Email marketing remains one of the most popular options for organization to distribute their message. In fact, a marketing survey conducted by Ascend2 suggested that email marketing is a tool used by roughly 82% of B2B and B2C companies. Without getting too deep into figures and statistics, it makes sense that email marketing would be a popular choice, as email is a medium so commonly understood in today’s society. The majority of people interact with email every day, in several aspects of their day – both at work and at home. This familiarity makes email an attractive (and accessible) way to reach consumers in a place that they are constantly connected to.
At Prizm, we often discuss the benefits of lead generation and the impact it can have on an organization’s sales funnel – especially in the case of healthcare leads (check out more about lead generation on our blog). Marketers might think that lead generation has little to do with the ins and outs of email marketing, especially healthcare email marketing, but that is no longer the case. In a changing regulatory environment (with legislation like CASL in Canada and the CAN-SPAM act in the USA), it is increasingly important to qualify your email lists to ensure that you can carry out your campaigns without any repercussions. This process is exactly what happens in a lead generation campaign and having a strong understanding of how to close more healthcare leads through a well-developed email marketing program is a great first step towards developing a more robust lead generation program.
Today, we are going to discuss a few items for marketing professionals to consider when it comes to not only carrying out a healthcare email marketing campaign, but also to implementing changes that will close more healthcare leads and result in more sales conversions.
Be Authentic and Provide Value
This one may seem like fluff, but it is so crucially important to the success of any healthcare email marketing campaign: be sincere. We all have sales numbers to reach – and we know what it feels like when the pressure is on – but if you do not truly believe that the individuals on your list will benefit from the product or service you are marketing to them, you probably should not be contacting them. At the end of the day, email marketing is just another way of providing value to prospective customers, but if the healthcare leads you are reaching will not benefit from that value, do not waste your time and resources on attempting to connect with them.
In terms of the development of messaging for a healthcare email marketing campaign, using specificity when possible is one way to build relatability and credibility into the content you are crafting. Understanding who you are connecting with can really help with this – are there demographic breakdowns? Is geographic targeting involved? How have these individuals interacted with the organization previously? Even being able to answer one of these questions will allow you to build a little bit more specificity into your communication that makes it feel a bit more personalized. In sales, a handwritten note always goes further than an e-mail or digital communication, and by keeping this in mind you can make small tweaks to your healthcare email marketing program that try to capture that “handwritten” personalized essence that resounds with people so well.
Finally, following up is incredibly important in the world of marketing, and even more so when it comes to healthcare email marketing. Again, follow up emails should be genuine, personal, and human. There is so much out there written on “how to craft that perfect message” – but if you are clear about the value of your product and why you sincerely think that the person you are writing to would benefit from it, chances are you are doing a lot of things right.
Have A Sound E-mail Marketing Strategy
While we’re on the topic of follow-up emails, it’s worth discussing the importance of a well-developed healthcare email marketing follow up strategy. While we maintain that being genuine is the most important thing you can do when developing an email marketing program, it is still foolish to go in blind. Having a plan with respect to the initial pitch, when you are going to be following up, and how many times is crucial to the success and effective management of the campaign. These are a few factors to consider when it comes to planning a strategy for healthcare lead touchpoints:
- Time – What time of day are you sending your email blast? Is it during working hours or perhaps during an “off time”? This decision should depend on the nature of your product and service and what you want your healthcare leads headspace to be when they open your message. With respect to follow ups, it’s also important to ensure your blasts are not going out at the same time every day, so as to catch people at multiple different points in their day and ensure that they engage with your message at least once.
- Frequency – How often are you following up with your healthcare leads? This will again depend on the nature of your product or service, but is an important thing to consider before you send out your initial blast. Having an idea of how many times you are going to be attempting to reach your e-mail audience will help determine the third point, which is…
- Tone – Does the tone of your communication change from your initial blast to the subsequent follow-ups? If so, how? Having a content strategy that works to re-engage leads who may have previously been disinterested (or simply just too busy) is important in maximizing the effectiveness of your follow ups.
While these three factors are all important considerations in the development of follow-up messaging, the most important thing you can remember is that each and every contact that comes out of your healthcare email marketing program should showcase the value of your offering to the person you are writing to, and should have a clearly defined call to action.
Don’t Get Discouraged
Like all outgoing sales strategies, closing healthcare email marketing leads can be tough work. There will always be people who are frustrated, too busy, or just do not respond well to this type of marketing program. What is most important to remember is that in running this type of email marketing program, you are directly connecting with healthcare leads who could potentially improve their well-being and quality of life as a direct result of your interaction with them. That is incredibly important and should be your fuel to effectively reach leads, facilitate positive interactions, and ultimately convert those healthcare leads into users of your product or service.