- Jul 18, 2019
Email marketing can help hospitals reach patients from any corner of the globe. Hospitals can connect and communicate with current and future patients at any time and from anywhere. Emails have global reach and can take hospitals to a wider audience within a fraction of second via healthcare email marketing campaigns. It is considered to be the most effective and targeted ways to establish a relationship with potential customers, and that is why more than 50% of B2B marketers leverage email as their marketing strategy.
However, to effectively use email marketing, hospitals will need an accurate list of the email address of patients besides other strategies. Without the right contact, hospitals cannot get successful results from their healthcare email campaigns. The following are eight strategies that will guide hospitals on how to get started with their email campaigns to reach the desired objective.
Get Email Addresses of Contacts
The first thing hospitals planning to leverage email marketing need is contact information. To get the email addresses of patients, hospitals can either purchase an email list or collect themselves through online subscription forms available on their website. Interested patients who want to know more about any service or any other information can fill the form and sign up for receiving future communications. However, the subscription form should have simple information fields like name, email address, phone number, etc. and should not take much time to fill. This strategy will help to extract patient contact details that also with their permission.
Also, clearly mention in the form that in what frequency visitors to your site wants to get hospital updates like a monthly or weekly newsletter.
Offer Value in Return
It’s not easy to make visitors fill up the email subscription form and provide you with their contact details. Hospitals must offer something in return to the patients to encourage them to fill the form for receiving email communications ahead.
Most of them would like to know what purpose it will serve for them if they provide the hospital with their contact information. If they see that in return they will get useful and relevant information, then only they will think of signing email newsletter form. It’s like give and take, while you need patient contact details, patients need valuable content to keep them informed and updated with everything happening in your hospital. Hospitals can provide free guides, blogs, and video links via email newsletter on health tips, disease preventive measures, medical services, and other healthcare topics that may be helpful for the patients.
Personalize Your Email Campaigns
Personalized and segmented emails have a higher open rate than non-segmented and generic campaigns. Even the same strategy applies to the healthcare sector. Hospitals need to segment their vast contact list and categories them into different categories and adopt a personalized approach for every individual. The content of the hospital’s email campaign should be specific and relevant to each patient group.
The emails hospital send to a middle-aged patient should not be similar to the ones sent to senior citizens. Personalizing email content is a must as it helps in establishing the hospital’s credibility. It makes the patients feel that the hospital understands their concern and are therefore encouraged to trust the hospital with their healthcare needs.
Segment Your Email List for Targeted Campaigns
To ensure every email campaign reaches the right patient inbox and yields responses, hospitals need to segment their email list. Based on various demographics like gender, treatment type, age, health concern, etc. hospital staff can organize and divide their patient email addresses list for better targeting them with relevant campaigns that can help generate leads and increased revenue.
If list segmentation seems time-consuming, then hospitals can avail a well-segmented email list from healthcare data providers like MedicoReach.
Make Best Use of Attractive Email Templates
While strategizing email campaign, hospitals need to make sure that the email templates they use are engaging and attractive. A tempting email template will keep the targeted audience hooked and encourage them to read and share the email as well. The email template should be interesting and motivational. For instance, hospitals can use an engaging email template to display in different job portals while recruiting specialist nurses, multi-disciplinary teams, and youth support coordinators. This will definitely add to the hospital’s brand awareness, promotion, and marketing efforts.
To invite more people for a blood donation camp at your hospital, what you can do is send motivational email campaign templates to subscribers. This will help in leaving an impact on the recipients of that message.
Test Your Email Messages Before Sending
Test, before you send your emails to the prospect, is an essential part on which the success of an email campaign greatly depends. Brands need to estimate the possible loopholes in their campaign so that they can fix it before the damage happens. Once the email is delivered, there is no way it can be changed or modified. Hence, before finalizing the campaign testing its performance is indeed necessary.
Hospitals must not overlook the A/B testing part and should test every aspect of their email campaign before hitting the send button. From email content to template design, subject line, responsiveness, and links included, everything has to be checked and then forwarded to the patients. Hospitals can send a test email to their own address to check. Doing this will help to see how the final version will appear on the desktop screen as well as the mobile screen.
Ensuring everything is in place, hospitals can expect a good open rate of their email campaigns.
Schedule Email Campaigns to Stay Consistent
Sending emails whenever you feel like isn’t the right thing to do. It creates a sense of unprofessionalism and irresponsible. Setting a particular time when your emails will reach the patient inbox helps to manage a good reputation. If you follow a proper schedule to send email marketing campaigns, patients appreciate the consistency and commitment of the brand.
Hospitals must fix a time for email communications so that clients know when they will receive emails from the brand. It projects your hospital in good light and also helps you to track your email frequency. Sending too many emails in a week or month is a big no. Hence, with time schedules, hospitals can keep a check on how often they send emails. Being consistent is the key to the success of email campaigns.
Automate Your Email Marketing Process
Hospitals cater to patients with minor to serious health issues. As such, most of the hospitals do not have separate teams handling marketing and promotional tasks. Often it is a single individual who governs and does all the email marketing and communication job alone. In such scenarios, email automation does really help.
Also, to ensure emails are on time and as per the right frequency, autoresponders are a must use. Hospitals can set autoresponders to give patient reminders about health check-up, new treatment or equipment launch, health campaigns, and more. Also, when it comes to responding to patient inquiries quickly, email autoresponders do the job efficiently for hospitals.
Ready to get started with email marketing for your hospital?
Email marketing is not rocket science for which specialized skills are required. All hospitals need is the right email database for their healthcare business and the effective strategy to implement. When it comes to making connections with patients and expanding market reach, hospitals cannot deny the significance of healthcare email marketing.
The above strategies are based on market observations and expert understanding. So, try implementing the strategies we shared and start growing your hospital business while delivering quality patient care.
However, remember to keep your strategy list filled with new ideas with every passing day. Try experimenting and learning from your email mistakes to evolve with better achievements with your healthcare marketing efforts.
