How to Improve Patient Return Rates With Email Marketing
In today’s digital world, medical practices have numerous ways to engage with their patients. And practices across the nation use a variety of different marketing strategies to communicate their services. Nowadays, competition is fierce and medical practices are getting creative about how they can attract potential patients. With billions of people online every day, it is clear that using healthcare marketing strategies would be very beneficial. And one of the top ways to reach patients is email marketing. Read along to discover its benefits and how it can create more loyal patients.
What is Email Marketing?
You can consider email marketing to be as old as the Internet. It has become one of the most popular forms of communication throughout the years, and it is not going away anytime soon. Statista predicts US email users to grow up to 4.48 billion in 2024. According to Salesforce, email has an average return on investment (ROI) of 3,800 percent. It means that for every dollar invested, the average return is $38! And what’s even better is that you can track the performance and impact of every email you send out. Therefore, with the numbers presented above, you can conclude that email marketing is beneficial.
Email marketing is using emails to promote different products, services, and even clinic events. You can develop relationships with potential patients and keep current patients informed and updated on your services as a medical practice. Aside from that, it lets your patients know about promos and discounts.
Additionally, email marketing allows you to create targeted and personalized messages. It can be effective in building meaningful relationships with your patients. However, it is also important to remember not to overuse email marketing. Sometimes, receiving too many emails from one organization can be irritating. And it can result in your patients deleting your email, sending them to their junk folder, or even unsubscribing.
Types of Email Marketing
There are different types of email marketing used by medical practices across the nation. Here are some of the prominent ones:
- Newsletter Email
Newsletters are a creative and informative way to cultivate long-term relationships with patients. They are a powerful marketing and communications tool typically sent to inform patients about the latest news, tips, or updates.
And newsletters come in different forms, and they can have a wide range of different content depending on what a practice wants. The point of using email newsletters is to keep the people who subscribed to your website connected, engaged, and informed on what’s new in your practice. And as a result, hopefully, it will help you gain more patients.
- Transaction Email
It is the email you get when your customer performs a specific action. For instance, you will get an email when you sign up for a webinar. They will then instruct you to fill out a form with basic information. After you fill out the form, you should receive a thank you email. The thank-you email is an example of a transactional email. In US Healthcare, transactional emails are also used for medication reminders, sharing lab test results, medical proof of delivery, and billing reminders.
- Catalog Email
Catalog email marketing is similar to a newsletter email. However, it focuses more on images and short descriptions. It sometimes shows prices on products and services. Catalog emails are like a digital version of a hard copy catalog. But the advantage of using this one is that it’s much cheap and incurs no printing costs. Medical practices can create catalog emails containing the services they offer and the prices for each service. They can also put the equipment and facilities to entice more patients. It would help raise awareness of your current and potential patients.
- Video Email
Video email is a type of email marketing that combines a newsletter email and catalog email. It consists of having images, video footage, and graphics. There are a lot of video applications to choose from to assist you with creating this type of email. Some of the video applications you can use are Covideo, BombBomb, and Headliner.
Why Use Email Marketing?
You might be wondering why it is important for medical practices to use email marketing as a way to reach out to their patients. Here are a few of the top reasons:
- Email marketing is cost-effective.
One of the most evident advantages of email marketing is its lower cost than some other marketing channels. With email marketing, there are no printing costs, advertising fees, or postal fees. Practices can just pay for software that does email marketing (and some are free up to a certain number of contacts!).
- Email marketing strengthens customer relationships.
It’s not easy to grow lasting patients relationships. One of the foundations to building a solid, lasting relationship is interaction. That is the goal of email marketing -- to have constant interaction with your patients. With the use of email marketing, it is reminding them that you value them as your patients. And it helps to keep your patients thinking about you all year-round.
- Email marketing increases leads.
Encouraging your website visitors to sign up for your email list or newsletter will generate more leads. There is a higher chance that your subscribers will forward these emails to their family and friends or share it on social media.
- Email marketing drives conversion.
riving conversions is the top priority of healthcare marketers. Email marketing is proven to be more effective in click-through rates than social media. The marketers can track the patient journey from receiving the email to scheduling an appointment.
- Email marketing increases sales.
Email is one of the most successful marketing mediums on the web. It has been proven that email marketing helps generate more sales than social media. If you have a new promotion, people can click on links and follow your call-to-action button immediately. It also accounts for approximately 23% of sales, and the return of investment (ROI) of email marketing is twice as much as the average of all other online advertising efforts.
How can email marketing help your medical practice?
As we have already established, email marketing is a highly effective and inexpensive way for medical practices to reach patients. It provides direct communication to their existing patients, as well as their potential customers. Furthermore, email marketing improves patient communication and increases patient engagement. Email marketing also helps inform your patients about your current services. It positions your organization as a reliable source for health information. It has also been proven that using email marketing will help your practice gain a competitive advantage over your competitors who don’t.
Partner with DrCatalyst
There are a lot of ways that you can take advantage of email marketing. But it can be tedious.
DrCatalyst can help you with that. We can help you inform your patients about your services through email marketing and more with our exclusive digital marketing services. Our team can design your website, manage your social media, and even write your medical blogs too.
Are you interested in learning more? Hop on a call with one of our marketing specialists.
