Attracting new patients can be an expensive and often inefficient process. Traditional advertising and direct mailing campaigns can be costly and often have very little impact. Today, marketing can be so much easier for medical services, especially with email marketing.

Too many practices only use emails to send appointment reminders and ask for reviews. It’s a huge missed opportunity to ignore the pros of email marketing which allows you to improve sales as well as gain a connection with consumers.

It’s never been easier to connect with patients than with automated email marketing funnels, here is why:

1. It’s a Money Saver

Everything about marketing is expensive. Every time an ad is placed or direct mail is sent to patients there is a cost. Flyers and billboards come at a hefty cost and that’s money that isn’t always returned. The wider the distribution the higher the cost but all that is avoided if you replace it with email advertising.

Email marketing comes at a smaller price as there are no stock or printing costs. For one-time emails simply log into your email system, draft the email, select the recipient and send it before going back to work. There is no outsourcing, no printing, and no calling local billboard services. It doesn’t matter if your email marketing list contains 500, 1000, or 10,000 patients, it will cost the same to send out the message every time.

2. It’s a Time-Saver

Email marketing helps you to make more money by allowing you to automate the patient pre-purchase process. Patients tend to have the same inquiries so it’s easy to anticipate what they will ask, create a series of emails for popular procedures and it will automatically send it to patients who express interest in that procedures. Most medical practices use this type of email marketing funneling and build sequences of emails for their top procedures or procedures they want to promote like Invisalign, veneers, and teeth whitening.

There aren’t many forms of marketing that are as easy to share as email marketing. With the forward button, subscribers can share your content with their contacts, possibly gaining new customers at no extra expense.

“The less time you spend selling your products and the more time you spend serving patients is time and cost-effective. A lot of hours have been lost to answering queries from people who don’t pursue them, email marketing can half this time”, - says William Bryan, an Email Marketing Strategist at Bestbritishessays and a Huffingtonpost writer.

3. It’s Measurable

Unlike traditional marketing where you have no idea who is opening their mail or passing your billboard, you can measure email marketing. With emails, you know exactly who receives your email, who interacts with it, what type of marketing works better for your demographic, and which links are the most clicked. This will allow you to consistently improve your marketing strategies. Include plenty of links back to your website, this will encourage people to click and visit your site.

It is important to monitor the time and frequency in which to send out your email. There is no perfect time and way to send your email but measurable can help this. Tuesdays and Thursdays are the most effective days to send emails but Wednesdays are when the most replies are sent. Avoid Mondays as people’s inboxes can be hectic after the weekend and Fridays when users check out of their inboxes early in preparation for the weekend. Experts recommend no clear-cut time to send the email but early to mid-afternoon is often thought of as the best option, people have had time to sift through their inbox and feel less overwhelmed with their mail. 

Analytics are indispensable for measuring the success of the campaign and email marketing can offer precise and valuable metrics. Email marketing offers more than numbers and percentages, it can other more insight into the behaviors and interests of your customers.

4. It Allow You to Connect with Your Customers

People respond better to brands they know, trust, and like. People treat traditional marketing with a level of caution and distrust if it even makes that much of an impact. Email marketing can be more conversational and feel more like a community. Avoid any mention of purchasing and instead talk about the practice’s culture and values, to make an authentic connection with them. According to an Adobe marketing study, sixty-three percent of customers still prefer to receive marketing promotions and offers through email, customers are likely to be expecting emails from your company.

One of the easiest and most effective ways to keep In touch with your patients is by sending out a weekly newsletter that keeps them up to date with your practice and reminds them you are still there. Also set up an automatic birthday message and season greetings with some form of gift with an appointment or discount code. Because email marketing is so immediate you can make a positive out of seasonal messaging and encourage customers to come in for your services to prepare for Christmas parties or Valentine's Dates.

Arthur Scott, a Digital Marketer at Boomessays comments: “The typical consumer, generally, interacts with a company seven times before they make a purchase. This is less time-consuming and expensive with email marketing, all it takes is setting up an automated email sequence that shows the value of your business”.

5. It Will Position You as an Expert

As an experienced doctor, you probably would like to be recognized as this by your patients. Having regular email sequences will help you practice and stand out as an expert in the field. Writing blog posts that are featured in e-blasts or newsletters can help you gain the trust of customers. Anything that feels like an additional personal touch will help your customers feel connected with your practice and will be more likely to trust you with their medical needs.

