email marketing campaign, such as content and delivery.
Here are two:
- Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA). It is one of the most well-known laws that set standards for protecting patient information. Organizations that don’t comply with HIPAA can face heavy fines. In some cases, they may even lose their license to operate.
- CAN-SPAM Act. This law establishes rules for commercial email messages and gives recipients the right to opt out. Unsubscribing from your mailing list should be easy, and emails should be clear, whether transactional or promotional.
Certain nations may also have their own regulations. The European Union, for example, has the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) that requires companies to get explicit consent before collecting, using, or sharing personal data.
3. Hyperpersonalize Both Landing Pages and Emails
Most of your recipients are likely bombarded by gazillions of emails that sit idly in their inboxes. When the time is right, they can delete these en masse without even clicking any. Gone is your opportunity to convert.
You can significantly reduce abandonment by hyperpersonalizing landing pages and emails:
- Design landing pages accordingly. Create these pages based on the customer’s journey of your targeted leads, marketing goals, and audience segment. A new website visitor should see a different page than someone about to purchase your wellness product or book an appointment.
- Maintain segmentation consistently. When you divide your email list, make sure that the same message goes to the same segment. This way, each group receives content that’s relevant to them.
- Customize solutions and content for the individual. The email’s tone and copy should match your intended audience. If you’re talking to a millennial, use a more informal voice than when you’re addressing someone who is 50 years old or above. Offers and promos should also align with what the individual usually purchases or looks for.
4. Incorporate Automated Emails in Your Strategy
Email automation through artificial intelligence, management platforms, and templates can save you time while ensuring that your subscribers still receive the same, high-quality content.
Consider using automation for these purposes:
- Welcome series. New subscribers should feel that they are valued. Do this by sending a series of welcome emails after they sign up. Introduce your brand, give an overview of what they can expect, and provide value right away.
- Abandoned cart. Did your recipient leave something behind on your website? Send them an email reminder and include a special discount to encourage them to complete their purchase.
- Lead nurturing. Not all leads are ready to buy from you immediately. Consistently send them content that’s relevant to their needs and pain points until they’re finally ready to convert.
- Re-engagement. It is not uncommon for people to unsubscribe from your list or stop opening your emails after a while. You can try to win them back by sending a re-engagement email campaign.
- Product updates. Your current and potential customers would love to know whenever you have a new product or service. Automated emails can notify them as soon as you launch something new.
5. Optimize Email Delivery
Email deliverability is the ability of your messages to reach the inbox instead of the spam folder. To make sure that your campaigns don’t end up in the latter, observe these tips:
- Don’t purchase lists. These are most likely full of fake or inactive email addresses. You’ll just end up with a high number of bounces, which will hurt your sender reputation.
- Keep your list clean. Remove inactive subscribers and bounced emails from your list. You can also segment your subscribers based on their engagement levels.
- Look into your key performance indicators (KPIs). It will help you gauge the success of your email deliverability rate. Some critical KPIs are (CTR), unsubscribe rate, and complaint rate. Many marketers no longer include open rates because of tracking pixels.
- Monitor your sender reputation. Your IP address and domain name affect your sender score, which is a major factor in deliverability. Pay attention to blacklists, spam traps, and other red flags IP providers can associate with your campaign.
Other Email Marketing Tips to Know
The steps above should already set you up for success. But you can make your healthcare email marketing campaign even better with these tips:
- Conduct A/B tests. Use split tests to try different subject lines, calls to action (CTAs), images, and send times to see which performs better.
- Personalize your emails. Add the recipient’s name in the subject line or body copy. Greet them on their birthdays with exclusive discounts and offers.
- Include a strong CTA. Your email’s purpose is to get the recipient to do something: buy a product, download a whitepaper, or sign up for an event. Ensure that your CTA is clear and stands out.
- Make it mobile-friendly. More people are reading their emails on their mobile devices. Optimize your content for small screens using a single-column layout and large easy-to-tap buttons.
Summing Up
Email marketing is excellent for reaching out to your target market and promoting your healthcare business. But as with anything else, you must do it right to see results.
Creating a healthcare email marketing campaign that works is not difficult as long as you have a clear strategy. Keep the tips mentioned above in mind, and you should see a significant improvement in your performance in no time.
A digital marketing agency can also help you with your healthcare email marketing needs. It can develop a strategy tailored to your business goals, target market, and budget.
