With continuous changes in the healthcare industry, healthcare providers have to keep up with the top healthcare SEO trends and tactics in and email marketing is an option. Email communication is a reliable strategy to use for an effective healthcare marketing plan. It allows healthcare businesses to interact with customers and also helps attract new patients and retain them. However, many marketers do not consider email marketing and list building. Here are five reasons why you should consider email marketing.
- Email can be customized and are personal: Emails can be customized according to the needs and wants of the targeted users. Since the emails are customized it serves it purpose to the fullest. It is an inexpensive method to reach out to the desired audience and requires no investment.
- Emails help in building a good relationship: Email marketing is a method of communicating with potential patients personally. Even though social media is a good communication tool, it may not have the power to build relationships. Email marketing helps in building a long-term relationship with the clients. However, social media can be used as tool to discover more people and make their acquaintance and use email marketing to build a rapport with the customers.
- Unlimited access to your audience: Email marketing helps in sending broadcast emails to all potential patients and clients. It ensures that the mails reach the respective users without any hindrance.
- Promote your healthcare business: Email marketing is useful for promoting the services of your healthcare business. For example, email marketing can be used to provide special offers and discounts when a visitor first books an appointment and the email content can be a way to reconcile the commercial aspect of healthcare as a business.
- Educate patients: Emails can be used as a way to share informative content to potential patients and this will make them feel valued. It is a tool for healthcare marketers to reach out to prospective patients with a broad range of topics from seasonal health warnings and reminders, to educating patients about good health practices. This will bring more variety to your mailing lists and also help to schedule yearly newsletters.
Optimizing Your e-mail Newsletters
Email campaigns do not have any direct impact on SEO but the exchange of content between email and the site can influence ranking factors:
- Boost your content: Valuable content can be promoted through newsletters or by creating digests and sending it to your readers. This will improve your visibility and increase traffic to your site.
- Link building: Links from credible sites can improve your site’s authority and your newsletters to encourage users to link to your posts. Make sure that it is easy to link to your post and make it available for the readers who use your newsletter.
- Improve engagement: According to data gathered by Neil Patel, email visitors write 41 percent of the comments on their blog when they only make up 14% of his overall traffic. This shows that readers that come through his emails are more engaged than others. When you link your posts in the newsletter, the users tend to come back to your site and this will improve your ranking.
Different Ways to Optimize Email Campaign for SEO
- Use content from your newsletter on your blog: Do not let your valuable content sit in the inboxes of your readers. Remember, Google does not index emails. So, publish your content from your email campaigns as blog to improve your ranking and visibility. You can write a gist of your blog on emails and request your subscribers to read the blog, or you can send emails with a link to get the full version of the blog post.
- Come up with digests: If your articles are long and interesting, then you can create a digest with articles of similar topics. Create catchy email subject lines and add valuable posts to the digest. Make sure that you don’t use the digest to promote your healthcare services or products. It should have interesting articles that can attract more traffic. Create a list of content marketers and thought leaders that may be interested in your blogs, and send newsletters to these people. This will give a wider reach to your blogs.
- Add HTML versions: If you add HTML version, even if your email doesn’t display properly the subscriber can look at the HTML version. If you have an archive of newsletters on your site, you don’t need HTML version. You can give a link to the page with the email at the bottom.
- Newsletter archives are useful: Archive all your newsletters on your site and this helps the search engines to rank your email text. This also helps your readers to see what you are sending to your subscribers. This can improve the chances of getting more subscribers. Ensure that you use the right keywords, and optimized headlines so that the search engines can find your text. If you are publishing the text on your blog and in the archive, it is important to use canonical tags that point to the blog pages so that the search engine will understand that is should index your blog.
- Utilize UTM parameters: UTM (Urchin Tracking Module) is a module that helps to track the effectiveness of online marketing campaigns. When the subscriber clicks on the link with the UTM parameters, Google Analytics gets all the information and, in a day, you can see the full statistics on a specific email in the personal profile in Google Analytics. This will show you show many visitors emails brings and which email works better. You can also take note of tips mentioned in it.
- Ask to share: Ask to share is a simple procedure that makes it easy to share your post just by adding share button to the email. Many platforms for email marketing offer the opportunity to add share button. This will make it easier for the readers to share your content and this will give more shares and backlinks.
- Leave link to site’s search bar: If the visitors visit many pages during one visit, this will lower your site’s bounce rate. You can find information regarding bounce rate and audience engagement using tools like SimilarWeb plugin. Link to your search bar at the bottom of the email so that people will be encouraged to browse your website. The reader can visit multiple pages on your site, and search engines consider this factor when ranking your site. You can also add a “Read More” section to your email and provide links to your other content and your search bar.
Email marketing has proven to be a useful as well as cost-effective marketing method. It is one of the best digital marketing tools that helps to build a long-lasting relationship between healthcare providers and patients, and also helps to measure how much effect the campaign had. There are various tools available on the Internet and choosing the right tools for healthcare SEO is important for better ranking and increased traffic.
