Healthcare Email Marketing: Tips, Tricks, and More

Whether you’re a hospital providing traditional care or a clinic specializing in complementary therapies like acupuncture, healthcare is always personal, and it thrives on provider-patient trust. In an increasingly digital care setting, clients expect more from their providers (and not just the umpteenth call reminding them of their upcoming appointment).

As the unrivaled champion of marketing media across and between industries, email marketing services provide consumers with the content they need to stay healthy—and it has remarkable capabilities for maximizing your ROI as a business in the healthcare space.

In the guide below, we’ll explain exactly what an email marketing campaign is, why it’s advantageous, and some tricks of the trade you can use before your next email makes landfall in your patients’ inboxes.

Healthcare Email Marketing: A Crash Course

Before we get into the tips for email marketing in the healthcare space, let’s take a look at the big picture:

• What is email marketing? Email marketing is a way of familiarizing potential or existing patients with your company and the services you offer. Where traditional advertising is unilateral, email marketing fosters reciprocity between businesses and the customers they serve.
• How is it done? When you adopt a potential patientt, they’ll have the option to opt into your email list to receive updates, notices, and complementary knowledge related to their care. Effective email marketing requires a force of designers and IT experts to hone your brand voice, automate your email schedule, and disseminate your message effectively.
• How much does email marketing cost? The question of cost depends on a few variables such as the email marketing trends you decide to pursue, your design needs, or the volume of messaging you expect to send. That said, an email marketing campaign can collect an average of $45 per $1 spent—and with 80% of businesses using this marketing tactic, you can bet your competition is already making use of email’s functionality and earn-back potential.¹
• Why is email marketing important for the healthcare sector? In 2020, per-patient spending in healthcare averaged nearly $11,000 per capita in 2020—almost double the cost of most other developed countries on the planet.² No matter what sort of provider you are, email marketing is uniquely positioned to eliminate inefficiencies, offer more to your clients, and help you make good on your bottom line.³ 

A healthcare provider needs solutions for slashing budgetary bloat and doing right by their clients.⁴ How can email marketing help with that? 

Let’s take a look.

5 Benefits of Healthcare Email Marketing

There are five critical areas where email marketing can improve performance:

1. Streamlining administrative workloads – According to a survey by Stanford Medicine, digital storage was the #1 value provided by electronic health records (EHR)—but many providers report resulting inefficiencies in coordination and patient billing.⁵ Email marketing refines and fortifies provider-patient communications to bridge the gaps where other tech falls short. 
2. Reducing spending – The American health sector is the biggest spender on the planet, and it shows: according to a 2021 Gallup poll, 77% of respondents were “dissatisfied” with the overall cost of their care.⁶ When used tactically, email marketing can slash administrative redundancies and simplify treatment protocol, curtailing costs in the long run and helping you keep price points competitive for your existing patients.
3. Establishing authority – Email marketing is an instrumental channel for content marketing—one of the most effective ways to demonstrate your credibility as a provider. Whether you create your own branded content or pass along the latest news in your industry, content marketing via email is key for becoming a presence customers trust.
4. Improving patient relations – Email marketing analytics have remarkable capabilities for data retrieval, matching services to the clientele who’d benefit most from your product. You’ll also be able to track which initiatives prosper and which fall flat, refining your approach as your business grows.
5. Improving care outcomes – As a healthcare provider, you already know that health conditions are best treated through prevention, regardless of what modalities you specialize in. Your insights are valuable, and with e-marketing trends like list segmentation and targeted campaigns, you can direct knowledge to the right recipients to help patients keep up with treatment between appointments.

Whether you’re looking to wow your peers at the next budget meeting or are aiming to upgrade patient experience, ultimately, email marketing has numerous benefits to improve your internal operations—and enhance the experience of the communities you serve.

5 Tips For Healthcare Email Marketing

As advantageous as email marketing can be, an email campaign that yields strong click-to-open rates (CTOR) needs a skillfully-hewn strategy to be effective and not have a high email bounce rate.

Below, find 5 tips for building a profitable email marketing strategy that can earn you the confidence of your base.

#1 Start With a Warm Welcome

In every sector, the Welcome email sequence is the series that paves the way for client retention and engagement. Oberlo reports that customers peek into 82% of the Welcome emails they receive, as opposed to an average 21% for follow-up marketing communications.⁷

Your Welcome sequence should demonstrate what your client can expect from a relationship with you. Ideally, yours should include:

• An introduction that establishes your brand mission and identity
• Educational assets for your product or service
• Opportunities for engagement, like online webinars or social sharing buttons
• Contact Us information for account management, FAQs, or customer service queries
• Resources for ad-hoc support

Welcome sequences should be streamlined, approachable, and user-friendly—graphically, verbally, and technically. It’s the Welcome sequence that drafts the map your clients can use to get to know you better and navigate your resources with ease.

