Use email in MedTech marketing in 6 easy steps
Let’s start with a short quiz.
In which of the following scenarios should you incorporate email as part of your marketing strategy?
- Supporting a hospital’s efforts to build awareness for your surgical equipment among community doctors after the sale
- Educating surgeons on the latest data on morbidity and length of stay for your company’s high-tech surgical assistance tool
- Exposing physicians to a brand new device or implant that your company is launching
- Following up with a group of radiologists you met at a trade show who wanted to learn more about your latest digital imaging machine
- Convincing an independent physician to adopt your electronic health record or back-office billing app
- All of the above
Email prospecting is one of the most effective ways to get in front of your potential customers. In fact, we believe it’s possible to leverage email in all the above scenarios!
One of the biggest challenges in selling to hospitals and physicians is reaching the “right”person.
The elusive person you are trying to reach is someone who understands the value your product can deliver for their patients, their employees, their organization (or whoever the end user or beneficiary may be for your scenario) AND can make a buying decision.
Email is a great way to help your organization identify and engage that “right” person. You could be using email to ask for a referral to that right person or if you already know who the right person is, then engaging directly by email is an efficient way for that prospect to get to know you in small, incremental steps.
Getting started in incorporating email into your sales and marketing processes isn’t hard and doesn’t have to be expensive or time-consuming.
We’ve put together six best practices which are applicable if you are already a seasoned email marketer or if you are new to using email in developing prospects and cultivating relationships.
1. Segment Smartly
Get clear on your Ideal Customer Profile for the email campaign.
Identify the criteria and describe the why … How would you describe your ideal target? What are their core challenges? What about your outreach or offer is going to address these challenges?In healthcare, get as specific as possible with your Ideal Customer Profile so you can tailor and personalize your outreach to increase engagement. How does your target audience practice medicine? What does their patient panel look like? Who are their trusted associates and colleagues? What industry relationships are already in place?
Carevoyance can help you segment your Ideal Customer Profile with extreme precision (and help your team source or validate email addresses if needed).
2. Tools of the Trade
Target precisely using transactional and demographic data about US healthcare providers.
Assuming your outreach is more than a handful of emails, you’ll want to leverage professional tools to accelerate the process. There are many web-based sales and marketing tools that are affordable and easy to to learn. These tools can help you manage contacts and send emails, as well as track interactions and follow-ups.
MixMax is great for Gmail users. The price point is very reasonable and the platform has a ton of useful features like email sequences, integrated meeting bookings and robust tracking.
Hubspot is also a great tool, giving you access to many additional CRM features. It includes many of the same features as MixMax plus more to manage your prospect funnel beyond just email. That said, it is a bit more time-consuming to learn and expensive to subscribe to.
3. Content Matters
Start by focusing on the subject line of your email.
After all, if people don’t open the email, nothing else matters.Next, work on optimizing the email body. Keep in mind, most email readers display the subject line AND the beginning of the email copy. The email body should be short and sweet. 4–5 sentences max.Give people enough information, but in a short way. The trick is to being specific enough about what you do and why you are reaching out, but in a very short way.
The more you make the email about them (rather than yourself or your product), the more likely they will keep reading and engage in the way you want.
4. Call to Action
With emails, the smaller the ask, the easier to answer.
Don’t sell. Trying too hard to sell at the early stage you are using emails will wreck havoc on your conversion rates. Resist the urge to throw in a bunch of salesy stuff like elaborate value propositions, PDFs, sell sheets and the like.Make sure you are asking for just one thing so you don’t overwhelm and confuse your recipient. Focus on describing your one ask clearly and succinctly, whether it’s a referral, time on the phone, in-person meeting, an RSVP to an event or some other action.
Another useful tool to consider using is a calendar integration to manage appointments and bookings. Calendly helps you schedule meetings without the back-and-forth emails.
5. Confirm
Follow up, and follow up your follow ups.
You can’t expect to contact someone once, and then wait around for that person to get back to them. You need to proactively nudge them along. Obviously you don’t want to annoy or pester the individual. Look for signals of open rates or click-rates on links within your email to gauge the tempo of your follow-ups.
Email marketing tools — like MixMax or Hubspot — can help you automate your follow-ups by sending a sequence of emails if your recipient doesn’t engage. You can also set reminders or tasks to follow-up at a later date using these tools. Gentle nudges increase the odds you will catch your audience in a moment when they have time to respond.
6. Track and Test
If You Can’t Measure It, You Can’t Improve It
Before sending your first email, consider what metrics matter so you can set up your processes to actually measure those variables and calculate those metrics.
Typically you’ll be interested in knowing if your emails are reaching your intended recipient, whether they are opening your emails and what their level of engagement is. Therefore 3 key metrics to consider tracking are:
- Bounce rates
- Open rates
- Response rates
Bounce rates are an indication of the quality of your list. It tells you if your database of contacts has aged or if the partner you use to source emails needs to be reconsidered.
Open rates are almost vanity metric as what you really care about is engagement and responses. However open rates inform whether your subject lines need optimization or if your prospect is engaging with multiple opens but hasn’t yet replied. Typically you’d expect to see open rates of 20–30% in healthcare marketing campaigns.
How you measure response rates is going to vary based on your campaign and call to action. Is a response a reply, a directly booked meeting or interaction with a landing page you incorporated into your email. If you aren’t seeing a minimum 5% response rate, then you are doing something wrong. Perhaps your Ideal Customer Profile needs more work or your target list is out-dated or perhaps your email copy needs clarification and more oomph. Most likely, if you follow best practices, you can expect to see response rates in the 10–20% range.
You may consider sending your emails in batches each day to give you the opportunity to optimize headlines, email copy, times you send and other variables that could influence the overall success of your campaign.
You could also implement A/B testing in your campaign if it is something you plan to re-use in the future with additional audiences. In this case, you could define two groups to receive variations on your campaign to determine which is most successful.
Here’s a quick re-cap on how to get started using email in your MedTech or HealthTech sales and marketing process:
- Segment Smartly
- Tools of the Trade
- Content Matters
- Call to Action
- Confirm and Follow-up
- Track and Test
Carevoyance can support you throughout the entire process and help you set up and execute your next marketing campaign.
If you are ready to get started incorporating emails, then dig deeper and learn how one of our clients incorporated email as part of a post-sale referral program.
Originally published at www.carevoyance.com.
