What does healthcare email marketing do for your practice and your patients?
Whether you're starting your medical email marketing from scratch or trying to pick up where you left off, email marketing can make a huge impact on how you connect with your patients.
When you only have 15-30 minutes to discuss conditions, questions, and treatments face-to-face with your patients there's such a huge potential that information about the services and products you offer is getting left on the table. Plus, besides regularly calling your patients directly, email is the only other direct connection you have with them.
Through healthcare email marketing, you engage and connect with patients
Communicate in a way that is comfortable for every generation -millennials and boomers included
Even though our inboxes are full, many people prefer to communicate via email or be informed about new things from companies they love, directly in their inbox. An astounding 74% of Boomers prefer emails as the most personal channel to communicate with businesses and brands.
Think about all the times that an email reminded you that you wanted to buy something before the sale ran out. Or you were glad when seeing an email reminded you to book that appointment or flight.
Re-engage the interests of current patients and share the additional services you offer
From the saturation of neighboring practices and med spas, patients could very well be receiving treatments from multiple providers in the area. How convenient would it be if they could take care of all of their skin needs with you? By re-engaging with current patients you’re naturally opening lines of communication regarding services and products that suit them well.
Provide value and share accurate information that is relevant to trends, seasons, or specific skin concerns
Email is the perfect way to emphasize the importance of skin checks or using sunscreen. It also serves to myth bust social media trends and helps shed light on untruths, making you a resource for trusted information.
Through email, you can specifically target patients with information that’s relevant to them. You can also analyze your emails to get an understanding of which topics resonate most with your audience.
You can redirect patients back to your website through blog articles, videos, or product links
It helps your overall search results when you increase website traffic, meaning URL links lead back to your website. Ultimately increased website traffic should lead to practice awareness, awareness of services and products you offer, and an increase in new, returning, or referral appointments.
Practice updates so your patients always know what’s going
When service is interrupted for one reason or another (weather, down phones, internet issues), you have a new provider starting with a schedule to fill, you have a new device with little downtime, you have special COVID requirements, etc.
Even if your patient population extends from Millenials to Baby Boomers, all of them check their email and engage with businesses in the ways I described above.
When you reach out regularly to your patients you’re always on their minds -even if they don’t open your emails right away.
What your consistent email communication does, is continue to let your patients know what you do, how you can help, and that you’re the place to go when they are in need.
I’m tellin’ ya, people like to be reminded in their email. If they’re not searching for something directly on a website, the email is the perfect place for that “oh yeah, that’s right I was looking at those skincare products” reminders. I mean, 78% of marketers saw an uptick in email engagement in 2020 alone. Pandemic or not, digital communication isn’t stopping anytime soon.
Email also has a long shelf life. Meaning that a person might not open their email right away but come back to it, make a mental note about it, save it to a folder, or open the next one you send because they meant to open the last one anyway.
Wondering how email marketing could help your aesthetics, cosmetic or med spa practice? Book a consult to discuss.
stats source Bluecore
Healthcare email marketing is meant to send helpful information to patients about things like…
Product and treatments deals
Practice updates
Provider highlights
Disease and treatment info
Ways to connect with your practice
Trending topics
Blog articles
Treatment overviews
Before and afters
Invitations to events
…and more
Healthcare email marketing helps you stand out from the crowd
While you may be thinking your patient’s inboxes are overflowing and that’s keeping you from sending more, one thing is true, people keep the businesses they want in their inbox.
Healthcare email marketing is growing because practices realize the benefit of building a connection outside the office and providing value to the patient to help them stand out from other nearby dermatology and non-dermatology practices.
Patients have many choices, especially when they’re paying for a cash pay service. Taking the time to stand out from the rest is critical to a small business’ success, especially in a saturated market.
Believe it or not, the more you pop into someone’s email, the more likely they are to open. When random, unrecognizable emails come from businesses I didn’t, or don’t remember subscribing to, I do not open them. Or I open them to unsubscribe because I haven’t needed them before, why should I need them now?
One of the keys to getting your emails opened is actually through consistency and getting people used to seeing your subject lines. When you continue to reach out with relevant information, something is bound to catch their eye and get them to open your email. And if that doesn’t happen, it wasn’t meant to happen. The people who want to connect with you on that level will open their emails and the ROI’s there to prove it.
Email marketing can be inexpensive for your medical practice
Email marketing could potentially be one of the least expensive forms of marketing you can do, besides social media. In fact, it’s technically free for some plans.
Based on your practice needs, you can choose to hire out for email marketing or do it yourself in-house.
…Either way, it benefits you now and in the long run.
Email marketing can be a cost-effective way to reach out to your potential, new, and current patients. It gives you direct contact information, and you own it —unlike social media.
Email marketing has a general industry ROI of 36:1 (pretty fantastic I’d say) so in the event, you want to sell a product online or drive patient traffic to a new practice location, you have the tools and the list to do it.
Besides the time it takes to craft your emails, email marketing is something you can set up, automate, and let it help foster the practice-patient relationship for you. There’s trust in consistency and showing up regularly and email is a fabulous way to build that trust.
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