ExecutiveChronicles | How to Upgrade Your Healthcare Email Marketing | Are your healthcare email marketing results stalling or tanking? It is time for an upgrade.
This five-step guide will help you overhaul your email marketing strategies and rev up your medical practice online once again.
Boost Your Medical Email Marketing Results with These 5 Steps
Email marketing works, especially if you are in the healthcare industry. It connects with patients, builds loyalty, and even increases patient retention.
But the positive effects can plateau or decline. Sometimes you feel you can do more to engage your patients and make the most of the email lists you have worked so hard to build.
How do you bring your email marketing strategies back on track fast? Read this guide:
1. Audit Your Email Marketing Plan
Doctors cannot treat a patient without knowing the problem. The same goes for email marketing. Step back and take a good look at your current strategies, tactics, and campaigns.
- Do you have the right goal in mind?
- Are you using the proper tone in your emails?
- Do you just stick to one-size-fits-all messages or tailor them according to the type of patient or the particular need?
- Are you using automation or relying on manual processes to send messages?
Know the answers by taking these steps:
- Review your past performance. Look into your metrics or key performance indicators (KPIs) at least for the last six months. Pay close attention to your open, click-through, and bounce rates. Do not ignore spam complaints, unsubscribe requests, and opt-outs either.
- Revisit your marketing goals. You might not get the desired results because your priorities and objectives have changed. If not, your content does not align with your goals.
Once you have the data on hand, you can proceed with step 2.
2. Hyper-Personalize Your Audience
According to Digital Authority Partners (DAP), personalization is your ticket to better patient engagement. After all, nothing appeals to your readers more than content that speaks to them.
But since we are on the subject of upgrades, we also should take this healthcare marketing tactic to a higher level: hyper-personalization.
What is it?
- It is a marketing approach aiming to further break down an already-segmented target audience to customize content and user experience.
- Hyper-personalization uses new technologies, such as artificial intelligence and big data, to generate more granular customer insights.
- It focuses on providing tailor-fit messages for each person in your target audience by considering their needs and preferences.
Here is an illustration. Say you are a chiropractic clinic whose clients are 60% seniors. When you hyper-personalize, the email marketing process becomes this:
- Use automation, AI, and big data tools to curate massive audience information. Do not worry, your options are abundant, and the features are similar. You can conveniently use several simultaneously or shift from one brand to another.
- Segment your target audience based on their profiles and other criteria. These can include age, medical conditions, location, and income. You can also consider their treatment challenges, lifestyle, and other factors.
- Study user behavior. Monitor their responses to your emails and other communications. For instance, what devices do they use to open your emails? What content types do they prefer, and which ones do they avoid?
- Create custom content and offers. Once you have the data, generate personalized messages for each segment. For example, seniors with limited mobility may prefer workout routines they can do at home to supplement chiropractic services.
3. Improve Your Content Quality
No matter how segmented and personalized your messages are, it will not make a difference if the content is not up to par.
Bring your email content up a notch with these ideas:
- Make sure that all emails contain relevant, useful information. While it helps to be creative with your content, always consider the purpose of each message. Stick to one idea each time to avoid overwhelming your readers.
- Incorporate storytelling into your messages. Use stories to bring out the emotional side of a topic or situation to help humanize your communications. Share user-generated content, testimonials, success stories, and other real-life experiences.
- Test before sending. Experiments help to determine which strategies work best for your campaigns. Try out different combinations of subject lines, messages, visuals, offers, calls to action (CTAs), and other elements.
- Use visuals smartly. Add visuals to your emails, such as images and videos, to grab attention. Avoid using too many high-resolution graphics that could slow down the page’s loading time.
4. Automate the Email Marketing Process
Automation is your ally to maximizing digital marketing benefits. It streamlines email marketing operations, from content creation to segmentation and distribution. Here are some ideas:
- Set up a customer relationship management (CRM) platform for collecting data about your customers, including their preferences and histories (do not forget HIPAA marketing rules)
- Try using automated email marketing tools for creating campaigns, scheduling messages, personalizing content, segmenting audiences, tracking results, and more
- Set up automated campaigns, such as welcome sequences and anniversary emails
- Configure autoresponders to respond automatically to customer inquiries and comments
- Create personalized offers with dynamic content that changes based on customer data
- Optimize messages for mobile devices, extend automated emails, test multiple versions of your messages, and much more
5. Continuously Track and Review Your Email Marketing Performance
You have found a way to improve your marketing strategies because you took the time to track and review your email marketing performance. Now, the goal is to maintain or improve this step.
Here is how to do it:
- Set aside time for review and reporting. Schedule a review of your email campaigns at least once a quarter. Analyze the data and identify opportunities for improvement.
- Update your KPIs. Are the ones you have still relevant? How does your performance compare to the industry average or your competitors? Perhaps you should start tracking new metrics.
- Apply new email marketing strategies and monitor them. Many tactics are worth trying, such as zero-party data collection, dark modes, and growth loops. Keep a close eye on how they affect your results.
- Ask your readers how you are doing. Use surveys and polls to get customer feedback. Find out what they think about your emails, content, and offers.
Summing Up
Healthcare email marketing is like the best medicine: it helps your medical practice thrive by keeping your audience engaged and active. But its benefits are only as good as your commitment to continuously improve your campaigns.
Adopt the above tips to get it back on track quickly. For a faster approach, work with a healthcare marketing agency that understands the specific needs of your practice and can help you create a targeted, successful email marketing campaign.
