Marketing is at the heart of any business‘s success, and healthcare organizations aren‘t exempt. For any medical practice owner trying to grow their practice to new heights, it’s essential to consider all available digital marketing avenues for today’s digitalized patients.

One of the most promising marketing channels is email marketing, and every practice owner should look into it for several reasons:

• Cost-effectiveness. The ROI on email marketing is extremely high, at $36 to $38 per $1 invested.
• Low labor. There’s no need to draft every single email and send it at a specific time. Email automation allows practices to reach more patients in less time.
• Good Reach. Per Constant Contact, email open rates for the healthcare industry sit at 22.89%, which is fantastic compared to other sectors.

As you can see, email marketing has some great perks and is worth considering. But the fact remains that if you don‘t know how to leverage this marketing channel, you won‘t see the growth you‘re looking for. So, in this article, we’ll give you helpful information you can use to grow your healthcare practice with a stellar email marketing campaign.

Healthcare Email Marketing Campaign Ideas for Your Patients

There are several types of emails healthcare providers can send to their patients to accomplish their practice’s unique objectives and foster growth. Keep reading to find out how to use email marketing to reach your prospects and existing patients.

• Promotional Emails - Healthcare professionals should leverage promotional emails to inform your patients of freebies and exclusive deals. This is a fantastic way to bring in new business or revive existing patient relationships. For example, a dermatology practice can send out patient emails informing them that they’ll be offering free skin exams on a given weekend. Doing so will drum up additional business from current patients and encourage new people to give the practice a try. ‍

• Email Newsletters - To stay top-of-mind, it's important to regularly send newsletters to existing patients. In the emails, you can consider a welcome email to all new patients, wellness tips, emerging research, and events or webinars that'll be coming up. For example, a general medicine practice can send out a monthly newsletter with a health-related article encouraging patients to take care of some aspect of their bodily health.

• Email Review Requests - The importance of patient reviews should never be underestimated – more than 70% of people look at reviews before visiting a new practice. But you won't receive many reviews if you don't ask for them. That's where review requests come in. Most practices send out review request emails shortly after a patient's visit, requesting that they share their honest opinion about the care they received.  

• Appointment Reminder Emails - To reduce no-shows and cancellations, send your patient appointment reminders via emails before their visit to the doctor’s office and include useful information like time and date, address, and contact information.

Now that you know a few types of emails you can incorporate into your email marketing campaign, we'd like to present some tips you can use immediately to jumpstart your email marketing efforts.

Make Sure Your Emails are HIPAA Compliant

Sending out emails with any information violating HIPAA privacy laws can result in sizable fines, criminal charges, and jail time. So, we must stress the importance of ensuring your emails are HIPAA compliant. It’s always a good idea to brush up on HIPAA regulations before drafting emails - here’s an overview of the privacy rules from the HIPAA Journal website.

Segment Your Target Audience

The truth is that not every patient in your practice should receive the same email. Why? If an email feels impersonal or overly generalized, your recipients may unsubscribe from your email list or simply ignore your emails. The solution? Segmentation.

Segmenting your audience can increase your emails’ relevance, boosting open rates and conversions. Though audience segmentation requires a bit of legwork, once you’ve gone through the initial segmentation process, you’ll have defined audiences to send tailored emails to.

You’ll need to first obtain relevant data on your target audience. Once you’ve got that information, group your patients and other targets according to specific criteria. Healthcare marketing teams often segment their targets and patients based on personal interests, location, gender, and more.

Optimize and Test Subject Lines

The first thing that your email recipients will see before opening up your emails is your subject line. Those 60 characters determine whether your patient will open the email, read it, or ignore it, and move on. So, you need to get your subject lines right.

Here are some tips to ensure that your subject lines are adequately optimized:

1. Make sure your subject line is straightforward and can be understood with just a glance.
2. Tailor your subject line to the segment you’re trying to communicate with.
3. By default, keep your subject lines short (under 60 characters).
4. Never use click-bait subject lines. They don’t go over well, especially in the healthcare industry.
5. Consider A/B testing your subject lines

Do you need some email subject line templates to get started? Read this article for some ideas. We recommend you use email templates as a guide and fine-tune them to your unique practice and objectives.

Testing your subject lines is paramount. How else will you know how well your subject lines are doing? The primary metric to keep track of is the open rate. If you notice that a specific subject line resulted in a low open rate, it’s time to tweak something about that subject line and try again.

This same thing applies to email content (what the recipient will see upon opening the email). To reach each segment, you need to send personalized email content. And to do that, you’ll need to get to know your audience intimately.

Watch Your Emailing Frequency

No one likes to be bombarded with emails, so it's never good when a practice sends constant emails to patients or prospects. Sending emails too infrequently can be a problem as well. Your email subscribers should know your practice and think of it before competitors - so it’s vital that you send enough emails to keep your practice on their minds.

Successful medical practices send out email communications twice a month and thrice a week. The sweet spot for your emailing frequency will likely fall in this range but may also vary based on the time of year. For instance, during the summer, you may send out a couple of extra emails here and there for seasonal events, webinars, or promotions.

Don't Forget to Include an Unsubscribe Link

To build trust with new prospects and keep your relationships with existing customers on good terms, ensure that every email contains an unsubscribe link. Your email subscribers should always be able to refuse your emails if that’s what they desire. It’s never good to force unsolicited advice, promotions, or requests on people.

Always Include a CTA

Any email meant to encourage a specific action from the recipient should include a CTA, also known as a call-to-action. For instance, if you‘re sending out a newsletter mentioning an event, clearly ask the recipient to sign up or reserve a spot. And on any email, you can include a CTA to opt-in to receive promotional emails.

When it comes to email marketing, you don’t want to be vague. That’s why you should always include a CTA, instructions, or a link to complete whatever action you’re encouraging. Otherwise, your target may be confused or even put off by the vagueness of the message.

DearDoc is Your Premier Email Marketing Companion

Even with the best of intentions, you’ll quickly realize that email marketing is no walk in the park. So, if you tackle email marketing without the appropriate tools, you’ll not only be exhausted, but you won’t be using your time wisely. That’s where technological innovations come in.

DearDoc is a technology-based companion poised to bolster your marketing efforts in a huge way. It’s a comprehensive suite of marketing and growth tools created specifically for medical practices. Here’s how it can help:

1. Send automated review request emails via their 5-star review generator, which sends automated emails to patients requesting a review. Leave your review requests to DearDoc so you can focus on other aspects of your email marketing campaign.
2. The AI Smart Chat lets you communicate with prospective patients seconds after they land on your site. With this technology, many practices have doubled the number of new patients they get from their website, and yours can too!
3. DearDoc’s AI Auto Dialer is a tool that enables you to call and speak with website visitors within a minute of receiving their contact information. You’ll be better positioned to beat out your competition due to your speed.

Book a quick demo to see how DearDoc can help your practice: