5 Healthcare Email Marketing Tips Proven to Lift Your Practice

Email marketing is not dead, as some people believe. In fact, it remains the most effective digital marketing strategy for healthcare professionals.

Why is it so? People consider emails less intrusive. They do not feel committed to taking any offer or trying a product, like what happens in a pushy phone call or text. That is why healthcare practitioners wanting to expand their reach and promote their brands should look into email marketing. 

Let us talk about some healthcare email marketing tips that can help grow your practice.

1. Publish Healthcare Newsletters

Newsletters help you communicate directly with patients. Using content they want to read, you can engage patients more personally and effectively. It helps you send relevant offers and promotions straight to your patient’s inbox.

But before your patients get your newsletters, they need to subscribe. This is the most critical part of the process. During sign-up, they provide valuable information you can use in future marketing campaigns, like their name, email, location, gender, age, and more. They can also fill out a questionnaire or a quiz about their preferred newsletter content.

Remember that you are working with protected health information (PHI). How you store this information and use it for email communication should comply with the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA). This is to ensure the security of sensitive patient information. 

Once you have the needed patient details, create engaging, well-crafted, professional, and quality newsletters. Here are tips for creating attention-grabbing newsletters:

• Create balanced content. Newsletters must be 90% educational or /informative and only 10% promotional.
• Use minimalist design and copy. Avoid clutter; help readers focus on important information or content. White space helps remove the chaotic feel and makes it easier to find the link you want readers to click.
• Ensure images have alt text. Alternative text or alt text is a description of what an image is showing. When an image fails to load, this text appears instead. Also, it helps visually impaired people understand what an image is about. 
• Allow easy unsubscribing. This keeps your email away from the spam folder. With easy unsubscribe options, you keep your newsletter subscriber list updated.

Chances are, your competitors also use newsletters with email marketing to engage their audience. Learn the different marketing trend predictions for the end of 2022 to stay focused on your goals.

2. Craft Enticing Promotional Emails

Digitalauthority.me reports that email marketing is among the best ways to drive more patients to your clinic and announce promotions. Whether offering a free service or a discount promo, you can reach out through email.

But be very careful not to sound too promotional. Using the word “free” in your promotional emails can lead to inaccurate flagging, with your emails ending up in spam folders.

Emphasize the value your patients get from your offer rather than focusing on the discount or freebie. Try the following tips:

• Have a single goal. Focus on key actions that you want your patients to do.
• Include your brand name. Promote trust and let your readers know your email is not spam.
• Use patients’ names. Doing so gets your patients’ attention and lets them know that your email is not spam.
• Optimize the main content of your email. Create interesting but crisp content using a conversational tone and readable fonts. Add a visible call-to-action (CTA) button/
• Add graphics to email content. Capture readers’ interest and convey messages faster with images.
• Create a mobile-friendly promotional email. Most marketers optimize emails for mobile, considering it a crucial part of their strategies. Do the same: keep email copies concise and place CTAs in the front and center. Test your email across different mobile devices before going live.

3. Highlight Social Media Updates

Update your patients about your social media activity. For example, if you are working with other doctors in your area to get people vaccinated against COVID-19, post videos, pictures, or a status update on your social media page. Promote this post by sending an email to your audience.

Patients receiving social media updates through email can pay more attention to the most important posts in your social media campaigns, like your community involvement, partnerships, etc. Besides, they feel valued as you are taking time to update them in a more personal way.

Your email could also ask your patients to follow you on social media. Here are some tips to help you get started: 

• Reward your audience for following you on your social media page. Give away free guides or a gift your patients will appreciate and use.
• Share upfront what they get. Tell them the benefits of following your social media site.
• Include all your social media links. Offer a variety of social media choices. Let your readers choose the platform they are comfortable with.
• Keep your email copy short. Avoid stuffing the email body with many CTAs.
• Use a bulleted list to highlight your benefits. Help readers easily scan your email and immediately take action.

Use email marketing with social media to engage more people. Use practical social media marketing strategies to get you started.

4. Include Educational Content

Offer ways your patients can obtain educational information. Let them know through email that you have resources available for them at any time.

Offer your blog site, e-books, podcasts, and webinars. Explain how these resources can help them make valuable choices, though they can still reach you at any time. Create better educational and healthcare emails with the following tips:

• Insert links throughout the content. Give your patients a variety of ways to digest your educational content. Include links to your YouTube videos, blog posts, or social media accounts.
• Use infographics. This is a visual representation of information that helps readers understand details easily. Infographics help draw audience attention and increase engagement.
• Provide quizzes, e-learning games, and simulations. Learning something new could be fun. Use your email to send games, simulations, quizzes, and presentations.

5. Create Informative Emails

Emails can also help send information to patients. Nowadays, getting misled by incorrect medical information is easy. A February 2022 survey revealed that 42% of American adults worry about whether or not the news they find on social media is accurate. 

Ease these worries by providing accurate, well-researched, and high-quality information through email. Here are essential strategies for creating informative emails.

• Create and use an email template. This helps you make instant, consistent, error-free responses to your patients.
• Do not overcommunicate. Engage your patients with a piece of information, but do not confuse or overwhelm them. Make informative email copies brief and to the point, but include links to where patients can get additional information. 
• Use good subject lines. When sending informative emails, include a date in the subject line if you plan to send a series of emails, like a report or a situational update.
• Always check your tone. Whether you want to break some bad news about a disease outbreak or a cure for cancer, choose your words wisely. Consider punctuation, sentence length, and capitalization to avoid misinterpretation.

Summing Up:

Email marketing can promote your healthcare practice if you follow our five top strategies. Use email to promote newsletters, announce a promotion, and highlight social media updates. Emails can also provide information and educational content.

When done right, email marketing can be a powerful way to get more people to visit your clinic online and in person.