When writing newsletters and emails remember to keep it educational. Ensure you are providing material of value to your readers by offering advice, tips, and even on how to maintain oral health.

How to make your email marketing campaign effective?

So now you understand how much of a money and time-saving strategy tool email marketing is here’s how are some tips on how to make your medical email campaign generate more practice visits.

Make it Brand Focused

Branding is everything in the modern world, you want people to remember who you are. Your campaigns need to be well-branded, and your website URL should match your email address and your practice name. Avoiding sending emails with free account addresses as it appears unprofessional. Several reputable companies offer free plans that allow users to send a certain amount of emails, per month, enough to satisfy a growing list. If your needs outgrow the free service, you can always upgrade your plan at a later date.

All the marketing material should look the same so try and use the same fonts and colors across platforms. Patients will be weary when giving personal details out via the web but having these personal branding touches will assure patients that you are a legitimate company.

Make it Mobile-Optimized

Nearly half of emails are opened on a mobile device make sure your emails and website are compatible with this platform. A patient must be able to read the content without having to zoom in and out, remember when formatting that your emails could be read on devices with smaller screens than a desktop computer.

“Keep your subject line concise, otherwise it will be cut off on the small phone or tablet screen. Keep your subject lines under 50 characters to avoid them getting cut off. The most effective subject lines are straightforward, not pushy or sales orientated”, - says Jenna Mark, a Sales manager at Uktopwriters and a blog editor at Studydemic.

Avoid the Spam Folder

A high amount of permission emails never reaches the inbox because they are sent straight to the recipient’s spam folder. If the email appears fraudulent, the provider’s algorithms will automatically flag it as some form of a threat. Using all caps and having subjects with the word ‘FREE’ can trigger the provider to automatically bin your marketing. If a huge amount of people flag your brand’s emails as spam the provider will take this on board for future emails and start presuming they are spam.

Don’t Try Too Hard

The goal of email marketing is to get more patients and make more money, but don’t be too obvious with it. If it looks obvious that you are trying to sell procedures to patients they may not need or upselling unnecessary products, they will unsubscribe from your list.

Show that you are offering insight into how patients can keep their mouths healthy and how to prevent oral problems. Make your marketing about them and how much your practice values their health. Sell it as it would be beneficial for them to come to their next appointment.

Personalize the Messages

Make sure your messages are accurate and grammatically correct, bad spelling and typos can make your brand look careless and unprofessional. If you can’t take the care to spellcheck or use a grammar checker on an email how much care will you take on their teeth? Write in a professional yet friendly tone, like you were writing to another doctor. Use natural humor with a personal tone, and don’t be afraid to tell stories about yourself. Try and keep your emails themed otherwise the reader will get confused and will move on to something else.

Here are some of the best tools to help make sure you are sending accurate and personalized emails:

• Grammarly -to check your grammar to ensure you have the best
• State of Writing and Ukwritings offer various writing assistance and advice.
• Academadvisor and Oxessays provide formatting and email copywriting guides, as recommended here.
• Easy Word Count will help keep your posts brief, especially if you don’t use Microsoft Word.
• Cite It In and Essayroo will help your perfect your citations when you need to reference someone else’s work.

Keep it Simple

An average person will send and receive more than 80 emails a day, our inboxes are constantly cluttered with subscriptions, advertising, newsletters, and office emails. Attention spans are short and people lead increasingly busy lives so very few people will want to read a long in-depth email. Keep your messages concise and picture-heavy, there is no need to flood patients with too many details. A focused message will encourage people to read it and engage with it. Anything too long and jargon-filled just bore your customers and they are unlikely to open another message from your address.

Using headings and bullet points will increase readability alongside content-related imagery and snappy paragraphs.

Keep it Trustworthy

Buying an unsolicited email list is becoming a bigger and bigger concern of customers but it’s a popular branding method for companies. Only send emails to people who have provided their addresses to you, it’s a courtesy that will keep your audience’s trust. If people who didn’t sign up start flagging your emails as spam or repetitively delete them, providers might start automatically sending future emails to the spam folder.

Make sure you provide website traffic with a choice to subscribe to messages and then provide an email preference option so your customers are aware of what they are signing up for.

In today’s fast-changing digital landscape email marketing has been pushed aside for flashier platforms. Email marketing is a targeted, reliable, shareable, credible, and cost-effective tool that is perfect for marketing medical practices. It is time and money efficient whilst allowing you to measure how effective the marketing is. The key to good email marketing is to be trustworthy and create a sense of community with engaging branding.