Healthcare is a multifaceted industry – where a cardiologist’s services are promoted differently from those of an orthodontist. Whatever the niche, there are a plethora of email marketing strategies for healthcare that everyone can deploy to drive patient engagement and improve retention. Whether you want to educate your audience or keep your brand on top of patients’ minds, email marketing for healthcare can help you maximise the benefit. In this post, we will look at the best email marketing strategies that will help you grow your patient base.
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1. What Is Healthcare Email Marketing?
Healthcare email marketing is one of the best digital marketing channels for establishing long-term patient relationships. It can help you extract the maximum benefit through effective segmentation. As a health marketer, you can send only relevant content to the right audience at the right time. According to sources, the open rate of healthcare emails is 22%, higher than in any other industry. It means half of the customers who regularly check emails are likely to open relevant mail. While healthcare is not all about profits, these numbers show that email marketing for healthcare continues to give remarkable results.
2. How Does Email Marketing for Healthcare Work?
Email marketing for healthcare is a strong option in every marketing plan, regardless of the niche or industry. Besides acquiring new patients, it lets you speak directly to your patients and create an emotional bond. Emails are the perfect way to target your audience because the recipients already give you their consent, meaning they are interested in hearing from your clinic, hospital, or healthcare centre. For example, you can email discount coupons, the latest happenings, industry news, updates and more to the ones who have subscribed to receive your emails.
3. What are the Types of Healthcare Emails?
1 Welcome Series
The welcome email is the first and most important email you should send to your prospects to introduce them to your practice. You can include information about your services, staff, contact information, office hours, and what they can expect during their first visit to your clinic. Welcome emails are the best opportunity to upsell other services that your practice offers and make the first impression.
2 Promotional Emails
Promotional emails are the best way to let your potential patients know about special offers and discounts you are offering. Whether it is a new product, service, or free consultation for new patients – you can send emails to educate your patients. In addition, you can be more creative with promotions by including contests or quizzes that offer patients an opportunity to win free services or merchandise.
3 Appointment Reminder
Appointment reminder emails are sent to prevent your patients from missing their visit. While missed appointments are unavoidable in some cases, the patients often get busy and forget about their appointments. In such cases, appointment reminder emails are a great way to maximise patient attendance and minimise cancellations or no-shows.
4 Newsletter
Email newsletters are often used by organisations to share relevant and valuable information. For example, you can send out relevant newsletters to patients and prospects weekly or monthly. It keeps everyone informed about what’s going on in your practice and makes them a part of your community. Within the newsletter, you can talk about your products, share informative blogs, or even have an informal conversation.
5 Survey Emails
It is always a good idea to send out a survey to your clients and patients. Within the survey emails, you can include questions about how everyone is finding the service and where there could be room for improvement. Today, businesses are about being customer-centric and having a patient experience. If you offer poor or average-quality service, you may lose your patients to other clinics or hospitals. You can put your customers at the centre of every decision you make through survey emails.
4. 10 Healthcare Email Marketing Strategies to Increase Patient Retention
1. Build Audience List
Email marketing for healthcare is an easy way to educate your audience about your services. To set up a successful email marketing campaign for your healthcare, you need to build your audience and create winning content that catches their attention. Establishing your expertise and generating interesting queries will allow you to make your email list.
Some of the ways to make your audience list are –
- Use embedded signup forms
- Introduce gamification
- Deploy popups and overlays
- Use referral programs
- Invite to subscribe.
You can even offer a free guide or a discount coupon on their next visit to your clinic. Also, encourage people who walk in for a consultation to fill details in a paper form and take their consent if it is ok to send them the offers, newsletters, and other updates.
2. Use Segmenting
Audience segmentation is another crucial step in healthcare email marketing. Since everyone on your list might not be interested in specifically knowing about cardiac conditions or pulmonary diseases. You need to segment the audience based on relevant age groups, gender, demographics, and interests. Once you have an extensive list of audiences, create different categories based on the most suitable criteria for your services.
3. Leverage automation
Automating healthcare emails is another best way to nurture prospects and turn them into potential clients. When you want to scale your marketing and have hundreds or thousands of individuals, automating the emails is a wise option. By automating the workflows, you can seamlessly engage the new leads, engage the existing ones, and retain them for longer.
