As digital marketing strategies have evolved, one question continues to pop up: “is email marketing still important?”
Yes, it’s very necessary — as email marketing helps you reach and connect with your target audience in a very personalized way, increasing sales at an affordable cost. In fact, today’s email marketing tools allow you to reach potential patients easier than ever.
Top 9 reasons why you need email marketing for your healthcare business:
1. Connect with your audience
Emails help keep your customers informed. Prospective patients will check email when it is convenient for them. Anyone who has signed up to your email list has made a commitment to receive these notes. When you give them something worth reading, they will enjoy your emails — which serves to enhance engagement with your customers.
Your email gives them a feeling you’re thinking of them. Your email might be very simple: “Hi, just thinking about you, here is a special offer!” or “We’ve got an update on improvements in recent weeks.”
2. Reach customers in real-time
Research shows 54% of all emails are opened on a mobile device. This is significant for planning any marketing strategy. Emails designed for mobile devices produce higher conversion rates than any other medium.
3. People engage with emails
Over the years, email has evolved into one of our main choices of communication. We tend to do something with the email — whether reply, forward, click through to something else embedded within the email, delete, buy something, or sign up. This means you can use email to drive people to your website, to call, or perform any other call to action. In fact, over 25 percent of sales last year were attributed to email marketing.
4. Email marketing is easy to measure
With email marketing tools, you can track the activity when the email is sent out. Track delivery rates, bounce rates, unsubscribe rates, click-through rates, and open rates. You’ll get a better understanding of how your email campaigns are working, which ones need tweaking.
Don’t ignore these valuable metrics. They are an important part of your internet marketing campaign. How often should you email? Various studies and surveys that present “optimal” numbers to aim for, but you can tailor frequency to your own readers. Sending too many emails to consumers will see your unsubscribe rate increase. It’s all about knowing your customers and providing valuable content.
5. It’s affordable
There’s no doubt — email marketing is very affordable. You can reach a large number of consumers for less than pennies per message. The cost per conversion is so low with email marketing, every healthcare company should try it.
Certainly, the emails must be professional so you need someone to management them — the writing, drafting, scheduling, sending, etc.
6. Allows for targeted messaging
Lead nurturing is another form of email marketing. With each email, you will reach your potential customers are at different stages of the buying cycle. Some may be in the consideration stage, while others may be at the research and compare stage, and others in the ready-to-purchase stage.
By creating buyer personas, you can determine the content to create for each step. Customers need information to move them to the next buying cycle stage; pushing the right content can do just that. The goal is to move your prospects down your sales funnel – as efficiently as possible.
7. Increase brand awareness
When you have a customer or prospect’s email address, this means they have a level of interest in your healthcare industry business. Email marketing allows you to increase that interest level, that brand awareness, by staying top of mind.
This doesn’t mean you should bombard customers with emails. Instead, use email marketing for more than sell, sell, sell. Instead, you can use email to educate or increase brand awareness. Email can inform readers of your volunteer activities in the local community. Or industry awards you’ve received. Presentations you’ve given to special interest groups.
This approach helps build customer trust and adds a sense of personality to your brand.
8. Email is timely
You can offer customers a special offer on their birthday, or let them know a favorite treatment is discounted. You can promote holiday specials or annual sales — with a sense of urgency, as customers are much more likely to purchase when a deal is ending soon.
9. Nearly everyone uses email
A Hubspot survey states that 91% of consumers use email. That alone means that email presents an incredible opportunity to reach customers. You can provide them with discounts, specials, new treatments — which they can share and forward to anyone they’d like. A good email marketing strategy is to encourage customers to share offers as much as possible. Remember brand awareness?
Need help with email marketing?
Our Somnowell Marketing team has helped many healthcare businesses just like yours, to create and implement an email marketing campaign — including lead nurture marketing. The team will develop templates that can be adjusted for your specific business and demographic. We will track response rate and other data to ensure you’re getting the best ROI — and reaching your conversion goals.
If your healthcare business could benefit from a well-developed email marketing campaign, let’s talk.
