Global healthcare spending is expected to cross the $10 trillion mark by the end of 2022. The Covid-19 pandemic has boosted spending in the healthcare sector, especially in the digital healthcare space. People today are more open to the idea of availing of healthcare services digitally. That’s why your healthcare business needs to have a digital presence. Through digital presence, you can avail a host of benefits. Strategies like healthcare email marketing can help you extract the maximum benefit from your healthcare business. In this complete guide for healthcare email marketing, we will look at every detail regarding healthcare email marketing that will help you boost your healthcare business.
Let’s start.
How is email used in healthcare?
Many healthcare businesses are wary of using healthcare email marketing because they think they might get entangled in privacy issues. Many laws govern the legal distribution of healthcare data. HIPAA is the most prominent one. As an experienced healthcare marketing agency, we can help you build your healthcare email marketing strategy based on HIPAA and other privacy laws. Here are some ways in which you can use email marketing in healthcare.
Transactional emails
Transactional healthcare emails are emails that are sent after a transaction. A transactional email can be an email that reminds the patients about their appointments. You can also send a transactional email to remind the patients regarding their payments, medicines, or insurance premiums.
The transactional emails help the healthcare business reduce their
- Reliance on phone calls
- Reliance on manual emails
- Costs associated with manual emails and phone calls
- Time spent on manual emails and phone calls
Marketing emails
Healthcare email marketing can help you reach your patients easily and effectively. Certain healthcare businesses can benefit from sending targeted marketing emails to their customers. Healthcare businesses like cosmetic clinics, opticians, and dentists are such businesses.
Such businesses can send marketing emails regarding teeth whitening procedures, skin treatments, the latest branded sunglasses, etc.
Patient health emails
Patient health emails are patient-focused targeted emails that are tailor-made according to the individual needs of different patients. You can use email marketing in healthcare to send the patients the latest research about their particular health condition, public health messages, and new medicines that can treat their condition.
Personalized patient health messages can deliver wonderful results. While sending patient health emails, you should take care not to cross the line regarding patient privacy. You can encourage patients to voluntarily subscribe to health-focused emails to avoid using protected health information (PHI).
Benefits of Healthcare Email Marketing You Must Know
Many marketers have this myth that email marketing is dead in the era of social media. Don’t know about all kinds of email marketing, but healthcare email marketing is still a very good option. The average open rate for healthcare email marketing is around 21.72%. These statistics show how strong is the response to healthcare email marketing. Here are a few major benefits of email marketing for healthcare.
Save time
You can automate almost all your important communications and repetitive email tasks through healthcare email marketing. This way, you do not need to spend time and resources sending healthcare emails to your patients.
Email marketing in healthcare can help you to
- Confirm appointment bookings
- Send automated reminder emails
- Follow up with patients
- Deliver critical information to the patients before the appointment
As an efficient healthcare email marketing agency, we can automate the entire healthcare email marketing process for you.
Through automation, you can gain multiple benefits like
- Save the time of your staff
- Reduce the risk of not sending emails
- Never miss a patient because you forget to follow up
Better patient communication
One of the major benefits of an efficient healthcare email marketing strategy is that it helps you communicate better with your patients. According to research, email is still one of the most popular modes of communication, with 9 out of 10 adults using email regularly.
What differentiates emails from other communication channels is that, unlike other channels, people do not use email for leisure purposes. Instead, most adults prefer to use emails to contact businesses and organizations. Thus, your patients will welcome your healthcare emails.
You can decrease the occurrences of missed appointments through automated reminder emails. Reach your patients through a communication medium like email, which they check daily.
Disseminate important information
Emails help you to deliver important information to your patients regularly and immediately. Patients are concerned about their health, and through healthcare emails, you can reduce their concerns. You can disseminate important information like
- Lab test results
- Tips and remedies for ailments
- New medicines and product announcements
- Confirmation of appointments and appointment reminders
Boost patient engagement rates
Engaging your patients and making them comfortable is one of the most critical determinants of success in the healthcare business. Healthcare emails can help you deliver to your audience the required information at the required time. This, in turn, helps you create a positive connection with your patients and increases trust. Email marketing can help you build a link between your healthcare service and your patients even when they do not require medical assistance. A robust healthcare email marketing strategy can help you to
- Raise awareness in patients
- Become a trustworthy source of information
- Solve the issues of patients
- Deliver relevant information
Reduce costs
An efficient healthcare email marketing strategy can help you to reduce your spending. Email marketing can reduce administrative costs and simplify patient treatment protocols helping you to remain competitive in the healthcare business.
