Building a healthcare email marketing list is daunting, but its rewards are massive and significant. Even better, you can make it work by focusing your strategies on personalization, segmentation, expertise, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness (E-E-A-T) principles.
This article shares seven tips that revolve around these three.
Grow Your Medical Email Marketing List with These 7 Ideas
Email marketing, along with search engine optimization (SEO), has always been an important part of a good digital marketing plan. That is not without reason.
For the healthcare industry, it nurtures leads, builds a community, and retains patients. It goes beyond converting the audience through pushy ads. The approach is more intimate, personal, and emotional.
But how do you launch and grow your subscribers without feeling overwhelmed? Simplify it with these seven tips.
1. Define Your Audience and Break Them into Segments
No two people are the same. That’s why any email marketing strategy in the healthcare industry needs to include segmentation.
Breaking down your list into segments allows you to create personalized emails focusing on patients’ needs and wants. It also helps you track your progress with each separate group and see which one has better engagement.
How to Do It: Analyze your patient data and divide them into groups based on demographics, location, health concerns, etc. According to Digital Authority Partners (DAP), you can also create three broad categories: existing patients, new leads, and past or returning patients. Use different tools, like industry research, clinic surveys, social media polls, and questionnaires, to gather information.
2. Personalize Your Emails
How do you make a friend? You share each other’s names, shake hands, and try your best to relate and be there for each other.
That is what healthcare email marketing is all about, except that you bring this concept into the business.
Personalization is the key to creating emails that feel like they are talking directly to each patient. It is an effective way of building relationships and leveraging trust in the industry.
How to Do It: Begin with the basics. Use the names they provided during sign-up when addressing them in the subject line and content. Match your content with their interests, preferences, or actions. For instance, you can send an email reminder to those who booked an appointment or offer discounts to birthday celebrants.
3. Automate Your Workflows
Automation, especially within the healthcare industry, is the way to go. It allows you to manage your workflow and personalize emails all at once. It also makes you a better medical provider because you can boost quality care through improved customer service.
Think of automation as a digital assistant that does what you cannot do manually. It saves time and money while helping you prioritize tasks when things get busy.
How to Do It: Automate the processes that you can, from welcome emails to birthday messages, reminders, and thank-you notes. Use a customer relationship management (CRM) system to help you collect patient data and track their activities in real time.
4. Take Advantage of Visuals
Multiple studies have shown that humans are more responsive to content with visuals, such as images and videos. In fact, color psychology features heavily in clinics and hospitals.
In hospital email marketing, these assets offer many benefits. It uplifts your credibility and enhances your subscribers’ information retention. This is because you can use them to break up blocks of text.
Visuals also add more context to your brand, from your core values to the quality of care you provide.
How to Do It: While it is tempting to use stock photos, consider publishing your own. It makes your email look more personal and authentic. Create visuals from user-generated content (UGC) as long as they do not violate HIPAA.
5. Use Email to Display Your Expertise
Google counts your business as a “your money, your life” (YMYL) type. In other words, your industry (and what you share in emails) can influence people’s life decisions, such as how they care for their health.
For this reason, the search engine demands more of your content. In particular, you should be trustworthy. What better way to showcase that than to tell your subscribers they are getting emails from an expert?
How to Do It: Tell stories based on your expertise and experiences. Share tips, industry news, case studies, and insights about healthcare. Diversify your content type. Use the mail to promote a podcast you guested on or created, a webinar, or a YouTube channel.
6. Show Off Your First-Hand Experience
This tip piggybacks on #5. Google has recently updated the E-A-T guidelines to include another E, which stands for “experience.”
Although these rules weigh more if you are doing SEO, trust is the universal currency online. It still applies—and matters—in email marketing.
How to Do It: The experience here revolves around your credentials. Use the email to show off your achievements, certifications, and awards. Sign off using your complete name and share contact details, such as your clinic address and phone number. Introduce your team and practice through visuals.
7. Track Your Progress and Make Adjustments
The emails back in the early 2000s are so different from today. But how do you know that your techniques and templates are still relevant? You track your progress.
This tip may sound complicated, but several tools can already reduce the learning curve. They monitor several metrics simultaneously, give you real-time data, and even generate understandable reports.
The goal, therefore, is to identify the metrics to track, such as click-through rates (CTRs), and know what to do with your email marketing plan based on the information. Unless you make adjustments, they do not mean anything.
How to Do It: Focus on the relevant metrics. Compare your results with the benchmarks in your niche or industry. Perform A/B testing to check the effectiveness of your marketing strategies.
Summing Up
Healthcare email marketing builds loyal patients in ways that SEO and ads cannot. It actively engages them more intimately, making them more likely to stick around for a long time.
These seven tips can help you maximize this digital marketing technique’s benefits. If you need help, you can always rely on the experience of a professional digital marketer to refine them and make them more effective.