Email marketing can be a very effective tool for medical practices. It can be an excellent way to get in touch with patients. However, it’s important to use email marketing correctly, or it could end up alienating patients instead. The following are some best practices that you should follow in order to effectively use email marketing to grow your medical practise.
Avoid Spam
People get a lot of spam emails. It’s estimated that up to 85% of the world’s email traffic is actually made up of spam emails. That’s billions of emails sent daily that no one sees because it’s caught by a spam filter.
This does mean that marketing emails can sometimes end up in the spam folder, too. For this reason, it’s important to make sure that your emails don’t look like spam, either to recipients, who can mark them as spam manually, or to a spam filter. Check out examples of spam emails so that you know what words to avoid using, such as “best price” or “100% free” that might make it look like spam. You should also make sure everything is completely authenticated so that your emails are coming from a legitimate source.
Less Is More
When it comes to email marketing, sometimes less is more. People get a ton of emails every day, both spam and legitimate emails. If you send too many emails too frequently, then you’re likely to see initially interested patients unsubscribing from your mailing list. That said, you also don’t want to make the mistake of emailing too infrequently, either. The best option is to adjust your email frequency as needed to match what your audience wants. This may mean starting out with fewer emails and gradually increasing the frequency over time, or backing off and decreasing the number of emails you send if people start unsubscribing at a faster rate.
Avoid Grammar and Spelling Mistakes
For your email marketing to work as effectively as possible, you should make sure to carefully proofread everything before you send it. Spelling and grammar mistakes can make an email marketing campaign look less professional. Plus, it can leave patients wondering if you’ll display a similar lack of care in other areas of your practice, too.
Be Concise
When you compose your emails, make sure to get to the point as quickly as possible. Your patients already have a lot they need to read and they’re more likely to ignore your email completely if it’s too long. This is even more important because of the number of people reading emails on mobile devices, which have much smaller screens. People don’t have the time for a lot of scrolling.
Don’t Forget a Call to Action
A call to action, or CTA, is a button that prompts a patient to do something. For example, “click here to sign up” or “book now” are common calls to action for medical practices.
Emails Aren’t One-Size-Fits-All
Depending on the nature of your medical practice, you may need to create separate mailing lists. This can help reduce the volume of emails each patient receives while also ensuring that patients are receiving marketing emails based on what they’re most likely to come to your practice for. For example, you can create an email list of patients who are most interested in a particular service that you offer. This can help you to avoid patients unsubscribing due to receiving emails they’re not as interested in.
Send the Emails at the Right Time
Patients are often more receptive to emails at certain times of day than at others. It’s important to find the best time to send your marketing emails so that patients are more likely to respond. Often, this is 10 a.m. and 2 p.m. on Tuesdays and Wednesdays. However, that may vary depending on your particular audience. The higher your open and click rate, the better for your practice.
