While it may be one of the oldest marketing channels, medical email marketing still holds reign over being one of the most high-potential marketing channels, with over four billion users waiting for you to market to them. With time, like all the other marketing channels, email marketing has changed drastically as well, introducing efficient, budget-friendly, and interactive ways to connect with your patients and promote your medical services to them.
So, if you were considering scratching off email marketing from your list of medical marketing strategies in favor of a newer marketing channel, don’t. According to recent studies, email marketing accumulates an ROI of $38-$40 for every dollar you spend on your email marketing campaign. In fact, when it comes to its ROI, you should be looking for ways to use medical email marketing more efficiently. This is why learning the latest medical email marketing tips can help doctors leverage its potential to retain, market, and convert patients more efficiently.
Nine Latest Medical Email Marketing Tips For Doctors To Follow In 2022
If your reason for abandoning email marketing as a marketing channel is its low performance, then maybe it’s time to upgrade and optimize your medical email marketing campaigns instead of deserting the marketing channel entirely. Here are some latest tips you can follow for upgrading your medical email marketing campaign:
1. Track Your Campaigns’ Performance
Assessing the performance of your email marketing campaign is not a new concept to follow in 2022. In fact, it should be a part of your annual or bi-annual medical marketing performance evaluation and audits. You won’t be able to establish realistic objectives for the remainder of the year if you don’t make time to track and measure if your campaigns are bringing back positive numbers.
This data will not only show you how you compare to your medical competition, but it will also assist you in pinpointing particular areas in your campaign that demand your further attention. You can use the metrics below to measure the performance of your email marketing campaigns:
- Open rate
- Click-through rate
- Conversion rate
- Social sharing rate
- Click-to-open rate
- Unsubscribe rate
- Overall ROI
2. Learn More About Your Patient Audience
You can only proceed with implementing your medical marketing strategies once you have identified your target patient audience. Without it, every marketing effort you invest in is a shot in the dark. If you know your target audience, you will know what kind of content, titles, infographics, and tone to include in your emails. Having targeted audiences will naturally result in a higher engagement rate. Your email titles should reflect what’s inside the email. It’s easier to create effective marketing email copies if you’re targeting specific patient groups,
3. Transparency Is Key
The drive for sustainability has had a significant influence on marketing in general in 2021. However, sustainability encompasses much more than just the environmental effect. In medical marketing, it implies that you should always be transparent in your email marketing efforts.
Don’t try to obtain email addresses in a spammy way. It brings more harm than it does good. Obtaining the email addresses of your patients by tricking them or sending them click-bait or spam emails will alienate your audience, harm your healthcare practice, and risk your medical business being tagged as spam.
To avoid that, consider using a double-opt-in box and don’t check the opt-in box automatically. If your patients wish to receive your emails, let them mark the box and ask them to confirm in a follow-up email. You may even go a step further and allow them to choose which sorts of emails they want to receive. This will help you cultivate an engaged patient audience, making your campaigns more fruitful.
4. Implement User-Generated Content
You get the chance to attest to the credibility of your medical business by implementing user-generated content (UGC) in your medical email marketing campaigns. Your patients are more likely to trust your medical services if they can see how other patients have connected with your medical practice.
Implementing user-generated content is free of cost and you can begin creating it by asking your existing patients for reviews and testimonials and incorporating them into your promotional materials. Using user-generated content has become one of the most followed marketing practices in 2022, with an estimated worth of over six billion dollars by 2023.
5. Be More Personalized
One of the biggest developments in email marketing over the previous year was email customization or personalization, and it’s anticipated that it will continue to play a significant role in 2022. With every minute that you waste not taking advantage of this trend, you risk making your patients feel unappreciated and lose their interest in your medical services. Furthermore, patients now expect to see personalized emails from you. Here are some tips you can use to implement personalization in your email marketing campaigns:
- Make medical services recommendations to particular groups on your list
- Set up a trigger in your campaigns for patients who are not visiting or opening your emails anymore.
- Include the name of your receiver in your emails to make them feel individually cared for.
6. Take Advantage Of AI
More and more marketers are using artificial intelligence for their marketing strategies for handling tasks such as monitoring user engagement and providing tailored promotional experiences. You can also use AI features to analyze patient data such as engagement and click-to-open rates to predict their conversion behavior. If you’ve invested in a really good AI data software, it may even assist you in boosting your engagement and patient retention rates.
7. Offer Attractive Incentives
Patients are likely to click open your emails if they have something more than just promotional material within. Incorporate content snippets, informational videos, offers, discounts, or infographics in your emails to compel patients to open and view them. Just a simpl “Visit our website now” is no longer viable in medical email marketing.
8. Determine The Best Time And Days
Timing is crucial in medical email marketing. To boost your open rates, click-through rates, and ROI, you need to determine the best time and days to send your medical marketing emails to your patients. According to online reviews, the best days to send marketing emails are Tuesdays and Thursdays. These two days are when users are most active on their email accounts and are likely to open your emails. You can boost the performance of your medical email marketing campaign by sending your emails during afternoon hours.
9. Declutter And Re-Design
If your email design is cluttered and old-school, it won’t be attractive enough for patients to keep up with. Review the copy of your marketing emails and declutter any extra designs, CTAs, or blurbs that make them look jumbled. Try changing your color schemes, tones, or any graphics as well to freshen up your email copies. Minimalistic email designs are now popular in 2022 as they convey the message while appearing attractive and put-together.
2022 Is The Time To Brush Up On Your Medical Email Marketing Campaigns
It’s time to reconsider your approach if you’ve been ignoring medical email marketing all this time. Once you update your campaigns according to 2022 trends and write email copies targeted to specific patient groups, you’re likely to generate double the ROI as you would with any other medical marketing channel. A properly executed medical email marketing campaign can boost your patient conversion and engagement rates, retain existing patients, and strengthen your relationship with them.