Establish authority
Email marketing for healthcare is one of the best ways to establish your authority as an effective healthcare service provider. By disseminating important information in the healthcare domain, you can come across as an authority in your field. You can create your healthcare content or send emails regarding the latest happenings in your industry.
Tactics to grow your healthcare contact list
You will need to grow your contact list to taste success in healthcare email marketing. Your contact list can include
- New patients
- Existing patients
- Prospective patients
- Website as well as blog subscribers
Here are a few tactics that you can use to grow your email marketing contact list.
Get the email addresses of your existing patients
The first and the most obvious technique is to get the email addresses of your existing patients and add them to your email list.
Allow online appointment booking
Online appointment booking has become a popular mode of booking appointments, especially after the pandemic. By allowing your website visitors to book appointments online, you are, in essence, making your business available 24/7. You can ask for the email addresses of patients who book appointments online.
Provide free doctor consultations
Conduct free doctor consultation drives to gain the contact details of prospective patients. Free consultation drives attract hordes of customers as everyone likes to test the waters before they avail full-fledged healthcare service.
You can convince patients to register their contact details on your website, and in return, they receive professional advice. Free doctor consultation drives help you grow your contact list and help you build trust with your patients.
Provide webinars
Webinars have become a popular mode of disseminating important information. Webinars allow you to present the information easily and help you grow your audience base significantly. Interested people can register for your webinar by providing their contact details, including email addresses. A webinar can help your audience learn about a particular treatment process, medicine, tips, and remedies for their diseases. Build a webinar email sequence to alert your participants regarding future webinars.
Offer valuable resources
Lead magnets, as we call them in digital marketing, are valuable resources that attract your website’s visitors towards your website. A lead magnet can be in the form of a
- Ebook
- Podcast
- Video
To let your users download these valuable resources, you can ask your users for their email addresses.
Ensure to place your branding on these lead magnets so that your audience will connect expertise in healthcare to your institution.
Tips for effective healthcare marketing
Here are a few tips that will help you devise an effective email marketing healthcare strategy.
Always start with a warm welcome
In the healthcare sector, the welcome email sequence is extremely important as it paves the way for client retention and engagement. According to a report, the customers will open 8 out of 10 welcome emails as opposed to only 2 out of 10 follow-up emails.
Hence it is necessary to have an excellent welcome email. Your welcome email sequence should demonstrate what your customers can expect from you. Ideally, it should include
- Your mission statement
- Online engagement opportunities like webinars and social sharing buttons
- Commonly asked questions by patients
- Resources for support
A good welcome email should induce some kind of action from the users. They should either sign up for your email service or book that free consultation you offer in the welcome email. To ensure a maximum click-through rate for the welcome email, you should build welcome sequences that are approachable and user-friendly.
Customer’s problems come first
Understand that today’s users are bombarded with hundreds of sales pitch emails daily. Unless your email provides some kind of value upfront, there are high chances that the users won’t read your entire email. To ensure that your users read your email and always look forward to your emails, ensure to engage the reader with a subject line and content that focuses on their problems. No healthcare user is interested in reading your sales pitch. Instead, they are interested in opening and reading a message that helps them genuinely solve their problem.
Test the subject line
The open rate of your email depends significantly on its subject line. In many cases, your users will get notifications regarding your new email on their smartphones. There is very limited space in the notification panel, and unless your subject line is eye-catching, your users won’t open your email. There are tools that tell you how good your subject line is before you hit the send button. These tools decide the best subject lines for different subjects by analyzing the data of millions of email subject lines.
You can base your work on data rather than guesswork through proper analysis of subject lines.
