How Healthcare Email Marketing is Making an Impact

Healthcare email marketing is an underdog when it comes to marketing tactic. Unlike other industries, healthcare and pharmaceutical companies need a specialized email marketing campaign. 

The attention span of the current generation is less than a minute, while the rate of information consumption in 60 seconds is staggering. If we combine the above two facts and try to come up with a healthcare marketing solution the answer would be Email Marketing. Period.

Disease awareness, physician education, service offerings, drug information, new approvals, new discovery, innovative solutions and many more healthcare offerings can be brought under a single roof of email marketing. In today’s world of technology, marketing by emails – Email Marketing has become the most popular strategy to reach out to your customer and it provides highest ROI – Return on Investment compared to other marketing tactics.

Email Marketing

Healthcare and pharmaceutical companies definitely need email marketing as a part of their marketing plan, as we expect a growth in next 4-5 years to a significant level. One can definitely stay ahead of competition by deploying email marketing as a part of their monthly marketing efforts. It is the best communication channel to connect with the consumers as well as the providers of healthcare and pharma companies.

Listed below are the 3-main reasons why healthcare and pharmaceutical companies should adopt email marketing:

1. Highest ROI:

The total cost of executing email marketing is far cheaper than other marketing strategies, yet provides the maximum return of investment.

2. Generates Rapid Results:

When compared to other marketing channels, which can take few days to get a response, email marketing generates quicker results since you are directly reaching into your customer’s inbox.

3. Gives You Deeper Insights:

You can easily and quickly analyse the effectiveness of your email campaigns like track open rates, click through rate, etc., and then accordingly adjust your marketing strategy.

Implementing Healthcare Email Marketing

One can implement healthcare email marketing all by own or one can approach companies such as Moisaka Solutions, Mailchimp etc to create email marketing campaigns. Moisaka Solutions provides a custom email marketing solution based on the client’s objective. Moisaka takes care of content, creative designs, email ID management, reports and analytics of the entire email marketing campaign, whereas Mailchimp provides a platform to create your own email campaign by uploading images, content and icons. Both has its own pros and cons, it requires an expertise to use mailchimp whereas one can contact email marketing experts like Moisaka Solutions and relax.

Some Facts about Email Marketing:

1. Email marketing technology is used by 82% of B2B and B2C companies – Ascend2

2. Automated email messages average 70.5% higher open rates and 152% higher click-through rates than “business as usual” marketing messages – Epsilon Email Institute

3. About 53% of emails are opened on mobile devices – Campaign Monitor

4. 23% of readers who open an email on a mobile device open it again later – Campaign Monitor

5. Emails with personalized subject lines are 26% more likely to be opened – Campaign Monitor

6. You are 6x more likely to get a click-through from an email campaign than you are from a tweet – Campaign Monitor

7. Email is 40 times more effective at acquiring new customers than Facebook or Twitter – McKinsey

8. Email subscribers are 3 times more likely to share your content via social media than visitors from other sources – QuickSprout

9. 72% people prefer to receive promotional content through email, compared to 17% who prefer social media – MarketingSherpa

10. Including a call to action button instead of a text link can increase conversion rates by as much as 28% – Campaign Monitor

11. A message is 5x more likely to be seen in email than via Facebook – Radicati

12. Sending four emails in a month instead of one significantly increases the number of consumers opening more than one email – WhoIsHostingThis “Email Deliverability 101.”

13. Email marketing has an ROI of 3800% – DMA

14. The average order value of an email is at least three times higher than that of social media – McKinsey

15. 57% of email subscribers spend 10-60 minutes browsing marketing emails during the week – ChoozOn

16. For every $1 spent, email marketing generates $38 in ROI – Campaign Monitor

17. 90% of email gets delivered to the intended recipient’s inbox, whereas only 2% of your Facebook fans see your posts in their News Feed – Forrester Research

18. 83% of B2B marketers use email newsletters for content marketing – Content Marketing Institute

19. Open rate is highest when companies send two emails per month – Database Marketing Institute

20. At 1.47 million emails sent per month, US companies send more emails than the global average of 1.38 million – MarketingLand

Healthcare Email Marketing Best Practices

1. Setting a benchmark before the start of campaign

Recent trends states that emailers directed towards patient education and disease information tends to engage a lot more than it would in traditional B2B or SaaS based email marketing.  Just like comparing apple with oranges doesn’t make a logical sense, similarly we need to compare email marketing campaign results with healthcare benchmark data only.

We recommend using historical or reliable data and build your own specific benchmarks based on past and future email marketing communications.  This way, you are comparing any future emails and programs to your particular audience and marketing tactics.

2. Content Relevancy

It is really important to share the relevant content to the right person at the right time and place with premium content and creative visuals. By doing so, it not only helps healthcare companies to build a brand image, but also the trust of patients. For instance, if the healthcare company knows about an upcoming surgery of one of their patient, it will be of great use to send an email to the patient about the necessary information beforehand. That’s how loyalty and trust is built.

3. Education over Sale

No doubt sales are important, but what good does it bring in the long run if we don’t implement patient and physician educational programs? A small investment in the form of education has paid a lot for a number of companies.

We have deployed educational-based emails with topics like patient treatment options, wellness tips, and ways to improve comfort, as well as general information on a diagnosis. As per our studies, educational based emails perform well as compared to direct sales emails.

Few Ideas for Your Next Email Campaign

1. Share the latest health or local community news and your commentary or advice to build patient or physician relationships and drive email sharing.
2. Remind patients of your existing services and announce new ones to increase appointments.
3. Remind physicians of your constant effort in physician education and innovation is the fundamental reason why your company is progressing.
4. Announce a patient appreciation event to develop a connection with patients and inspire referrals.
5. Integrate a patient-physician GIF or video in your emailer campaign and drive engagement.
6. Create a personalized email campaign with you physicians’ name and say THANK YOU (a simple thank you note goes a long way).
7. Announce a patient referral incentive to reach new patients (e.g., entry into a teeth whitening raffle or nutrition class).
8. Share local health resources like wellness events and seminars to stay connected and drive email sharing.

Thanks a lot for reading this article, you can help spread the importance of healthcare email marketing by sharing this article with your colleagues and friends.