Email marketing campaigns for your clinic patients can significantly improve patient experience and improve their attitude towards your healthcare service and a possible treatment they may have had. However, staying in regular touch with your past and prospective patients via email is often overlooked and for reasons that have nothing to do with medical practice or privacy issues.
The Return on Investment (ROI) of an average email marketing campaign is around $36 for every $1 invested, so considering email as a viable communications platform (however single-directional) is probably the best way to go for long-term benefits and increased traffic on your website. You can achieve the same effect through social media funneling if you run a private clinic, that traffic combined with a good conversion rate results in more future patients.
If you want to improve your conversion rate and increase your patients’ experience, follow our steps to create the best possible email for your private health clinic, dental clinic, or plastic surgery clinic.
First things first, you should not send too many emails a day. You may consider sending 1-2 emails to your email newsletter subscribers per month. The contents should not be repetitive, and you should send emails only when there is something to communicate to your email list.
We recommend that you send different emails once a month, plus a regular one (possible roundup of blog posts) once a month. This should be enough to cover your basic communication needs and will not bother your patient readership too often so that they are not tempted to unsubscribe. Do not worry too much about overdoing emails; after all, online services in the healthcare industry have been around for a while.
Once you’ve decided on the kinds of emails, you will be sending each month or biweekly, it is time to focus on the email itself. While structuring your Healthcare email newsletter, you should pay attention to two tiers of information. The first tier relates to the contents of the email itself. The second relates to all the meta-elements you should pay attention to to ensure your email is a pleasant experience and ensure your future healthcare emails are read. Focus on your target audience and speak their language.
The First Step
If you can adequately detect your audience, their age, interests, and the language they use, ensure you include this kind of information in your email. Of course, do not mention anything, but rather make your speech more flexible and suited to the audience.
Speak Directly to Your Audience
Speaking of language, you should also talk directly to your audience. Address them frequently by referring to them as ‘you.’ Use other pronouns as well, since they bring about a closer tone and may positively impact establishing a good rapport with your healthcare customers early on.
Make It Personal
Whenever possible, and if local regulation allows for this, include a header in your emails where you address your healthcare email recipient by their name. This patient-centered health approach will further help establish a good report and positively affect the patient. Nobody wants to be yet another number, so patients gravitate to doctors who can develop closer connections with them.
Use a Catchy Subject Line
A good subject line is more likely to attract readers to open your email. An average American receives 40 emails a day, so making sure your email stands out is the way to go. Using Caps Lock, but sporadically, will also ensure extra visibility.
Include Physical Address in the Email
Including a physical address is required by law in some states, but you should also include it in all emails so that people know WHERE you work. They can easily find this information on Google. Including it in your email takes one step away from the steps your prospective patients have to take to reach you for a procedure.
Create Original Content
Creating Original Content was always the best way to approach an audience. Both people and search engines want to see that you have something new to offer. You may not develop a new procedure, but making sure your healthcare content writing team has a fresh approach will ensure you have something valuable to contribute to the market.
Vary the Type of Content Included
In making a variety of emails, you should consider the following types of email newsletters:
Educational emails
Educational emails – teaching your audience about new procedures in the market, new medicine, pain relievers, or even non-surgical procedures that your audience can benefit from,
A Roundup of Blog Posts
A roundup of blog posts – regularly posting on your blog will rank you better on search engines, so possible new patients will find you more frequently. Emailing the latest contents of your blog regularly will also increase the number of visitors and help establish a trusted brand image among your patients,
Informational Email Newsletter
Informational Email Newsletter – Offering new information on the clinic or your practice, such as work hours, new staff members, and other information your audience may want to hear. This can also help establish the image of your clinic as a friendly, family-like place,
Promotional Email Newsletter
Promotional Email Newsletter – a promotional email newsletter can present your patients with information on any new procedures, discounts, and open-door events you may organize. In plastic surgery, it is a common practice that clinics use promotional emails to promote other clinics that may complement their services or even new surgeons who join their practice.
The Second Step
It would help if you only implemented the second step once. The first email in a series you send out should be a masterpiece that you should only tweak here and there on the off-page level to see whether different formatting approaches and styling can improve your click-through rate.
Use Newsletter as a Portal to Your Website
Your newsletter does not bring much value on its own. However, the real power and why email campaigns pay off so much is that they can direct your audience where you need them – on your website. Here, every visit is counted and may convert more readers into potential patients.
Write Mobile-Friendly Emails
Today, most users read emails on the go, on much smaller screens than your laptop screen. To ensure the body of your healthcare newsletter is easy to read, speak to experts – either a good content marketing agency or your IT and find out what they can do to make your healthcare emails more suited to the small screen.
Pay Attention to Formatting Specificities
Formatting specificities can include but are not limited to text color, font size, visuals, text justification, and overuse of space of the screen. Here, you can pay attention to the negative space as well. Negative space can improve the page’s readability and increase the time your audience spends in front of the screen.
Creating a positive patient experience on your website is likely to keep prospective and existing patients, as well as those who come for informational purposes only for longer, on your website. This reduces your bounce rate and makes you score higher on search engines.
Final Considerations
With a high ROI, newsletter emails in the healthcare niche are an excellent way to ensure you increase your patient numbers and make past patients return for more healthcare services. Creating an email sounds easy enough, but making a good email can be very difficult. Knowing your audience, the exact message you want to send, and the technicalities that make a good email will ensure a successful email campaign and enable the sustainable growth of your healthcare practice.