Always send reminder emails
Automatic reminder emails help you ensure that none of your patients misses an important appointment. You can nudge your email contacts to add the appointment as an event on their Outlook or Google calendar. Thus ensuring that they do not forget the appointment. Automatic reminder emails help you boost your patient engagement and customer satisfaction rates.
Conduct effective patient segmentation
Every patient comes to you with a unique set of problems, and that’s why you should not treat them all the same while running healthcare email campaigns. You can segment your patients based on
- The nature of their illness
- Returning or first-time patients
- Age
- Gender
- The stage of their illness
You can send relevant content to patients and provide value to them through effective segmentation. Use sub-accounts in case your healthcare centre has multiple departments for different diseases.
Sub-accounts can help you create account structure and manage multiple healthcare departments under a single account. Every department will have separate data access and thus would not interfere with other departments.
Personalized emails
Personalization is an important component of any email marketing campaign, especially for a healthcare email marketing campaign. You need to ensure that every email you send feels personal to the receiver. Today, the extensive data at your disposal can help you build a highly personalized healthcare email marketing campaign. Here are some personalization opportunities that you can grab while sending emails to your patients
- Always use the first name of the patient
- Allow your contacts to opt-in source
- Send content based on their personal preferences
For instance, if your contacts have shown interest in a blog title named “The top 10 skin diseases that you can get in summers,” then you can send content regarding skin diseases to these people.
Personalization helps you put the right content in front of the right contact and boost your email engagement rates.
Optimize emails for mobile
According to healthcare email marketing statistics, 4 out of 10 people use mobiles to access emails. Around half of the email, campaigns were viewed first on mobile. Check whether your healthcare email campaign is optimized for mobile or not.
Consider the following tips to optimize your emails for mobile
- Avoid using large-sized images
- Always be brief and straightforward in your email copy
- Use CTA buttons instead of links
- Emphasize responsive email templates
- Use short paragraphs
Provide incentives
Email marketing can be the ideal channel for building positive relationships with existing patients. Effective email marketing can also help you expand your outreach and help you gain new customers. You can encourage your existing patients to refer new patients to you. Here are a few ways to do so
Referral programs
Referral programs are an effective way to gain new customers. This is because a referral program takes advantage of one of the most powerful forms of marketing, the word of mouth marketing. Many healthcare businesses, particularly those in the wellness space, use referral programs. You can offer deals or pers to those customers who refer their friends to you. You need to check whether you can legally market your healthcare organization’s services and products using referral programs in the healthcare domain. This usually depends on the laws of the country in which you are operating your business.
Increase shareability
Another way to tap into the word-of-mouth market is to increase the shareability of your healthcare marketing emails. Today, it is possible to provide social sharing buttons in marketing emails enabling subscribers to post their favourite content to their social media pages. This way, you can gain access to all the friends and followers of the person who posts your content on their social media channel. Ensure that your every healthcare email contains content that can be easily shared.
Provide perks to existing clients
You can provide loyalty rewards to your existing clients. For instance, you can provide a 10% discount on the 10th purchase. You can even start a loyalty rewards program where the customers earn a few loyalty points every time they purchase any product or service from you.
Always stick to a schedule
To succeed in email marketing in healthcare, it is important to stick to a schedule. As a digital healthcare marketing agency, we understand the importance of sending emails according to a fixed schedule.
There are two types of marketing emails
Broadcast emails
These kinds of emails are sent to keep the customers updated with the latest happenings in your company. One can send broadcast emails to let the customers know about new product launches or new programs your business offers. Broadcast emails are often seasonal, time-sensitive, or circumstantial.
Broadcast emails require more time, but you can generate a good ROI from them in the long run. You can use automated email marketing to deliver broadcast emails regularly.
Email sequences
Reaching out to the customer at the correct instance is important. That’s why we use email sequences. An email sequence is a set of pre-written emails sent automatically to customers during different stages of the sales funnel. A welcome email sequence is a nice example of an email sequence.
Provide valuable content
Use your healthcare expertise and provide valuable content to your subscribers. You can send valuable complementary knowledge content regarding healthcare to your subscribers.
