9 Great Tips to Measure Healthcare Email Marketing ROI

Emails are a great way to send patients personalized marketing messages or content through a secure private channel. That makes it valuable within the healthcare industry, where strong and strict laws protect clients and their information. Despite that and its inexpensiveness, you need a return on investment (ROI).

Here are healthcare email marketing tips that ensure you see returns from your campaigns:

1. Track campaigns with CRM
2. Personalize emails
3. Properly build a mailing list
4. Write simple messages
5. Add a compelling CTA button
6. Provide value
7. Work around spam filters
8. Use automation tools
9. Track campaign success

There is a lot to discuss, so get ready to take notes. Let’s go!

Are you looking for help with marketing your healthcare business? Watch the video below to learn our approach to healthcare marketing and why 150+ healthcare companies have chosen Digital Authority Partners to help them generate more leads and patient appointments.

1. Use a CRM to Track Your Campaigns

You can plan your healthcare email marketing strategy as carefully as you want, but the result can be a huge mess without a proper way to manage the sheer volume. You need a tool that can help you keep track of your email campaign.

Customer relationship management (CRM) software or tools, particularly Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA)-compliant ones, solve many healthcare email marketing woes. With a CRM, you can store your mailing list, write personalized emails, and track every email you send and reply you receive.

2. Make Your Emails Personally Relevant

One of the major benefits of healthcare email marketing is that you build and maintain strong relationships with your patients or clients. You can communicate directly and appeal to people better with personalized messages than through broad or generic content.

A personalized email allows you to discuss, offer, or introduce new or existing treatment options that your patient might not have been aware of before. Be cautious with what you include in an email because its security does not mean you can bring up protected health information (PHI).

3. Build Your Mailing List the Correct Way

An email marketing campaign cannot work if you do not have email addresses to send your message to, and that means you need a way to source them before you begin. The top of your healthcare email marketing checklist should be how to securely and ethically build your contact list. 

Do not feel tempted to buy lists off the internet or use dishonest tactics to get them from anyone other than the patients themselves. Instead, create value to encourage your potential patients to give you their email. For instance, offer free consultations or put email on the intake form.

4. Write Simple and Engaging Messages

No one likes to spend their time reading messages, especially not marketing ones—unless there’s value in it for them. For marketing emails to succeed in getting conversions, you need to keep them simple. Start with a message that is easy for anyone in your target market to understand.

From there, do what you can to personalize the message without inserting sensitive information. Doing this puts you on the path to being HIPAA- and ADA-compliant, another critical rule for healthcare businesses. In short, keep it simple, relevant, and still engaging.

5. Add a Compelling Call-to-Action Button

The value or point of your email should be made clear to the recipient (patient). And you should directly point out what they can do in response. For instance, if your email concerns free consultations on the first Thursday of September, make it extra clear.

Do so by adding a call-to-action (CTA) button that says ‘Book your appointment now’ or ‘Reserve your free consultation’ in a highly visible email section. Ensure the text is readable and the colors make the words stand out; otherwise, it becomes useless.

6. Provide Value with the Communication

A key theme in email marketing is “relevance.” No one wants to open an email that has nothing to do with their lives. Given the prevalence of scams and phishing emails, you can see why value has to be communicated throughout your email, starting with the subject line.

When you write your message, focus on the value you bring to the patient instead of what you get in return. Do not, however, make grandiose promises or false claims about the services you provide. It helps no one, least of all your healthcare practice, to be a source of misinformation.

7. Learn to Work Around the Spam Filters

People and email services are vigilant about scams and phishing attacks, meaning spam filters are a possible roadblock for your campaigns. Although email services have smart algorithms to take care of spam, many users apply their own rules to sift out any harmful emails.

For instance, words such as “free,”’ “all-natural,” and “guaranteed” will likely send your healthcare email marketing messages straight to spam. If not, buzzwords like the ones above are still not encouraging for most people because of their high use in scams, resulting in subpar open rates.

8. Employ an Automation Tool for Results

Sending an email might not seem like much of a challenge, but executing an email marketing strategy can be quite time-consuming. This is especially true if you have other protocols or steps to monitor your patients' interactions, analytics, engagement, and replies.

Leveraging email automation takes much of the difficulty out of any marketing strategy because you essentially delegate the rote tasks to a machine that can complete them without assistance. That leaves you with more time to focus on your interactions with patients and providing service.

9. Track Your Campaign Success Closely

Email marketing, like any other marketing strategy, produces analytics data that reveals its many successes and failures, efficiencies and inefficiencies, and effectiveness and ineffectiveness. For instance, you should know the successful delivery rate to improve your email marketing ROI.

To improve your ROI, you need to know what works and what does not. Open and bounce rates are other critical statistics to keep track of when analyzing your healthcare email marketing campaign. These tell you what your patients respond to most in marketing.

Summing Up

Emails are a handy tool for quick, cheap, and easy marketing, but that does not mean long mailing lists equal instant ROI or success. The quality of your strategy matters because getting people to open and interact with your marketing emails is an incredible challenge in and of itself.

Need help improving your healthcare email marketing ROI? Contact Digital Authority Partners (DAP) to learn how we can help.