If you believe email marketing has become an ineffective patient engagement and retention channel, you need to reassess your stance. As the world approach 4.5 billion active email accounts, and email users spend an average of 5 hours per workday checking emails, if you as a medical practice are not leveraging email to add value to your patients’ lives – and in the process staying on top of their minds, thereby maximizing patient loyalty – then your practice’s patient retention and ‘word-of-mouth’ advocacy development strategy has a gaping hole in it.
When following best practices, email marketing may serve as a powerful patient engagement and retention channel in the healthcare industry. This blog will cover 9 effective healthcare email marketing best practices.
1. Avoid Spam Filters
Email marketing has gotten a bad rap in recent years because of the unbridled amount of spam pouring into people’s inboxes. In fact, spam is reported to account for almost 50% of all email traffic! To counter this prevalence of spam, email service providers have drastically tightened up their email filter systems. Even if patients have consented to receive your emails, your healthcare marketing emails may unfortunately end up in spam boxes.
Here are some pointers to avoid triggering the spam filter:
• Avoid using “sales-y” terms like “100% free”, “best price ever”, and “biggest savings.”
• Create an email list yourself rather than using a third-party.
• Adhere to HTML practice standards to ensure a clean and clear email design and layout.
• Authenticating your email setup properly will let inbox providers know who you are.
• Regularly purge your email list because unread messages reduce engagement and jeopardize your relationship with email service providers.
• Craft a preference center where patients may select the kind of information and frequency they wish to receive emails from you.
2. Use The Appropriate Frequency
Email is still by far the most preferred method of communication by which consumers prefer brands to communicate with them. That said, the majority of people that unsubscribe from email lists are precisely those who believe that they are receiving emails too frequently from a given brand.
And yet, while you don’t want to clog up people’s inboxes, sending out too few messages can work against you as competitors find an optimal way to stay top-of-mind. Therefore, given your specialty type and geographic competitive clime, you must take the time to determine what works for your healthcare practice because there isn’t a one-size-fits-all solution.
Including a preference center, as mentioned above, is a simple approach to make sure patients receive the ideal number of emails of their choosing in addition to serving as a mechanism to prevent being blacklisted by email service providers as a spammer.
3. Apply Segmentation
Nearly one-third of email users regard emails that don’t match their interests to be the most annoying. Use segmentation to target the right group of recipients for each email campaign you generate; in this manner, not every patient on your list will be the recipient of every email, but instead will only be the recipient of their select interests.
For instance, a facial plastic surgery practice may want to segment its patient email list such that it sends an email blast exclusively to patients who have undergone a non-surgical rhinoplasty but wish for long-lasting results so they are being offered a special discount rate on cosmetic primary surgical rhinoplasty, because the surgeons are aware that these patients are seeking long-lasting nasal appearance changes but may be hesitant or unable to pay the much higher pricing rates of an actual surgical rhinoplasty. Patients who have recently undergone a cosmetic primary surgical rhinoplasty, or who have had a consult and already have an upcoming scheduled date for this procedure, would be segmented off of this email blast because they just paid, or a prepared to pay, full price for the procedure.
By taking this targeted segmentation approach, your engagement rates will increase as you keep patients informed about issues that they are truly interested in and pertain to their actual real-life situations.
4. Design Several Kinds Of Campaigns
Numerous variations of email marketing are possible. An email campaign can include commercial messaging (such as ‘get 3 Botox treatment sessions for the price of 2’, or ‘$100 off your first sclerotherapy session for spider vein treatment’), instructive messaging (such as ‘healthy foods to help you manage your blood glucose levels’ or ‘exercises for elderly women to maintain leg strength as they age’), seasonal greetings (such as “Happy Independence Day!”), or take the shape of a monthly newsletter.
At Curato Health, we advise practices to provide patients with a variety of content types that will keep them engaged in your emails and inform them of topics they’d be interested in learning more about.
5. Keep An Eye On The Stats
Even if patients receive your emails, that doesn’t guarantee that they read them. Healthcare emails have an open rate of less than 27% and a click-through rate of less than 0.7%. Thus, it’s crucial that you determine what is and isn’t working by carefully monitoring critical metrics like open rate, click rate, and bounce rate. You’ll be able to modify your messages after reviewing.
6. Craft A Catchy Subject Line
Nearly 350 billion emails are received in inboxes every single day. Because of the unbridled volume of emails flooding your patients’ inboxes daily, your subject line must be catchy.
Curato Health suggests crafting a catchy subject line with the following in mind:
a.) Be concise: Keep your subject line short and to the point. Aim for a length of 3-8 words or 40-60 characters to ensure its visible on various devices and doesn’t get cut off.
b.) Note who you are: Note the name of your practice, especially if your email domain and username are not obvious, so patients have recognition of where the email is coming from and familiarity with the fact that it’s not random spam.
c.) Personalization: Personalize the subject line by using the recipient’s name or other relevant information. People are more likely to open an email when it feels tailored to their needs or interests.
d.) Pose a question: Asking thought-provoking questions can engage patients and pique their curiosity. Make sure the question is relevant to the content of your email, fits your patient segmentation, and have the answer lie within the email’s message.
e.) Use humor or wit: If appropriate for your target patient audience and practice brand, incorporating humor or wit can make your subject line stand out. It can create a positive association and intrigue patients to open the email.
f.) Be clear and specific: Clearly convey the purpose or benefit the patient will derive by opening the email. Avoid vague or misleading subject lines as they may result in low open rates or recipients marking your emails as spam.
g.) Avoid spam triggers: Stay away from using spam-triggering words or phrases that could land your email in the spam folder. These include excessive punctuation, all caps, too many exclamation marks, or terms like “free,” “discount,” or “urgent” that are commonly associated with spam.
h.) A/B test: Experiment with different subject lines to determine what works best for your patient base. Split your email list into two segments and test different subject lines to see which one yields higher open rates.
7. Add A Call-To-Action (CTA) To Your Message
Email marketing has the potential to yield the highest return on investment (ROI) out of any marketing channel. In fact, this can be as high as a 44x ROI. Therefore, it’s imperative to harness email to motivate patients to take action.
At Curato Health, we advise practices to include simple, “non-sales-y” call-to-action buttons such as “Request Appointment”, “Book Your Visit”, or “Schedule Consultation.”
8. Make Your Point
Patients don’t have time to read an email manifesto; just like you, they are busy! As a result, Curato Health suggests making emails succinct and to the point. Additionally, short texts work better on smartphones. Given that essentially half of all emails today are opened on mobile devices, this is of utmost importance.
When done right, email marketing in the healthcare industry is a powerful tool for staying “top-of-mind” and engaging with patients. It serves as an excellent avenue to encourage patients to visit your office again for follow-ups and other services instead of considering local competitors and healthcare systems that are constantly marketing to them via multiple channels. Furthermore, email marketing can serve as a spotlight on issues that perhaps your patient isn’t suffering from, but their family or friends may be, thereby enabling a powerful advocacy system to help generate new organic “word-of-mouth” patient leads.
9. Be Sure To Proofread
Content is the most crucial component of any effective healthcare email marketing strategy. Grammar and spelling mistakes make patients less likely to take your practice seriously and reflect poorly on you.
The individual who authored the email should proofread it, but don’t stop there. It has to be reviewed by at least one other person because it can be challenging for the author to catch errors because they’re so close to the topic.
