The open rate has become one of the gold standards in measuring email marketing success. How can your medical practice harness it to your advantage?
Here are the best healthcare email marketing ideas to entice your subscribers to click on your mail.
5 Email Marketing Strategies That Can Increase Your Open Rates
With email marketing, every newsletter is like a knock on your lead’s door. An optimized landing page, an attractive discount, or well-curated content is useless if nobody opens it.
If you are a healthcare organization looking to maximize your open rate, then these ideas are for you:
1. Target Your Audience
You can only convert people who are your targeted lead. In fact, it will be a huge waste of your resources, especially money.
But who is your target market? You can consider many factors:
Type of healthcare you offer: Are you an urgent care clinic, drug rehab facility, or a direct-pay medical practitioner?
Location: Do you have several specialty centers nationwide? Are you local?
Patient demographic: Do you focus on children, seniors, families, or a specific gender?
Specialty: Do you practice general medicine, or are you a cardiologist, oncologist, etc.?
Based on these initial data, you can then build a buyer persona, a more in-depth representation of your target patient. These usually include more information, such as income level, barriers or pain points, education, and even family details. Are they single, married, or divorced?
2. Break Down Broad Segments into Smaller Ones
Not all who subscribe to your health and wellness newsletter are interested in weight loss. Others may focus on disease prevention, new products or services, or even mental health.
According to Digital Authority Partners (DAP), your open rate could have been better if you hyper-personalize. Break down your broad segments into smaller, more manageable ones. This way, you can send more targeted content that resonates with their interests and needs.
Let us have an example. Say you are a child-development specialist, so your target subscribers are mothers with children from 0 to 3 years old. They are also more likely in the middle class to afford your services.
From this pool, you can develop more specific segments with a possible marketing campaign for each:
For new mothers, you can talk about the different stages of development and what to expect.
Send tips on managing work and childcare efficiently to working mothers.
For parents with newly diagnosed children, you can provide support and resources.
Offer free trials or early-bird promos to moms and dads planning to change specialists.
3. Time Your Email Blasts
Timing is everything with emails. Send them too early, and they easily get buried among hundreds of others. Give them late, and your target might have already forgotten about you.
But when is the best time? Do these to know the answer:
Study your data. When was the last time your healthcare organization sent an email? When did most of your subscribers open it? Can you spot patterns?
Check the time zone. Though often overlooked, this one remains crucial, especially if you are doing local marketing. An obvious difference is sending an email on a Monday in California (PST) and New York (EST). Make sure you take this into account to avoid any confusion.
Experiment. Like anything in marketing, the best way to see if something works is by trying it out yourself. Start with a small segment of your list and send emails at different times of the day or week. From there, you can analyze which time gets the best results before implementing it on your entire list.
4. Create an Email Series to Hook Them Up
Do you know how some emails are more effective than others? That is because they are part of an email series, a group of messages sent periodically to achieve a certain result.
Let us go back to our earlier example. As a child-development specialist, your series could be like this:
First email: This is often the intro or welcome email. Nothing fancy here. In fact, keep it short and simple, but tell your subscribers what they can expect in your succeeding emails.
Second email: Use this to educate your audience about your work, topic, knowledge, and expertise. Share the best content that you have, which can range from a case study to a how-to guide.
Third email: Get more personal. Share your story or experience related to the topic. You can also provide user-generated content as long as you ask for consent. Otherwise, avoid sharing personally identifiable information to prevent violating HIPAA.
Fourth email: Introduce your products or services and how they can help address the subscribers’ needs. Be creative with promotions, such as free trials, vouchers, or discounts on their next visits.
5. Track Your Progress
Many variables can impact your open rate, but you will only know what they are if you track email marketing performance.
Here are some key performance indicators (KPIs) that healthcare organizations should track:
Open rate: It is the number of people who open your email out of the total number who received it. A good open rate is 15% to 20%.
Unsubscribe rate: These are the percentage of people who unsubscribe from your emails based on the number of emails you sent. A good unsubscribe rate is under 2%.
Bounce rate: It refers to those who cannot receive your email. It could be due to a full inbox, an invalid email address, or other reasons, such as data privacy guidelines. A good bounce rate is under 5%.
List growth rate: This is the number of people who sign up for your emails minus the number of people who unsubscribe or opt out. You want this number to be positive, which means you are acquiring more subscribers than losing.
Conversion rate: This measures how many followed your call to action (CTA) after receiving your email. It could be clicking on a link, signing up for a service, or making a purchase.
Revenue per email: This tells you how much revenue your organization earns for every email sent. To calculate, divide your total revenue by the number of emails sent.
Based on the results, you can then take proactive steps to improve your open rate. For instance, if you see that people are mostly opening your emails on their mobile devices, then format your messages to be more mobile-friendly.
You can also take a look at the unsubscribe and bounce rates. If you have a high unsubscribe rate, it could mean that your content is irrelevant to your subscribers. On the other hand, a high bounce rate could mean that you have stale email addresses on your list.
Summing Up
Email marketing is a powerful tool to help healthcare organizations achieve their marketing goals. Following the tips above can help you create a strategy to get your message across and improve your open rate.
Working with a healthcare marketing digital agency can further your success. Their deep understanding of your niche and years of experience can help you fine-tune your strategy, from content creation to email automation.