Healthcare Email Marketing: Why, What and How To Leverage It

Email marketing is the favorite playground for marketers, regardless of what industry it is.

It has been booming since technology and communication are on the rise.

And the healthcare industry is included as it brings one of the most benefits for the fields.

However, there are differences since healthcare works differently, too. So to know more about how you can use email marketing here, this guide might help you in understanding in detail.

Contents

Why Does Healthcare Need Email Marketing?

The average email open rate in medical, healthcare and dental email marketing is 21.72%.

Email marketing in healthcare is strong as ever.

Email is no doubt one of the most powerful marketing channels; also, here, you have the authority to do a personalized message depending on your target audience.

Delivering the information to the audience that they are looking for will help in creating a favorable connection.

Here you can personalize the email depending on their health status, interest, etc.

Also, it’s cost-effective. According to the data, the average open rate is 23.46% in healthcare emails, along with a 3.62% click-through rate which is considered super high as compared to all other industries.

Not just that, healthcare also has the win of using successful email marketing. It includes :

It Has The High Retention

Email marketing is the king of retention; the livelihood of your practice depends on the banality of showing patients the right pick as well as maintaining trust for each other.

Email marketing remains the customers and attracts them to get better as compared to the channel.

Speak Directly To Patients

Email marketing offers direct communication, and it’s a personalization tool.

Here you can talk directly to the patient; this gives you a direct line.

You can target personalized emails depending on interest, medical condition, etc.

Connect With Them

People who want to know and hear directly from you, not just you, get readers to opt-in to hear from you.

Also, studies say that it confirms that audiences prefer to get promotional content received through email.

Enhance The Social Media

Well, the organic reach of the Facebook pages might decline while you have used the ads, and it can be costly.

Social media is essential, but when you combine it with email in order to boost social media.

What Are The Best Way To Start With Email Marketing?

Automating can help in making your email communication get the right information at the right time for the right people, but it also reduces a lot of work.

Being in the healthcare industry and maintaining a lot of work, on top of that, launching email marketing can be daunting.

Also, there are different types of email marketing communication that you can automate when you launch.

Have a look at the Successful Email Marketing Campaigns.

Start With Welcome Series

Your contacts are highly engaged when you are new to the practice, so you can get the advantage of it by sending them a short series of emails to welcome them.

The first email should contain the following:

The first welcome email should be a welcome or delivery email. Such emails are immediately set once your patient signs up for email marketing.

This one also needs to be short, and here you can add a few basic FAQs.

Also, make sure that they know what they are going to get and what the expectations will be.

It needs to add the expectation on the first visit, including EMR signup procedures.

Also, in the future, what can they do to communicate or visit the practice?

Well, after that, the next welcome email needs to contain :

It should be about how a patient can connect with you and vice versa.

This email invites the person to connect via social media channels, secure EMR messages, or text messages.

When they start interacting, it will keep the practice at the top of their minds but with the interaction, they will form a relationship too.

Send Them Emails On Special Days And Events

Well, this helps in going beyond sending the welcome email that you sent in the beginning.

You need to automate different types of emails in different situations.

It can be for reminding them of the appointment they booked. Or it can be birthday or anniversary cards.

You can even send emails for their annual checkup reminders.

Spending on practice, you can send emails based on a series such as pregnancy health, child care, newborn health, etc.

What Are The Tactics For Growing Healthcare Contact List?

Well, as for growing the email list in healthcare marketing, the email list-building tactic might not work.

Most of the providers don’t have enough resources as well as time to create the content, which can help in attracting more people.

Not just that, the goal of websites and ad companies is to get more attraction and bookings, not to create an email list.

But, not everyone is up to making their appointment, and they do their research first. Also, they will like to explore and consider more options, and for this, they need more information.

Email marketing plays an important role even when your new patients are there.

For creating an excellent healthcare email template that engages the patient.

Here are some of the ways which can help in effectively building the email list along with providing valuable options.

Get Them Their First Appointment

The priority here should be giving patients the services and experience of first class.

But if you want to boost the relationship, you should have their email address.

For this, you can add the section to their paperwork that the new patients are required to fill. This can be digital or paper both.

Not just that, add a checkbox that says patients allow you to send them promotional emails.

Leverage Social Media For Signups

The next thing that should be on your list is making the most of social media.

There might be a number of followers you have on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and Pinterest. These can be the patients who were used to getting their treatments or might be potential ones.

So you can consider them to get the email and build the list.

