What To Do and What to Avoid When Email Marketing for Your Practice

Utilizing email as part of your marketing strategy is a great way to communicate with patients. In our often fast-paced lives, many prefer to hear from their healthcare providers through email, which allows you to connect efficiently with them and target the message to a particular audience or personalize communication to specific individuals.

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Medical practices shifted from using email communication for appointment reminders. It's a unique tool to market your business to the right audience if you implement it correctly. Here are some dos and don'ts of email marketing in healthcare.

Make your emails mobile-friendly

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Often, people check their emails on a mobile device like a phone or tablet. If your emails are difficult or confusing to read on a mobile device, you may lose some readers who are interested in your emails. Also, avoid side-scrolling; opt for a column-style layout that allows users to easily zoom in if needed.

Don't forget to target your audience

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Maybe some of your patients want to receive health tips while others want to get appointment reminders. Some may wish to do both. Give your patients the liberty to pick the kind of emails they want to receive. To tailor your newsletter content or healthcare tips even further, use data. Most email marketing services can give data on how many emails were open and what those people clicked on. If you notice a specific type of content is more popular than others, use that type of content more often. Likewise, if you see that

As a healthcare professional, social media offers you a valuable way to engage with patients, potential patients, and fellow industry professionals through platforms such as Twitter, Instagram, and others. Keeping your sanity while doing that in an efficient time and manner is the big challenge, and in order to conquer that challenge, healthcare hashtags are essential.
Hashtags are basically just phrases or acronyms with a "#" sign before them. #coronavirus might be included at the end of a tweet about the latest COVID-19 data. By clicking on that hashtag or manually entering it into a search box, users can view all the shared content from everyone who has used it.

a particular subject matter or content is unpopular, stop creating or sharing it. This can also help to reduce your opt-out rate.

Don't forget about branding

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Branding goes beyond a logo or a font. With every emailer you send out, pay attention to the overall tone and appearance. Remember, these communications represent your practice, so you'll want to ensure your emails are professional and consistent with your practice's branding. Also, make sure your emails are checked for spelling and grammatical errors. Most importantly, make sure all of your marketing emails are sent from an address containing your practice's name so that your emails aren't mistaken for spam.

Make it easy to unsubscribe
Ensure that patients have the option to not receive your communication, whether it's a mailer or a newsletter. This shows respect and allows the audience to not feel bombarded with your marketing emails. That means every email you send needs to have an easy-to-find "unsubscribe" link. By doing this, you are also saving yourself time and effort. If someone doesn't want to receive communication from you via email, it will do you no good to keep sending unwanted emails.

Keep it simple

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Avoid covering too many topics in one email. However, you shouldn't bombard a patient with ten emails

in a week; rather, group the topics, so it makes sense and is consistent. The reader may miss some details when there is too much content in an email. Additionally, while your emails should be visually appealing, don't overload them with images. The loading time can be longer, and that may distract the reader from the main message.
You can achieve great results with email marketing if you do it correctly. Try these tips if your email marketing isn't as successful as you'd like.

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