Email marketing is one of the most popular forms of marketing communications for hospitals and health care professionals. According to a UBM Medica study, 58% of health systems are engaging their patients with email marketing.
Whether you are looking to improve your email marketing strategy or are just getting started, the following tips are sure to help! Include these 5 features in your next e-blast and you will be on your way to delivering a successful email campaign in no time. And don't miss our free, complete guide to building your specialty healthcare marketing plan.
1. Focused Call to Action (CTA) Button
Your call to action (CTA) is vital to the overall success of your e-blast. Typically, your call to action will entail some sort of button that users can click on to follow through. The great thing about email marketing is that this can all be tracked! By making your CTA a button, you can monitor the click rate and see just how many viewers responded to your CTA.
To get started, determine what your CTA is going to be for your e-blast. Depending on your audience, it could be to view the volunteer schedule, donate, or book an appointment online. Once you have identified your CTA, create a large, colorful button for your e-blast and place it in a prominent location. Make sure your email content supports this CTA! About a week after your e-blast was sent, review and record your statistics and use this data to further optimize your CTA in the future.
2. Strong Subject Line
The subject line is the first contact that your email has with a recipient. Without a strong subject line, your email will never get opened. Some marketers recommend that you spend almost the same amount of time on your subject line as you do on the rest of the e-blast; that’s how important it is!
When writing your strong subject line, make sure it is something that would appeal to you. Also make sure that it is relevant to the email content. Finally, you will want to keep your subject line under 50 characters. This will ensure that most of the subject line displays in the preview panel and will help you to keep it clear and concise.
3. Mobile-Friendly Design
In order to ensure the best possible viewing experience for all of your recipients, you will want to design your e-blast in a mobile-friendly format. With more and more people accessing the internet and their emails from mobile devices, there is a greater need for responsive email design. Most email marketing services (i.e. MailChimp) will automatically generate a mobile-friendly version of your email campaign. If your e-blasts are not currently mobile-friendly, we can promise that you will see a rise in both open rates and click rates once you switch over.
4. Powerful Images
People these days are always in a hurry and checking email is no exception. Ensure that your emails are getting read by keeping them short, sweet, and to the point. Lists and bullet points are great options for making your email scannable. In addition, graphic-heavy emails save recipients a great deal of time. Incorporate images into your emails and let them speak for you. If you are trying to ask for donations, use a powerful image to do most of the talking. After all, how many times have we heard that a picture is worth a thousand words?
5. Segmentation
Segmentation of your emails and email lists is vital to increasing your open and click through rates. As a health care provider, you probably have a handful of very different audiences that you would like to reach. While you don’t want to be asking your doctors to book appointments online, you also don’t want to ask your patients for donations. Start by creating separate lists for your different audiences. Then, develop e-blasts as needed for each individual segment. While a monthly e-newsletter with organizational information may be relevant to all of your lists, most of your other bi-weekly e-blasts will not be.
As you move forward with your healthcare email marketing campaign, keep these 5 tips in mind. And as always, feel free to contact Informatics with any questions you may have regarding digital marketing and/or email campaigns.
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