Well, you can add the link to the signup landing page on your social media platforms.

You can use this for building the email list for healthcare email marketing.

So when they opt-in, it will give you more direct contact and an effective way to communicate via email.

You can post the link to the landing page as it’s one of the effective and simple ways to connect via social as well as email.

Testing The Subject line Before You Send

It’s no surprise that the open rate of your email depends on your email subject line.

That’s why you need to check if the subject line is creative and attractive enough or not.

You can test by using the tools, and this will help you email to achieve the open rate you are looking for.

Send The Emails For a Reminder

Well, managing your campaign for healthcare email marketing requires a lot of work. It includes working on appointment emails.

So it’s ideal to schedule those reminder emails for the patient so no one misses their important appointment.

Not just that, you can even add to the calendar, and with this CTa, it will remind the contacts to add their appointment as an event in their outlook and google calendars.

Consider The Opt-in Forms

The next way you should add is to opt-in forms for getting the email address.

Also, you can do it as practice if you have a blog or digital advertising for getting new people to the website.

You can embed forms, custom landing pages, or use pop-ups.

Here you can even add forms and pop-ups on your website throughout, making sure that it doesn’t annoy your visitor.

You need to place them strategically so they won’t end up causing disturbance to the people, as a lot of people skip the wheel thing because of annoying pop-ups at frequent times.

Some of the best places that you can consider adding your forms are :

Pop up on the log
About page
Underneath your blog articles
Blog footer
Blog Sidebar

In order to make a successful newsletter, you don’t need to spend money on graphic design as you can do it without help.

So if you are planning to segment the list in order to send more newsletters to targeted people, make sure to create a signup page that allows them to pick their preferences.

It should allow them to pick times and how often they like to hear and what topics they are interested in.

Once they submit, the segmented autosomal into the tool, with this you are allowed to set the newsletter which is focused on the topic and create segments automatically when you choose the recipient.

Make Your Email Copy Personalized

So if you are sending emails to a lot of people, it’s important that each email should give the impression you are talking directly to them.

But when you are doing email marketing for healthcare, you need to personalize the email copy correctly, and here are some of the points you need to consider.

Use the first name of your recipient
Use the date of birth
Point out the points that trigger what they are interested in
Include your name and pictures
Send customized emails along with opting into the source

However, to know what is working for you, you might need to experiment and learn more about it.

Automate The Email Campaign

Once you start healthcare email marketing and look for an expanding list, this might become difficult to do by manually sending emails to each subscriber.

Email automation can also help you in solving problems. It allows you to send emails depending on the triggers, behavioral and temporal.

You can use this for help in sending emails as a reminder of their annual appointment.

Have a look at the 30+ Effective Automated Emails That Boost Sales.

Do The Segment For Your Patients

There are different purposes of what your patients are in for, and that’s why you need to make sure you are not treating them the same when you are sending the same kind of emails.

So that’s why you need to do the segmentation and use the different tags as well as fields for labeling the patient.

With segmentation, it enables you to send the content to the patent which is relevant and also matches the interest.

And with each email, you are offering what they need, leading to better management and results

It can be divided into :

Health condition
First patients or they are returning
Age and Gender
Demographic data

Write the Subject Line That Holds Their Interest

Well, when it comes to open email rates, it highly depends on the subject line.

There is no formula for creating the perfect subject line for a healthcare email. But you can consider a few points that can help in improving results and not get you to end up in spam folders.

Get to the point, using 50 characters
Tell them instead of selling
Keep it relevant and important
Add a dash of urgency
Make it personalized, tailor it or customize
Understand what triggers spam and avoid those words.

Make Sure To Avoid Spam

On average, here, you get 2.16% of emails that get delivered to the spam folder on a monthly basis.

The healthcare emails might also land in spam, even if your patient has signed up for it.

There are different points that you need to know, so you can bypass the filters for spam.

It includes:

Build the email list on your own; even though there are different ways to buy the list but you should avoid it.

Avoid spam words as well as phrases including best price, 100% free, and save.

Properly authenticating the emails will help you in getting legitimate information from the email service providers.

Cleaning up the email list on a daily basis so you can avoid lower engagement significantly.

Also, add the double opt-in.

Create a preference center so you can patiently decide what kind of content they are looking for.

Optimize The Mobile

Make sure that your email marketing is optimized for mobile users too.

Here you need to optimize the healthcare emails and mobile users so this can help in improving the users.

