POWER OF EMAIL MARKETING IN HEALTHCARE
A healthcare marketing journey : Episode 5
Email marketing is an effective way of dispatching messages straight to your prospective patients. It reinforces relationships and incites the prospects to reach out to you. An IDC research suggests that 80% of smartphone users check their email inboxes before the morning coffee. 86% of digital marketers use emails as a primary marketing tool.
Healthcare providers can capitalise on email marketing to build long-lasting relationships with their patients. Email marketing enables patients to stay in touch with you. Patients engage with health care emails. With complete control over the messages that go in a mail, rapport building with the patients becomes a much simpler process.
A study suggests that healthcare emails have an average open rate of 23.46% with a click-through rate of 3.62%, which is a good number compared to emails from other industries. Email marketing is a cost-effective marketing tool that helps to foster relationships with your patients in a more affordable way. In marketing healthcare providers, everything comes down to building a good relationship with the patients, and email marketing is the best tool to achieve that goal.
To utilise the most out of email marketing, practice the following.
- Creating an email list is the most fundamental step in email marketing. While you can purchase databases with mailing lists easily, it is not recommended as you might end up mailing a broad set of people who have no relevance with your mails.
The best practice to gain the mail list is to provide a sign-up option on your website, and this ensures that the people you are mailing to are the ones who seek value from you. This is a time-consuming process, but it can substantially bring down the number of unsubscriptions down, and also results in better engagement.
2.Make patients sign-up to the mailing list. Provide them something in return which motivates them to sign-up for the mailing list. This can be achieved in a multitude like offering a discount, or whatever else best fits your patients’ needs. If patients feel like they are giving their information for nothing, they are not likely to sign-up.
You can also provide free study documents about preventive measures when they sign-up. To better understand what kind of information they are looking for, provide options to opt for a newsletter, hospital updates, or events.
3.Structure the email effectively to make it appealing and easily readable. Subject lines of an email play a significant role. A captivating subject line is the easiest way to grab the reader’s attention. 33 % of email recipients open their email only if they find the subject line relevant.
Make the content of the mail clean and precise. Design the emails aesthetically in a way that it aligns with your brand.
4.Concentrate on the frequency and the time of emails. Getting the mailing frequency right is crucial, as sending too many emails might irritate the customer and results in unsubscriptions. And if you are posting very few emails, it will hinder the relationship with the customer. Send mails at regular intervals.
5.Personalising emails is another key aspect of email marketing. Include personal detail to your emails which gives the patients a sense of connecting. Most email tools allow you to input shortcodes that can be substituted with the recipient’s name during the email dispatch. You can edit your mailing list to target specific segments of your customers.
The message in the email must feel personalised, so address the customers with their names. Personalisation helps the customers to relate with you better.
6.Implement email automation. Manually sending emails will become a tedious process when the mailing list becomes too large. Email automation can solve this problem by letting you send emails based on triggers. For example, on signing up, you can automatically send a welcome email.
So let’s start engaging !!!!
Adithya is the host for the Branding and Patient Experience Summit for Doctors
He is the creative lead for this summit. Adithya has worked on several market research studies with doctors across India. Being an operations guy wants to explore and learn new things always.
www.krea.in , www.krux108.com,www.krux108.com/branding4doctors/
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