5 Ways Medical Email Marketing Can Help Your Practice
Email is one of the most crucial marketing tools for medical practices, particularly in the past few years as the pandemic accelerated the digitization of the healthcare industry. Email’s versatility means you can use the messaging medium for patient acquisition, lead generation, and brand awareness.
There are many arguments for the ever-increasing popularity of email and why it remains the pillar of healthcare communication. However, we’re primarily concerned with key reasons why email has gained such immense utility as a healthcare marketing tool.
Today, we’ll cover the top five ways medical practices stand to benefit from email marketing.
The Key Benefits of Email Marketing for Medical Practices
Let’s cover the main benefits of using email marketing for your practice.
1- Medical email marketing can help your practice save money
As far as marketing and communication go, email has become nearly synonymous with cost-effectiveness, and it’s easy to see why. First, email and cheap go hand in hand. Your medical practice must pay email service companies, and you’ll have to foot the monthly bill associated with marketing automation.
However, the costs associated with medical email marketing pale in comparison to expenses linked with other marketing touch-points and channels. For instance, direct mail automation — a marketing technique still favored by some healthcare organizations — can cost $600 for every 1000 mail pieces, which is 100 times more than the average cost for medical email marketing.
As said by Digital Authority Partners, healthcare email marketing campaigns are incredibly profitable. Medical practices can expect a return of $42 for every dollar they spend on email marketing. Whether your goal is retaining current patients, attracting new patients, or anything in between, an effective healthcare email marketing strategy can yield a high return on investment (ROI) with little resource spending and fairly short timelines.
A 4,200% return on investment is certainly something to write home about! Plus, medical practices have an average email open rate of 21.5%, compared to just 21.3% across the board.
The bottom line is that medical email marketing not only works but also won’t break the bank!
2- Everyone uses email (including your patients)
Email matters more than ever, partly thanks to the sheer number of email users worldwide. And the chances are that 100% of your prospects, high-quality leads, and existing patients use it regularly.
While it may seem like a dated digital channel compared to mobile apps and social media, email enjoys an active user base of over four billion people. Google’s Gmail alone boasts more than a billion active email users, with over 300 billion emails sent and received daily.
It’s easy to understand why medical marketers are leveraging healthcare email marketing to promote their practices, boost brand awareness, and drive engagement.
At the very least, your practice should use email as the baseline for patient communication and identity. Let’s put it this way: If you want to fish, you’d better choose a pond with plenty of fish, and email is an ocean of abundance.
3- Medical email can help practices execute personalized and precise marketing campaigns
IFor the most direct channel to reach a target audience, look no further than email and its inherent potential for personalized marketing. It’s easy to segment your patients based on their email addresses.
More specifically, medical practices can also grow and segment their mailing lists using email addresses aggregated from doctor’s office registrations, newsletter enrollments, signup forms, and blog subscribers.
Beyond that, they can sift through simple demographic data like age, location, job title, and gender to better understand their target patient. User research can also help medical marketers get a clearer idea of what their target audience is interested in.
Everything from prior engagements to demographic info can help medical practices create personalized and precise healthcare email marketing campaigns. And the thing about personalized email marketing is that it works:
● Recipients are 26% more like to open emails with personalized subject lines
● Segmented email marketing campaigns are 75% more likely to be opened
As you create and run more campaigns, you also collect more email marketing data, such as click-through rates (CTRs), bounce rates, and open rates that can guide your future efforts. For instance, from your research, you might notice that most recipients read your messages on Monday morning.
Yes, results might differ from practice to practice, but the point is that you can track and measure the key performance indicators of your email marketing with high precision. This level of precise tracking of metrics like success and ROI allows medical practices to pivot their email marketing strategies accordingly. Few, if any, other marketing channels are that precise.
4- Email can help medical practices boost patient loyalty
The ability to build and boost patient loyalty is a huge benefit of healthcare email marketing that’s often overlooked. It enables medical practices to send communication emails to patients (for instance, an appointment confirmation) and is an incredibly helpful support channel.
More than anything, medical marketers can use the same email marketing tactics they use to attract, delight, and convert prospects for patient retention efforts. After all, the best patient to convert is the one that your practice already has. If current patients continue to get high-quality and useful emails that resonate with them, they’re likely to take further action.
For example, if you have a patient receiving ongoing treatment for substance use disorder, he is also likely to be interested in post-treatment support. It’s the same trick that big tech companies like Amazon use. If they notice you checked out tennis shoes, you’ll get offers on tennis socks or rackets in your inbox.
5- Email marketing can help medical practices improve patient engagement and trust
You can deliver timely and precise information that your patients need through email, building trust and promoting positive connections between your healthcare brand and patients. In other words, medical email marketing can help keep your audience (aka patients and prospects) in the loop even if they don’t need medical care.
Of course, practices can use a myriad of tactics and methods to build trust and credibility through medical email marketing. Firstly, sending personalized messages (such as those that salute patients using their first names) can help communicate personal value, establish trust, and instill customer loyalty.
Making sure your messages adhere to CAN-SPAM ACT and HIPAA regulations is another effective way to establish trust with your patients through medical emails. It can also help to segment your email list so that you can send tailored messages to the right recipients at the right time.
Final Thoughts
As you can clearly see from the examples above, healthcare email marketing can benefit your medical practice in many ways. It’s a powerful channel that can help your practice build brand awareness, boost patient loyalty, nurture existing patients, and optimize the use of marketing dollars.
5 Ways Medical Email Marketing Can Help Your Practice