It includes tips, such as :

Don’t add heavy images to your emails.
Use email templates that should be responsive.
Make it simple as well as straightforward in email copy
Use the CTA buttons instead of adding the text links
Break the sentences and add a few more paragraphs

List Of Actionable Strategies For Healthcare Email Marketing

Creating an email marketing campaign that is successful requires

more than collecting patient email addresses along with sending sporadic updates.

Here are some of the strategies that you should consider for your email marketing for healthcare

Provide Them The Online Registration To Emails

One of the best ways to help in getting the email address of your patient is to provide the signup form on the website.

Also, make sure it’s easy for them and add only a few fields, so it won’t take too much time to fill out.

Not only is it a great strategy for your healthcare email marketing, but also you can easily get more information about the patient.

You can also allow the visitor to sign up for emails and choose the type, such as hospital updates, monthly newsletters, and information regarding events.

Personalize The Message Of Your Email Marketing

When you are sending emails to the patients, it should be something that offers them value.

It should not be something wasteful, such as sending pediatric care to senior citizens.

Well, to make sure you avoid this, here you require to do the segmentation of the email list and divide the groups as well as personalize the content.

So if you are sending emails to senior citizens, add topics that help them.

It can be about meeting new pneumonia vaccines and showing how they can improve health.

And if it’s for middle-aged people who have families, you can add information on how they can prevent catching the flu for their kids.

So when you add the information, every bit of it will help in improving the relationship as it shows you care about their health.

Also, getting information from the hospital makes it more trustworthy and helpful.

Offer In Return To The Visitors

When you are asking the patient to fill out the email form, here you can make it more tempting by offering something.

Also, it improves the chances of getting more signs up, as it’s not free, and they will get something in return.

You can mention what you are offering in emails; it can be the free guides regarding prevention care or a healthcare email newsletter for every month.

Do the A/B Testing To Message

To make sure that you get the best results from the campaign, here you need to do the A/B testing on the email content.

You could also start with the subject line for the test to see if it promotes the open rate to the highest.

You can do the test about the subject line forming the question of higher open rate in a statement.

Not just that A/B test can be done on different elements, including images, links, and headlines.

Set The Schedule For The Sending Hospital Emails

To improve the result, you should also set the schedule, so people will know when they are getting the emails.

Also, it’s crucial to set your schedule, so you have a decided number of emails to send per month.

This increases the chances of sending too many or too few emails.

You need to choose a consistent time for sending emails; it should be either biweekly or monthly.

When you are sending emails consistently, make sure that you are delivering emails and information on a regular basis, but not too much, which might end up annoying the customers.

What Are The Practices For Healthcare Email Marketing?

The number of active email accounts across the world is from 4.1 billion in 2014, and in 2019 it will increase to 5.6 billion, as per Statista.

So if you are exiting email marketing in the right way, it can help you in boosting healthcare email marketing strategies.

Here are some of the best practices that you can consider.

Pick The Right Frequency

Email is the most preferred mode, as more than 50 % of people prefer to communicate with brands via email, as the Adobe survey says.

Also, 45% of sending emails too often can be the reason why people unsubscribe from the email list.

So you need not go overloaded but reaching out way too frequently leads to damage.

There are no formulas, so you need to take time to figure out what works well for you.

Choose The Different Types Of Campaigns

Email marketing can have different forms. An email campaign can help in providing educational messages; it can be tips for boosting health, promotion messaging, seasonal greetings, or monthly newsletters.

Since there are different types of content that can help in engaging as well as inform the patients.

Monitoring The Metrics

Patients might receive the emails, but there are chances that they are not reading them.

According to Mailchimp, medical, healthcare, and dental emails have 21.09 % open rates and 2.25%.

So it’s important that you monitor the open rates, bounce rate, and click rate.

This also allows you to know what is working or whatnot.

Do The Proofread With Content

Plenty of factors might be needed for successful healthcare email marketing, and choosing the right content is important.

Also, you need to check the spelling errors and poor grammar and do the proofreading for practicing as well as making sure to have proofread.

Email content should be proofread, and also you need another person to read the content for you.

Add The Call To Action

Nearly one-third of marketers, or 30%, say that email marketing, as well as marketing automation, for the digital marketing channel for the highest return on investment or ROI.

So you need to make sure that you have a call to action in email marketing.

Get To The Right Message

Well, your patients are busy, and you should not waste their time.

And you need to make sure to not waste time.

So you should keep the email short as well as sweet with a short message on point.

Ultimate Healthcare Email Marketing Guide