The success of any healthcare marketing plan relies on a delicate balance between science and art. Now, how do you combine these two critical elements?
This post shows you three creative, innovative strategies that can quickly enhance any email marketing campaign.
Launch and Grow Healthcare Marketing with These 3 Ideas
As a healthcare organization, you face unique challenges regarding email marketing. Unlike other industries, you must comply with strict regulations and privacy laws such as HIPAA.
These rules can limit the type of information you can ask from subscribers and send in your newsletters. They can also make it difficult to create effective marketing messages that resonate with your target audience.
How do you overcome these barriers, launch email marketing campaigns, and sustain their success? By getting creative and innovative with your approaches.
Here are three tips to illustrate that:
Break Your Target Market into Segments
Contrary to popular belief, sometimes segmenting your healthcare audience can do more harm than good for your campaigns. Take, for example, breaking down a subscriber list of fewer than a thousand.
Customizing messages for a small crowd is not the smartest way to use your limited resources. It is costly, time-consuming, and difficult to track.
However, you can already have a plan in place because you will eventually scale and grow your mailing list.
You have many categories for market segmentation, and it is possible for one person to belong to two or more of them. Here are a few options:
- Demographics: What is their age, income, gender, and location?
- Engagement Level: Are they active or inactive subscribers?
- Behavior: What type of content do they open and engage with?
- Interests: Are they looking for clinical trials, wellness tips, or a specific health condition?
- Healthcare barriers experienced: Are they struggling with access to care, insurance, or cost?
- Customer journey: Are they new to the clinic or have been there before?
- Entry points: How did they sign up for the mailing list? Did they visit your website or filled out your clinic form, or was it a referral?
Defining your market segments requires massive data. Fortunately, you can already find several HIPAA-compliant platforms to help you. Working with a digital marketing agency specializing in your niche can then curate these pieces of information and present them in an easy-to-understand way.
But the process is not over. One of the underrated market segmentation strategies is optimizing the list through testing. Here is how it works:
- Test your segments to see how effectively they reach and engage your subscribers. It could involve sending targeted emails to each segment and measuring their engagement levels.
- Optimize your segments based on the results of your tests. Then, make any necessary changes to improve their effectiveness.
- Regularly review and update your segments.
Personalize Your Email Content According to Your Market Segments
Marina Turea of Digital Authority Partners (DAP) said it best: you should keep your emails personal to make them work. In other words, craft messages that perfectly align with your defined market segments.
Here are seven ideas to try:
- Send exclusive messages, such as birthday greetings, discounts, or promos.
- Remind subscribers due for the next appointment with a link pointing directly to the clinic’s calendar or scheduling page.
- Share helpful content, such as health advice and tips, about the subscriber’s condition or interests.
- Provide information about relevant clinical trials or research studies.
- Craft a welcome email that matches their entry point. For example, if they sign up via your in-office survey, send a thank-you message and provide their patient portal access.
- Send relevant educational resources like recipe cards, infographics, and how-to videos.
A highly effective way of personalizing content is by pairing healthcare email content with the customer journey:
- New subscribers are often in the awareness stage. They might have subscribed to your email list because they are attracted to your freebie, curious about your brand, or need more information about your services. Send them introductory messages and highlight the benefits of engaging with your clinic.
- Those who start interacting with you via surveys, emails, or page clicks could be in the interest or consideration phases. Some of the best healthcare email content types for them may be studies, user-generated content (UGC) such as patient testimonials, and how-to videos.
- Subscribers who already booked an appointment with you or recently took advantage of your services are in the conversion phase. The goal is to retain them both as a subscriber and a patient. Show them appreciation by sending thank-you messages and exclusive content, such as offers, discounts, or promos.
Note: Healthcare content is tricky because you can violate HIPAA if you are not careful. Know the marketing rules by heart to avoid legal trouble later.
Automate Your Email Workflow
Without automating many of its processes, you can never grow a healthcare email marketing plan. You will eventually burn out and have to choose between managing the list and focusing on your job.
Besides, automation can let you save time, increase efficiency, and help you handle data properly by avoiding human errors. You get to focus on creating helpful content that aligns with each segment’s needs. Plus, they make market segmentation and email tracking more convenient.
The workflow design depends on many factors. These include marketing goals, existing campaigns, and the customer lifecycle stage. Here are various types of automated emails that can benefit your healthcare clinic:
- Welcome emails to introduce the clinic and nurture relationships with new subscribers.
- Re-engagement emails to revive inactive contacts and bring back old customers.
- Abandoned cart reminders for those who did not complete their purchase.
- Cross-selling messages and upsell offers to existing customers.
- Appointment reminders and follow-up calls to decrease no-shows.
- Post-appointment surveys to gather customer feedback.
Note: Automation aims to create a seamless user experience that translates to better returns. Try not to send too many emails at once. Instead, carefully plan each step by setting triggers and timing it right.
Summing Up
The outcome of healthcare email marketing campaigns is non-linear. You will not always get the best results, but that is the beauty of having a well-designed plan. As long as you follow these three tips, you can easily modify, overhaul, and even pivot.
You can also rely on experts such as healthcare digital marketers if you want more ideas and assistance. Their experience already makes them experts in understanding your online marketing needs.
