8 Tips to Improve Healthcare Email Marketing ROI

Most of the health care service & product providers consider email marketing as something that pushes hard to sell something with offers, reminders, etc. As a noble profession, this is something you might not be interested to do. 

But you should know that with email marketing you can actually serve your patients in the best possible way and also grow your practice at the same time. After all, your success as a healthcare professional or organization depends on showing patients that you are the right pick whenever they need you.

In today’s world when there are so many social media channels to keep up with, email is still the most trusted & reliable tool of communication among all demographics. Everyone has an email address and they use it for the most important stuff - profession, finance, and of course health.

You might have heard that email marketing doesn't work or take too much effort. But that’s only if you just collect email addresses, send sporadic emails but don’t know what to keep in mind and what to avoid. 

In this post, we will share the top 8 tips that will help you succeed in email marketing for healthcare. These tips will work for anyone working in the healthcare industry, providing nursing services, or providing products related to health. You can use these tips whether you have a small list of a few hundred people or a few hundred thousand people. 

So let’s get started. 

Here are the Top 8 Tips Summarized

  1. Build your list organically: Build your list through social media, walk-in patients, or your website but don’t ever ‘buy’ it.
  2. Personalize your interaction: Use data like first name, city, or date of birth to add a human & personal touch.
  3. Let them unsubscribe easily: Provide clearly visible, one-step unsubscription process to avoid being marked as spam.
  4. Segment your audience: Segment your list according to different criteria to send targeted emails and thus increase the response rate.
  5. Automate: Use automation technology in your email marketing software to save time & effort and increase engagement. 
  6. Avoid ‘spammy’ subject lines: Avoid manipulative, or sleazy subject lines so that you pass spam filters and go into the inbox instead of the spam folder.
  7. Optimize for mobile: Make your emails responsive so that they look good on all devices.
  8. Use data to optimize performance: Use data provided by email marketing software to see what’s working and what’s not working. 

Now let’s get into each of these in detail.

1. Build Your List Organically

You can build your email list by collecting email addresses of people who walk-in into your clinic or shop. If you are collecting their email addresses on an electronic device or iPad, it’s super easy to place a checkbox to confirm agreeing to receive promotional or content emails. 

On your website, you can put up a health guide or discount on the next visit to your clinic. But these are available only when someone signs up via email. This can be done via pop-ups or embedded email forms.

 

2. Personalize Your Interaction 

Personalization means using data of the subscriber to make the email feel more human, one-to-one, and like a personal interaction. 

There are many ways to do it but the simplest one is to address the recipient via their first name. This small trick can make the content feel tailor-made for them. 

This will result in an emotional connection with your brand. And we know that people make any decision first based on emotions and only then justify it with some logic. 

3. Let them Unsubscribe Easily 

Many times, marketers get stressed when they see their subscribers which they earned after a long toil, leaving their list. To avoid this, they come up with ‘hacks’ to make it difficult to unsubscribe and sort of ‘capture’ the subscriber. But if you just fill your list with uninterested people it will only give you a huge list that you will spend money and time to keep engaged. This list will not take action when you send them an offer or encourage them to visit your clinic/hospital. 

On top of it, just to get rid of your emails, they will mark them as spam. This will send a negative signal to inbox service providers (Google, Yahoo, etc.) that you are a spammer and hence all your future emails will also be sent to spam.

So the best way to avoid these things from happening is to let them unsubscribe easily. 

  • Put your unsubscribe button in a distinct way where it is easily visible. 
  • It should only take one step or a maximum of two steps to unsubscribe.
  • The person should immediately be removed from the list. 

Here is an example of footer with clearly visible unsubscribe link

 

Registration CTA email
Source: reallygoodemails.com


4. Segment Your Audience

Segmenting your audience means creating different categories of people in your list and sending them emails relevant to their category. 

This is done so that only the relevant content reaches your audience. Because not everyone on your list is interested in everything you have to say or offer. For example, a senior citizen will not care about child nutrition or a person living in the city A doesn’t care about your free workshop in city B. 

So you can create these categories based on a number of criteria:

  • Demographic: Age, Gender, Location, etc. 
  • Number of times they have been to your hospital in the past year
  • Have they registered for an annual checkup or not?
  • Engagement level: Have they opened any of your emails in the past 30 or 60 days? 

 

Audience segmentation
Segment your audience


5. Automate your Emails

Use automation technology in your email marketing software to save time & effort and increase engagement. Automated emails help you send emails relevant to a customer’s journey with you. 

