The use of digital technologies surged in all areas after the outbreak of the Covid-19 pandemic, including the health sector. Email marketing, influencer marketing, content marketing, Search Engine Optimization (SEO) marketing, social media marketing, pay-per-click, and mobile marketing are popular digital marketing techniques. Email marketing has been found to be more effective than any other tactic. In email marketing, commercial emails are sent to your clients or people in your contact list who give you permission to send them emails on a commercial basis. Email marketing offers many benefits for healthcare providers. Digital marketing outsourcing companies that provide medical SEO services help physicians implement effective email marketing campaigns.
Role of Email Marketing in Healthcare
Developing and maintaining cordial relations with your patients is very important. Email marketing plays a key role here. Sending personalized messages via email is an effective way to convey information about your services, facilities, offers, and so on. Delivering right information at the right time to your target audience is necessary to building strong connections with your patients.
You can even send personalized emails based on their interests, health status and so on. The benefits that healthcare providers can enjoy via email marketing are as follows:
- Helps maintain proper communication
- Delivers vital information about services and offers
- Sends timely alerts to patients about their appointments, and other matters
Email marketing can create a link between you and your patients even when they don’t need any medical assistance.
Benefits of Email marketing for Healthcare providers
The key advantages of healthcare email marketing are:
- Educates patients
- Helps with patient on-boarding
- Can create a strong relationship with patients
- Faster communication
- Cost-effective
- Personalizes communication
- Send automated alerts
- Enhances patient engagement
- Can be used to promote deals and offers
Healthcare Email Marketing Campaign Ideas
Providers of healthcare digital marketing services help physicians implement email marketing ideas strategies to help healthcare providers connect with their patients.
1) Educational healthcare emails or newsletters
Newsletters are the best way to provide relevant information and educate your patients. Provide information about your services. You can include health tips, solutions for common health conditions, and so on, and also mention special offers as well as facilities you are providing via newsletters. Send out educational newsletter emails every month and also on special days related to health like World Diabetes Day, World Cancer Day, World Tobacco Day, etc.
You can also provide a review link for your patients to leave their comments and feedback. This can build a strong relationship with your patients.
Publishing informative blogs and including a link to them in your newsletter can help increase website engagement and connect your patients to the vital information published on your website.
2) Transactional healthcare emails
Transactional emails act as an informer or reminder for patients regarding their appointments with their physicians or related to insurance or billing issues. This type of email is an alternative to a phone-in reminder and is much more cost effective. Transactional emails are accessible on any kind of electronic device — smartphones, laptops, tablets, and so on.
3) Responsive email templates
Templates for emails are a major factor in success with email marketing, especially responsive emails. Responsive email templates can adapt to any screen size, including mobile phones. They offer complete functionality on a small screen, just as on a normal screen. As it has many template design options, you can choose the template that would be right for your email campaign.
4) Marketing email
This kind of email is mainly used for marketing purposes. In such emails, you can promote offers and facilities you are providing as well as public health campaigns. Provide content on your experience and services.
Health care providers like opticians, dentists as well as cosmetic physicians/surgeons always have something like designer frames, contact lens, skin treatments, skin related products and so on to promote or sell. Healthcare marketing emails are the best way to promote such products. Send email regarding your products to your subscribers at a regular interval.
While sending any kind of email to patients, make sure that you add essential elements for branding your health firm in order to ensure the success of the email marketing. These essential elements include:
- Include the logo, address, phone number, redirecting link to your website and so on at the top of your mail
- Content should be organized and concise
- Include links to evergreen blogs posted on your website
- Include social media links
- Include call-to-action for every piece of content
- Always conclude your mail acknowledging the reader
Tips for effective healthcare email marketing
At the end of the day, the aim of email marketing in healthcare is to help providers retain their patients. Here are some tips for success with email marketing:
- Welcome patients: Extend a warm welcome to new patients and also use expressions like thank you, sorry and so forth when relevant.
- Send reminder mails: Send reminder mails to your patients regarding check-ups, follow-ups, appointments and so on. This will create an impression that you are concerned about their wellbeing, which will improve your relationship with them.
- Mobile optimization: Use an email template that all kinds of electronic devices will support. This will help increase subscribers.
- Should be informative: The mail should be informative and educate the patient.
- Space for feedback: Leave space or a link along with your mail for feedback from patients. Their comments can help you improve your services.
- Reduce typo errors: Take care to avoid typos. Proofread your emails before sending them out.
Points to note
- Focus on the security aspect.
- Build a list of contacts.
- Avoid sending too much email to your subscribers as it might result in their unsubscribing your email list.
- Automate reminder emails, mails for particular occasions, and so on
- Do some industry research to learn when is the best time to send emails to patients
- Avoid using words like ‘100%free’, ’best price’,’ promise’ and so on in your mail content as these may land your mail in the spam folder
- Closely analyze metrics like bounce rate, click rate, open rate and so on as it will allow you to come to know whether your campaign is working or not
Email marketing is the best method to connect with your patients. However, it is difficult to retain subscribers and even a small mistake might make them unsubscribe from your service. An experienced search engine optimization company can help you implement an effective email marketing campaign to connect with your patients and retain them.
