Email marketing is not new, but the ways we use it are constantly evolving. With new capabilities and trends continually emerging, healthcare organizations need to stay on top of what works and what doesn’t.
Goldman Marketing Group uses email marketing to reach patients and other audiences for our clients. We test new ideas and try out emerging trends so our clients can fully benefit from this powerful communication tool. Below, we’re sharing five steps your practice can take right now to achieve success in your email campaigns.
Segment & Target Your Audiences
Before you start writing an email, determine who is going to receive it. Current patients? Former event attendees? Potential patients or customers? This will frame not only what content you write but also how you write it. Medical practices you are hoping to acquire won’t want to get coupons for cosmetic treatments, and current patients certainly aren’t interested in your profits from last quarter. Consider who is reading your email first and foremost, and then make a different list for each distinct audience. You can create campaigns to specifically target these audiences and avoid sending generic or unhelpful emails.
The more narrow your focus, the more successful your email marketing can be. Go beyond current patients and target those who have received the same types of treatments. A patient who comes to you only for regular medical appointments is not the best patient to market elective cosmetic surgeries toward. Patients who have just completed a treatment plan or service with you may be ready to take the next step and try a new offering you’ve developed. You can also use email marketing to:
- Upsell customers with add-on services
- Inform your audience of new treatments they might be interested in
- Improve patient retention
- Maintain a strong, positive, and ongoing relationship with patients
2. Build Around Your CTAs
Once you know who will be reading your email, decide what specific actions you’d like your audience to take after they read it. Do you want them to call and schedule an appointment? Make your phone number big and bold toward the top. Should readers schedule a consultation for a brand-new service? Wow them with photos or other proof of potential results, and add a link to your online booking portal just below. Only include text and images that will encourage the actions you want your audience to take.
It’s best to limit the number of CTAs you include in an email so you don’t confuse or overwhelm your reader with too many options. It’s best to have a primary CTA with 1-2 secondary CTAs at most. Any CTAs you include should be clear and concise so the reader knows exactly where they’ll be directed when they click. Keeping things clear may also help encourage more clicks.
3. Stay Out of Spam Folders
Small mistakes can land your otherwise wonderful emails in your audience’s spam folders, never to be seen. A few of these triggers you should always avoid include:
- Not verifying AND authenticating your domain (a verified and authenticated domain drastically improves email deliverability)
- Using excessive capitalization within the email and subject line
- Using images/GIFs with a file size of 10MB or larger, as they may trigger spam filters
- Using both a “!” and a “?” in the subject line
- Requesting an urgent reply
- Including multiple emojis or a “%” in the subject line
- Adding too many images to your email
- Using too-formal greetings (e.g., “Dear sir”)
- Using awkward greetings (e.g., “Hey bro” or “Dear friend”)
- Having HTML errors
- Not including a plain-text version of your email
- Marking the email as “high importance”
- Using a free webmail provider as your sender email
These triggers change as email providers pick up on new email marketing regulations, so it’s important to check for updates on how to stay out of spam folders regularly.
4. Time Your Emails
More emails = more leads, right?
Wrong.
This can sometimes be the case, but you may end up turning people off if you bombard them with new emails every week. Quality is always better than quantity, and this is also true when determining what day or time to send your emails.
You won’t know the best days or times until you try different variations. Send your first campaign on Mondays, then switch it up and see if you get more responses when you send a similar email on a Wednesday. The best timing is different for every audience, so you’ll need to experiment before discovering your flow (at GMG, we’ve found 9 a.m. on Tuesday and Thursday is optimal). You should also use A/B (or split) testing on smaller sample groups to determine which variation of an email campaign will work best before you send it to your entire list.
5. Deploy Campaigns
You might be ready to send a full-on campaign to a specific audience you want to reach and connect with. However, you may have a lot of information to share about a new offering, or what you’re asking of your audience is a big commitment. This is when a drip campaign could help you drive leads. These require more time and expertise, but the payoff can be well worth it.
Drip campaigns consist of multiple emails about the same topic sent to the same group of people. Often a set of three, the first email sends to everyone, the second goes only to those who interacted with the first email, and the final email is the big sell for those who are really interested.
Enlist GMG for Your Email Campaigns
All of these steps take time, effort, and consistency, which can be difficult for a busy team of healthcare professionals to manage on their own. At Goldman Marketing Group, we take marketing-related tasks off your plate so you can focus on what matters most — your patients. With specialization in the medical space, our expert team of writers, designers, and marketing professionals can bring your email campaigns to life and reach your audience in innovative, effective, and engaging ways. Contact us today to learn more about how Goldman Marketing Group can drive leads for your practice with email marketing and other proven strategies.