For example, you can automate emails to send reminders for refill prescriptions. Or whenever a new subscriber joins, you can set automated journeys in your email marketing software to send them a series of onboarding emails. 

Here is one such example:

 

Automated healthcare email
Source: reallygoodemails.com


6. Avoid ‘spammy’ Subject Lines

The ultimate goal of sending an email is that your audience sees your offer or consumes your content. To make this happen the first step is to catch their attention with a subject line. 

To accomplish this, sometimes people tend to use manipulative, exaggerated, or sleazy subject lines. For example, ‘lose weight in 21 days’, ‘guaranteed cure for backache’, ‘100% free health camp’. 

Here is a screenshot from my spam folder. Avoid subject lines like the ones you see here.

 

Avoid spammy subject lines
Avoid spammy subject lines

 

While your intentions might be right, the technology responsible for filtering emails that might be spam doesn’t know this. It only knows how to parse your content and make a judgment based on the past behavior of spammers which is - using manipulative subject lines.

To get a full list of about 500+ words to avoid in your subject lines, check out this blog about spam trigger words

 

7. Optimize for Mobile 

It’s no fresh news that mobile is one of the main devices to view emails by all demographics. According to emailmonday, 61% of email opens occur on mobile. That’s more than half of any list size. 

This means that your email should be looking good on mobile - the image, text, CTAs, etc, should be properly aligned according to device size. Don’t make them too long as it can be hard to keep scrolling on mobile to get to the point. 

Here is an example showing how responsive emails should behave: 

Optimize for mobile
Source: kode88.ie

 

Most of the email marketing software provides templates that are responsive, meaning they will adjust the email according to the device on which it is viewed. SendX has a library of 20+ such templates which you can check on this free html email template resource here. 


8. Use Data to Optimize Performance

You can derive insights from the key metrics of email marketing to know about your audience’s behavior. Data from the email marketing tool that you use can help you know when your subscribers are most likely to open, what kind of device do they mostly use, what the major geographical locations where your audience is located are, what kind of emails get the most engagement, etc. 

Here is how SendX’s dashboard provides this data in an easy-to-read format

Measuring campaign performance
Use data to optimize performance

You can use these to make changes to your strategy. You basically have to do more of what’s working and less of what’s not working. 

To know about the key metrics you should be tracking, check out this article on email marketing metrics

 

What’s next?

As the next easiest step, if you haven’t already signed up for an email marketing software or you want to switch to an affordable, reliable, and easy to use software, you should check out SendX. Sign up today so you don’t miss the 14-day free trial of all their features. 

There is no credit card required for the free trial. You won’t have to fill up lengthy forms. 

If you choose to continue, the cost per month is just $7.49/mo for 1000 subscribers. That is 3x-5x cheaper than most alternatives out there. 

And the best part is that at this price you will get all features required for healthcare email marketing. 

With SendX, you can:

  • Quickly and easily create emails using a drag-and-drop editor.
  • Keep your emails always fresh and visually captivating by using images from a library of half a million stock photos. 
  • Collect email addresses of people visiting your website with the help of customizable pop-up forms.
  • Be sure that a high number of your emails will land into the inbox and not the spam folder. 
  • Always be assured that help is just an email or chat away with their 24/7 support. 

Now that you know why email marketing is important and how you can get started easily, hope to see you add this to your marketing strategy. 

FAQs for Healthcare Email Marketing

1) Why do I need email marketing for my healthcare service?

With email marketing you can actually serve your patients in the best possible way and also grow your practice at the same time, because your success as a healthcare professional or organization depends on showing patients that you are the right pick whenever they need you.

2) How can I build an organic email list for my healthcare service organization?

You can build your healthcare service's email list by collecting email addresses of people who walk-in into your clinic or shop. If you are collecting their email addresses on an electronic device or iPad, it’s super easy to place a checkbox to confirm agreeing to receive promotional or content emails. On your website, you can put up a health guide or discount on the next visit to your clinic. But these are available only when someone signs up via email. This can be done via pop-ups or embedded email forms.

3) What kind of segmentation can I create in my healthcare email marketing list?

You can create segments in your healthcare email marketing list based on a number of criteria:

- Demographic: Age, Gender, Location, etc.

- Number of times they have been to your hospital in the past year

- Have they registered for an annual checkup or not?

- Engagement level: Have they opened any of your emails in the past 30 or 60 days?

4) Can you give examples of automation that I can use for healthcare emails?

Here are a couple of examples of automation that you can use for your healthcare emails:

- Send reminders for refill prescriptions.

- Whenever a new subscriber joins, you can set automated journeys in your email marketing software to send them a series of onboarding emails.