Complete Guide To Successful Healthcare Email Marketing

Recent studies show that a third of all marketers focus heavily on email marketing, and more than 70% have witnessed an increase in engagement through email this past year. In the same study, 80% of the participants were likely to open a welcome email and more than half of those surveyed said they buy something through marketing emails at least once every month.

But how can you implement successful healthcare email marketing?

The answer is a resounding yes! In this article, we take you through the most common factors contributing to a successful healthcare email marketing campaign.

Let's begin!

9 Steps To Successful Healthcare Email Marketing

     1. Build an Email List With Quality Leads

Growing an email list is incredibly important because it enables healthcare services to utilize their connection to patients. The more places you encourage patients to sign up, the more you will add to this list, and there is no end of opportunities in this respect. While it's common to see submission forms on the homepage of a website, you can just as easily gather sign-ups from social media or through an enticing lead magnet offer.

But a large email list is not necessarily an effective email list.

     2. Clean the Email List To Improve Deliverability

You need to improve your email list over time and make sure emails are actually reaching your audience. One way to do this is by using a verification tool such as Clean Your List, which identifies and removes unknown/fake email addresses on the list. This improves the deliverability of emails and helps ensure the accuracy of any metrics used for return on investment.

     3. Use Segmentation To Create Groups of Patients

Segmentation is a powerful marketing strategies and a way for healthcare services to connect the right messages with the right patients. This should make the content more relevant to recipients and improve the rate of opens and conversions. Marketers frequently segment an email list into three types of clients; past patients, existing patients, and new leads.

     4. Sync Landing Pages and Email Lists To Increase Conversion

It's so important to sync your landing pages with your list – something healthcare email marketing often neglects. Synching these two helps create a cohesive experience for patients and leads to a more congruent message, ultimately leading to higher conversion rates.

You can also track user behavior much better through this process and pinpoint parts of the sales funnel that might be working well or need improvement. This enhances the relationship between marketing and sales teams while identifying precisely where your new leads are coming from.

     5. Create Engaging Subject Lines That Demand Attention

When notification pings and promotions seem to happen every few seconds, it's hard to get any kind of attention online. This is why the subject line of an email is so important and why marketers need to be increasingly creative with their titles. It's also possible to track this performance. Search engine optimization (SEO) agencies most commonly use the open rate (percentage of people that open the email) to maximize the efficacy of email campaigns.

But how can you actually create a subject line that grabs attention?

Different types of subject lines can increase your open rate. SEO agencies often suggest urgency as the best way to gain traction. This simply means including a "window of opportunity" in the subject line, which implies the recipient should act now. It's possible to achieve similar results by creating a sense of curiosity or telling the recipient exactly what value they will receive in the email. A compelling question can produce great results.

     6. Ensure Transparency To Nurture Higher Open Rates

HIPAA compliance rules regulate healthcare email marketing and require healthcare services to avoid using any protected health information (PHI) in their emails. They must ensure email recipients opt-in to the marketing list and have a reasonable expectation of the type of content they will receive in return for their contact information. It must also be easy to opt-out, and a clear call-to-action must be displayed which allows them to unsubscribe.

That being said, the quality of content is just as important, and there’s no point in having a marketing campaign without giving recipients an incentive to open the emails. Avoid spammy sounding emails, and ensure you have a strong call to action that makes  readers want to take action. It’s all about transparency, but you also need to offer consistent value within these emails for recipients to trust and know their time is not wasted.

     7. Deploy an Automated Email Campaign

Marketers use a range of tactics to gain the most traction possible for a healthcare email marketing campaign. This includes using different strategies, which will usually include automated email campaigns. This is when a healthcare service sends out a series of curated emails over time that encourage patients to re-engage with the service. These campaigns tend to be highly targeted, and automation means they require very little management.

     8. Know Your Audience To Better Time Your Emails

It’s really important to get the timing right with email marketing, which is why marketers do a lot of research before committing to a particular time at which to send emails. But how can you possibly know when your audience will open the email? This is where you need to know your target market and figure out when most recipients are likely to check their inboxes. Studies suggest that 9 am to 3 pm between Monday and Thursday is a good place to begin, and healthcare services can then perform split tests to see what time produces the best results.

     9. Split Testing To Refine and Improve the Emails

You need to measure results and check everything from click-through rates and open rates to the number of new sign-ups. However, it’s also important to split-test these emails and use key performance indicators (KPIs) to identify which ones work best and what needs to be changed. Metrics like this are hugely important because they provide insight that helps marketers make better decisions and refine email campaigns to achieve the desired success.

Summing Up

Success with email marketing largely comes down to mastering the above points. While some healthcare services keep the efforts in-house, a marketing agency will certainly outperform in terms of results. This is also a complex process that requires full-time attention, and the peace of mind it can bring is often why most healthcare companies outsource this job to experts.

Ready to get on the path to success with email marketing?

Get in touch with one of our team at Digital Authority Partners today!