Email Marketing: Best Practices for Your Healthcare Business

Email marketing in today’s world is a form of direct digital marketing through target audiences. Typically, email marketing involves using emails to send advertisements, solicit sales, or establish relationships with recipients for business.  

Email marketing creates a new role for your marketing strategy by promoting brand awareness, product promotion, and building customer relationships. Using this marketing strategy is an approach to help your business appeal to a specific target audience.  

Why Should Healthcare Practices Use Email Marketing Campaigns?

For healthcare practices, email marketing can be a reliable tool for communication and promotion. One of the most significant advantages is its free or low cost, with a high return on investment (ROI). This saves a lot of time, resources, and money. Traditional methods, such as direct mail or phone calls, must be revised compared to innovative digital marketing. According to a 2020 survey among marketers worldwide, the ROI was 45 dollars per dollar. This shows the evolution of ROI in email marketing and its sufficiency through the years.

Another reason healthcare practices should use email marketing campaigns is the reliability and engagement of customers and patients. Over 4 billion people worldwide use email as a form of communication, providing healthcare organizations with a unique opportunity to promote their brands. 

Lastly, providing valuable health information is another crucial reason for email marketing campaigns. Patients are looking to stay updated with health trends and news. By using email marketing, you can provide accurate information to patients, such as health trends, managing medical conditions, and staying updated with healthy habits.  

What Kind of Content Should Be Included?

Staying engaged with patients is essential for healthcare organizations; here are some content/campaigns that should be included to keep patients in mind and valued:  

1. Educational Engagement

Educational emails are a great way to stay in touch with your patients and familiarize them with your services. Updating your patients on healthcare industry trends and issues can create a positive change for them and make a reliable connection. Updating your patients on healthy lifestyle habits and associated care measures establishes a field of central engagement.  

2. Promotions

Healthcare practices could offer promotions such as discounts and free consultations. Having promotional offers encourages patients to reach out and consider the services. This can increase traffic and the reputation of healthcare practices.  

3. Patient Engagement

Patient engagement directly approaches storytelling and brand awareness rather than promotions and marketing. Staying engaged with your patients creates a dynamic relationship and makes an excellent first impression for them on your brand. Patient stories, welcome emails, and creative, informative emails are examples of staying engaged. Having engaged emails makes your branding clear and focused.  

Best Practices for Email Campaigns  

For compliance and effectiveness with healthcare regulations and patients, there are many healthcare practices to use for effective email marketing, such as:  

1. Segmenting

Segmenting is an important but influential practice for email campaigns. Thirty-three percent of people find emails that don’t match their work interests frustrating, and 31 percent of non-work-related emails, according to a study by Adobe, regarding email trends. Dividing your email list into groups based on interests, interactions, and demographics with your practice is an excellent way to direct your messages to specific audiences.  

2. HIPAA Regulation Compliance

Emails sent to patients should not contain protected health information and must be relevant to HIPAA Privacy Rule standards. 

3. Spam Filtering & Frequency

Emailing is a huge marketing platform, unfortunately, meaning that a big chunk of email traffic is considered spam. Using keywords to bypass spam filters is avoiding spam words and phrases, authenticating your emails, and segmenting. Not only this, but the frequency of your emails is also important. Overloading inboxes leads to spam, and many patients may see the intense frequency as spam and could unsubscribe from these emails.  

Let Valet Health Help You Maintain a Reliable Online Connection With your Patients through Email Marketing

Valet Health will give your healthcare organization a competitive edge. We can help you improve patient communication and take your online healthcare presence to a whole new level. Contact us for more information on how we can help you with your email marketing needs.