4. Create Different Healthcare Email Campaigns
Email marketing for healthcare can take different forms depending on the goals of your marketing efforts. From educational messaging to promotional, you can create various healthcare email campaigns to meet your requirements. For instance, if you want to regenerate qualified leads, you can send emails with discounts or coupon codes to gain traction. Conversely, you can send ebook downloads or signup emails if you want to boost brand awareness.
5. Write Engaging Subject Lines
Subject lines play a critical role in improving the open rate and CTRs. As per sources, nearly 333.2 billion emails are sent daily, which means your patient’s inboxes are filled with dozens of emails. To grab the attention of your patients, you need to create catchy subject lines with attractive messaging. Make sure to keep the subject lines short, emotionally appealing with beautiful icons or emojis.
6. Include a CTA
Call-To-Actions (CTAs) is that piece of content that encourages the audience to take the desired action. According to Litmus, email marketing is one of those digital channels with the highest ROI. You can take advantage of this by creating an email with CTA buttons such as “Schedule Appointment”, “Book Now”, “Join Us”, or “Learn More”.
7. Schedule at the Correct Times
You should always schedule emails at the right time and on the right day. For example, hospitals often make the mistake of sending emails to their patients all day. But, if it arrives in their inbox at the wrong time, they may not open and go through it. According to sources, the best times to send healthcare emails are 10 am on Tuesdays and 2 pm on Wednesdays. You can also experiment by sending your emails on other days at different times and comparing the opens/clicks.
8. Pick the Right Frequency
Depending on your objectives, you can decide the frequency of your emails – daily, weekly, or monthly. It also depends on how you want to interact with your audience. Your email marketing frequency should be based on your typical patient cycle and profile. For example, if the patient visits once in 6 months, don’t target them with emails right after their visit. Conversely, if you are a reputed doctor who stands at the top of people’s minds, you can schedule emails once a month.
9. Use Mobile-Friendly Healthcare Templates
In email marketing for healthcare, you can use mobile-friendly healthcare email templates – where the buttons, images, and text sizes adjust according to the mobile screen sizes. Since most people prefer to view their content on mobiles, healthcare email templates can be incredibly useful.. There are several email template designers to choose from, such as – Unlayer, Stripo, Beefree, and Topol. By implementing these email templates into your workflow, you will only have to do the groundwork once.
10. Make Unsubscribing Easy
When it comes to email marketing for healthcare, you need to make it easier for people to opt out of receiving emails. If you don’t provide an easy way for people to unsubscribe, they will mark your emails as spam, eventually hurting your domain score. Put an unsubscribe link at the bottom of the email or footer. Whenever someone clicks on it, they should be unsubscribed from the list without many steps.
5. Case Study Examples of Email Marketing for Healthcare
- Mayo Clinic
Mayo Clinic, one of the reputed nonprofit healthcare centres in America, focuses on clinical practice and research. They leveraged the power of email marketing for healthcare to drive more traffic to their website. Their welcome email series not only outlines their value proposition but also offers valuable welcome discounts to prospects. Below is the template of the welcome series used by the Mayo Clinic to nurture their leads.
- CVS Pharmacy
CVS Pharmacy, a subsidiary of CVS health, is one of the vital healthcare service providers in the United States. They implemented an email marketing campaign that was quite effective and helped them engage their clients. As a part of their email marketing strategy for healthcare, they sent highly targeted messages to segmented audiences.
6. FAQS
- Why Are Emails Important in Healthcare?
Email marketing in healthcare helps you improve efficiency, responsiveness, quality of healthcare, and patient focus. It is a reliable option for every healthcare marketer to obtain new patients, nurture existing ones, and retain them for longer.
- How Do You Do Digital Marketing in Healthcare?
There are many digital marketing strategies, such as – SEO, social media marketing, content marketing, and email marketing, to drive new patients, engage them, and retain them for longer.
- How Can Email Be Used in Healthcare?
Emails can be used in healthcare marketing in many ways, such as – welcome series, promotional emails, newsletters, survey emails, feedback emails, and more.
7. About Growth Ganik
Growth Ganik is a rapidly evolving digital marketing agency in Sydney, Australia, specialising in SEO, content marketing, marketing strategy, and lead generation.
We work with clients from leading brands and industries such as B2B SaaS, nonprofits, and more to develop profitable digital marketing solutions that are data-driven to support all kinds of business goals – from widening user bases and gaining more traction for online engagement to increasing conversion and helping businesses scale up.
For creative tailor-made digital solutions and sustainable growth insights, get in touch with us!