You can send the following type of content to your subscribers.
- Blog post on trending health topics
- Videos that help users practise physical therapy at home
- Important announcements from authorities like the centre for disease control(CDC) or the food and drugs authority(FDA)
- Product education videos
Understand that health content works only when it is aligned with the patient’s needs. Hence, try to send more personalized health content that talks directly about the patient’s ailment.
When sending content through emails, always stick to the 80/20 rule. The rule states that your email should contain 80% helpful information and only 20% of the sales pitch.
Consistency is the key to ensuring email marketing success. Hence always send your content regularly on the same day and same time.
Examples of effective healthcare email marketing
Here are a few examples of effective healthcare marketing emails.
Welcome email
A welcome email is the first impression your subscriber or contact has of your business. As they say, the first impression is not the last impression but certainly a lasting impression. That’s why it is important to draft a great welcome email that makes the right first impression on your contact. A welcome email helps you set the tone of the relationship. A welcome email helps you convey to your subscribers that they are important to you and you are ready to meet their requirements.
Below is a nice example of a welcome email from Mayo clinic.
You can see how beautifully the email outlines the value proposition and explains to the subscribers what they can expect from Mayo clinic. The email also offers the subscribers some valuable welcome discount offers.
Valuable content email
The primary aim of such emails is to provide valuable tips to the audience. These emails help you gain a good impression on your customers as it shows that you care about the health and well-being of your customers. The below email is an excellent example of how you can advise your customers in a very effective and pleasing manner. The email stands out with its unique design and clear content.
Order confirmation emails
A good order confirmation email is required as it eliminates confusion regarding whether the order has been confirmed or not. It is necessary to send a confirmation email as it raises the groundwork for future relationships with your customers. Below is a nice example of an order confirmation email.
Testimonial emails
Testimonial email can help you build trust amongst your subscribers as it is not seen as a sales pitch. Testimonials are unbiased voices from your previous customers and can help you leverage the power of social proof. Here is a nice example of how you can use testimonial emails to your advantage.
Take the advice of a top healthcare digital marketing agency that will draft appropriate emails for your business.
How Leansummits can help your healthcare business
At Leansummits, we have established ourselves as a premier healthcare software marketing agency. We are proud to establish ourselves as a healthcare marketing agency that delivers true medical marketing ROI.
We have vast experience in the healthcare marketing domain and understand that as a healthcare provider, you will need a complete marketing solution.
We help you acquire patients by matching the needs of the patients with the healthcare services offered by you. We even help you in post-treatment patient care, where our systems help you ensure that the patients are recovering as per plan.
Our medical CRM automates the process of post-discharge patient care. Our advanced insight system will send alerts to the concerned doctors if the patient’s condition worsens.
We will help you not only with patient care but also in reputation management. Our medical CRM solution is HIPAA compliant and helps you provide comprehensive care to your patients. Our experts will customize the healthcare marketing plan according to your needs.
We have a post-care clinical CRM platform that helps you improve the clinical health outcomes of your healthcare service. It does so through improved coordination between doctors, nurses, and patients.
Our healthcare Management system, HEAPS, build a personalized treatment plan for every patient. We prepare a hospitalization outcome plan and track the patient’s progress according to this plan. Leansummits assists you in publishing clinical results by collecting patient data on various contact points.
Our healthcare email marketing system helps you engage with your patients even after discharge and improves your hospital’s ratings.
At Leansummits, we provide the following healthcare marketing services.
- Doctor social media marketing
- Building New patient testimonials
- Improve patient experience
- Content marketing strategy
- Robust healthcare email marketing strategy
- Local search engine optimization strategy
- Video marketing strategy
- Efficient use of social media ads and Google ads
- Improve the number of new patient referrals
- Detailed marketing analytics report
At Leansummits, we are considered one of the best healthcare marketing agencies in the industry today. Our post-care management solution reduces your patient or referral leakages significantly. We help you reduce your leakage by up to 25%.
Our clinical CRM models provide improved patient healthcare outcomes and help you improve the quality of your healthcare service.
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