Email marketing for healthcare practices may or may not be effective depending on how you run it. Running a medical practice is complex, unique, and truly rewarding so as running your first campaign.
It’s important to recognize the intricate nature of marketing for a medical facility. In general, there are many details to consider and you also have to factor in the target audience. A lot of medical practices assume things are going to work out and patients will continue to pour in throughout the day. While everyone cares about their health, there are numerous medical facilities around town and each one is vying for them to come to their location.
To differentiate yourself from the rest, it’s time to harness the power of email marketing.
Tips for Successful Email Marketing for Healthcare Practices
1) Build a Relationship Using Email Marketing
Your relationship is of utmost importance in the world of medicine. If people don’t trust the medical practice, they’re simply going to choose someone else. This is one of those cases where people simply don’t take risks and rightly so. Therefore, you want to set the right tone by building a positive relationship using email marketing. To do this, you are going to personalize the emails (i.e. use their name) and make sure to remain consistent.
You don’t want to force the issue because people don’t want to be hassled. Instead, you want to keep things professional, clear-cut, and in line with local regulations. This is how you can start to build a great relationship with your list.
2) Don’t Spam
This should be common sense but is often a deterrent for medical practices.
There are many situations where a well-meaning medical practice ends up hurting itself. This has to do with the frequency of emails and how often they’re sending out emails to their list. If you end up sending 15-20 emails a month, it’s time to slow down!
This is simply too much and is going to come across as spam. In such cases, people end up unsubscribing and having your emails sent to their junk folder.
3) Be Vibrant
This is one of the biggest mistakes made by medical practices in relation to their email marketing campaigns. They get lost in a world of monotony where everything is bland, wordy, and unfortunately dull.
No one wants to read a jargon-filled message that has nothing to do with their needs. Instead, you want to be vibrant, use colors, and stand out in a way others don’t. This is going to allow you to win people over in the modern age where they’re used to high-quality emails.
4) Ensure the Emails Remain Mobile-Friendly
Whether you’ve taken an hour or two years to design an email template, it’s only good if it can be read on all devices. There’s nothing worse than having an email opened by a subscriber and then seeing it was ignored because the template didn’t function on a smartphone.
In the past, this may have been ignored but modern users don’t want to be hassled.
They want things to be straightforward and this begins with a mobile-friendly email template.
5) Create a Schedule
The reason you should be using an email automation platform is due to this reason.
The platform allows you to set up a schedule where emails are sent out at specific times of the week/month. For example, you can set up a month’s worth of emails in a single day. The email marketing platform will send out the emails as those dates roll around.
Medical practices can make the most of these tools by spreading out their emails and making sure the list is engaged at all times. Plus, you are able to focus on serving patients instead of worrying about emails all day long!
6) Follow the Local Regulations
In the world of medicine, it’s not as clear-cut as other niches. You have specific and rigid medical standards to uphold and those apply to email marketing campaigns as well. If you end up being non-compliant, this can put the entire practice at jeopardy. Instead of letting this happen, it’s important to go through the local/state/federal medicine regulations to see what’s permitted and what’s not.
Each association is going to be different and it’s never a bad idea to ask them about email marketing in advance. This will ensure you don’t end up making a horrible mistake accidentally.
7) Avoid Data-Heavy Elements
Too many email marketing campaigns fall flat because of their data-heavy elements.
This is not the time to force heavy CSS coding into your email template. Instead, you want to keep things simple because that’s what patients want to see. It’s going to keep things straight to the point and will allow for your message to get across to them.
There are so many email marketing campaigns that are slow to load because of these data-heavy elements. Get rid of them because they will do more harm than good to your marketing setup.
8) Track Everything!
Do you know how many people are opening your emails? What about the number of visitors coming to your website from these emails?
These questions are important and need to be answered before assessing the viability of your email marketing campaign. To ensure you’re on top of these numbers, please take the opportunity to use a high-grade email automation platform (i.e. MailChimp). This platform will allow you to send out scheduled emails while learning more about the underlying numbers.
These metrics are going to help optimize your emails and ensure people read them.
By setting up a successful email marketing campaign, you’re going to generate a considerable amount of attention. This is how the business will be able to flourish and patients will come in from all parts of town. It’s important to set up a vision for your marketing scheme that is going to remain viable over the long-term. it’s going to take time to reach this state but once you get there, it’ll become easier to churn out new emails. Continue to work hard, adapt, and track because email marketing is all about following through on the research in front of you!