#2 Strategize on Incentive-Building

Establishing a supportive network of healthcare providers can be a major obstacle for potential clients seeking support, whether by dint of prohibitive deductibles or lack of knowledge about providers that can meet their needs.

Email marketing is an ideal channel for creating positive relationships with existing clients and for expanding your orbit to include new ones. Here are two effective ways to encourage your patients to pass it on:

• Referral programs – Whether or not you can use referral programs to ethically (and legally) market your healthcare organization and services depends on the type of enterprise you’re running. Small to medium-sized businesses—particularly those in the wellness space—are well-positioned to offer deals or customer perks when a customer loops in a friend.
• Shareability – Today, social and share buttons are built into the bones of marketing emails, enabling subscribers to post the content you provide to their personal platforms. As a general rule, any knowledge that lands in their inbox (excluding any confidential data) should be easily shareable with the stroke of a thumb.

Finally, your healthcare organization might consider providing perks to clients each time they reach a new milestone. For instance, a personalized Vitamin vendor might initiate an email-led rewards program to let customers know when it’s time to replenish their cache or let them know that their 10th purchase will earn them a free month’s supply of Collagen gel caps.

#5 Stick to a Schedule

There are two main categories of marketing emails:

• Email sequences – Pre-written and sent automatically, these messages anticipate the different stages of your funnel and meet the customer where they are. The Welcome Sequence is a classic example, but sequences can also reach warm or cold customers with lapsed engagement.
• Broadcast emails – Broadcast emails keep clients abreast of sales, company developments, or programs offered through your business. They’re often seasonal, circumstantial, or time-sensitive, clueing your clients into company developments.

Automated email marketing has vastly improved the efficacy of brand messaging, particularly when it comes to timing when certain communications are delivered. These emails are substantially more time and work-intensive, but the investments you make here will earn you more in the long run.

#3 Provide Valued Content

As a provider, you already know that health conditions are best treated through prevention, regardless of what modalities your business specializes in.

Email marketing is a particularly vital channel for content marketing, where subscribers receive valuable, complementary knowledge that can enhance their profile. In the healthcare industry, this could include:

• Up-to-date recommendations from medical authorities such as the Center for Disease Control (CDC) or the American Academy of Pediatrics (AA)
• Product education linking the therapeutic services you offer to specific health concerns
• Digestible blog posts on trending mental health topics
• Physical therapy videos to practice at home

Email marketing is one element of a broader digital marketing strategy that thrives when paired with of-the-moment internet trends. Content that places patient concerns in context is more likely to get noticed, demonstrating not only your credibility but also your currency. 

#4 Make Emails Personal

Every patient arrives with a distinct set of health concerns, life events, or challenges they’re contending with. Firing off a spate of broadcast emails on how to help an infant latch may be enormously helpful to a new mother, but it’s unlikely to earn you much credit with a patient in recovery from kidney stone removal.

Email marketing advancements like list segmentation make it easier than ever to target specific groups of clients with specific concerns, ensuring resources relevant to their well-being are delivered in kind.

In short: the more individualized the message, the more likely your clients are to open it, and the more useful the content you provide will be.

Launch Your Next Campaign with Power Digital

When all is said and done, providers have an ethical and legal obligation to keep client information safe and HIPAA-compliant. To meet rigorous demands on discretion, you’ll need an expert set of eyes, hands, and humans to help you get established in your sector.

Our digital marketing agency provides email marketing services involving the craftsmanship, penmanship, and industry expertise to ensure your brand gets noticed. Strong email marketing is adaptable, addressing your pain points with a bifocal approach: meet your short-term goals and aim for vitality in the long run. 

As in health, so in wealth, and, with Power Digital, so in email marketing.

Sources: 

1. Statista. E-mail marketing worldwide – statistics & facts. https://www.statista.com/topics/1446/e-mail-marketing/#dossierKeyfigures
2. Organization for Economic Co-Operation and Development. Health Spending. https://data.oecd.org/healthres/health-spending.htm
3. Investopedia. Healthcare Sector. https://www.investopedia.com/terms/h/health_care_sector.asp
4. Investopedia. The 5 Industries Driving the U.S. Economy. https://www.investopedia.com/articles/investing/042915/5-industries-driving-us-economy.asp
5. Stanford Medicine. How Doctors Feel About Electronic Health Records. https://med.stanford.edu/content/dam/sm/ehr/documents/EHR-Poll-Presentation.pdf
6. Gallup. Healthcare System. https://news.gallup.com/poll/4708/healthcare-system.aspx
7. Oberlo. 10 Email Marketing Statistics. https://www.oberlo.com/blog/email-marketing-statistics