The healthcare industry needs to attract and retain customers like any other industry. With the right tools and strategies, you can steal customers away from your competitors and ensure your brand loyalty and perceived brand integrity for years to come.
One of the best tools available for businesses in the health industry is email marketing. But what are the best email marketing techniques for the health industry?
Why Email Marketing Is So Valuable for the Health Industry
Let's start by exploring why email marketing is so valuable for the health industry in the first place. What is it about this specific marketing strategy that makes it so uniquely powerful?
- Automation potential. One important characteristic is that email marketing is easy to automate. You don't need to have a campaign director at the head of each email blast. Instead, you can send out new email blasts based on old templates, changes to your list, and specific trigger conditions. Because emails are easy to automate, you can rest assured that your customers are getting information quickly and at the appropriate times; you also don't have to worry about human error messing up your schedule.
- Information and education. More so than other industries, customers in the health industry want as much information and education as they can get. They want to be informed about what's going on in their bodies and minds, and they want to feel more confident in their health care providers’ levels of expertise. Email marketing is one of the best mediums for educating and informing an audience, since you can dispense the information in many different ways quickly and efficiently.
- Low cost basis. Email marketing is popular, in part, because of its high return on investment (ROI). In other words, it's easy for people to make more money with their email marketing campaign than they initially spend on it. This, in turn, is largely due to how inexpensive email marketing is. You don't have to rent any physical space, you don't have to pay monthly fees (for the most part), and you don't need a gigantic workforce. Instead, you can send out email blasts on razor-thin budgets and still see a massive return.
- Snowballing nature. The potential of your email marketing campaign is practically limitless, since email marketing tends to snowball over time. You'll gain more subscribers, you'll reach more people, and your content will have a bigger and bigger impact. Each month of growth will push your campaign further.
The Best Email Marketing Techniques for the Health Industry
So what are the best email marketing techniques for companies in the health industry to use?
- Always prioritize security and privacy. Every industry should prioritize customer security and privacy, but for the health industry, it's even more important. Your customers are going to be interacting with their trusted health care providers on sensitive and personal matters. You're also going to be sharing information on important, yet delicate topics. If you don't make your customers feel like their security and privacy are being respected and valued, you could instantly lose a chunk of your subscriber base. Do everything you can to make sure all your emails are highly secure and respectful of patient privacy.
- Personalize videos. These days, it’s easy to include videos in your emails, thanks to tools like Viewed.video. Once you upload the video in question, you can choose to personalize it in a variety of different ways, based on uploaded characteristics about the individuals on your subscriber list. From there, you can copy and paste the code into your email blast tool and incorporate the video directly into the body of your email. Videos tend to be much more memorable and much more engaging; and personalized videos are even more relevant to your target audience, distinguishing your brand and helping you build more trust.
- Automate everything you can. Automation potential is one of the greatest features of email marketing, so take full advantage of it. Whenever you can automate an email blast, rather than sending it manually, do so. This will allow you to stay in contact with your customers, without adding unnecessary costs or time expenditures.
- Send reminders and directions. One of the best applications for your email marketing campaign is going to be sending reminders, directions, and other important pieces of information to your customers when they need it. Advising them of an upcoming appointment or instructing them on how to prepare for surgery will give them a much better overall experience, and help them trust your organization more.
- Keep it short. Many of your email subscribers are going to be suffering from health conditions or waiting for important news. They don't want to wade through many paragraphs of information while in these difficult circumstances; that's why it's important to keep your emails as short and to-the-point as possible.
- Remain top of mind, but don’t spam. Sending frequent emails is a great way to keep your brand top of mind with your target audience. But it's easy to cross the line into spam territory; if you send your customers too many messages, or send those messages too frequently, your reputation could suffer a significant blow.
- Adopt a mobile-first mindset. More than 54 percent of all web traffic now comes from mobile devices. Accordingly, mobile should be your highest priority when designing and testing emails. If your email doesn't work or doesn't look pretty on a mobile device, it's not going to have as much impact as it could.
- Get feedback. Make sure you get feedback from your email subscribers, at every stage of your email campaign. Do people feel like you're emailing too much or not enough? How do people feel about your content? Do they have any ideas for what you could do better in the future?
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