In the ever-evolving healthcare landscape, it is essential for hospitals to nurture a positive relationship with their patients to provide them with a satisfactory experience that will attract them to your brand and keep them coming back for your services. A strong email marketing strategy enables you to establish a strong connection with your patients, effectively improving both patient acquisition and retention. Today, let’s take a look at some strategies that will help you leverage email marketing to enhance your brand.

Setting Campaign Objectives

Before you start your email marketing campaigns, you need to decide what you plan to achieve through the campaign. Set clear campaign goals and tailor your strategy accordingly to elicit the desired response from the target audience. Break down the user journey into steps and monitor your progress during each step. This will enable you to refine your strategies to get a better response.

Creating Mailing Lists

Once you have defined your campaign objectives, the next step is to create mailing lists with contacts who might be interested in your services. You can try the following methods to create a quality mailing list.
Only add interested contacts: Collect emails of genuinely interested contacts. You can use social media, pop-out forms on your websites, and check-out forms at the hospital for this purpose.
Make the forms user-friendly: Don’t make the patient spend too much time on the forms. The sign-up process should be quick and easy, collecting only the relevant information.
Showcase your value: Let the patient realize the value in signing up for your emails through testimonials and stats so that they are encouraged to proceed further.

Segmenting Your Audience

If you want to be successful with your email marketing, it is necessary for you to segment your audience so that you can customize your communications to resonate with that particular group. Receiving personalized email communications that cater to the individual’s personal healthcare needs will help them feel seen and understood by your brand and they are more likely to put their trust in your care this way. For segmentation, you can use the following tactics.
Subscription Preferences: Enable email subscription preferences so that the patient can personally choose what kind of emails they would like to receive from you. This will help avoid unnecessary communications that might be considered spam by the patient.
Patient surveys: Get to know your patients better through patient surveys. The data directly collected through patient surveys can give you keen insight into the patient’s interests and preferences.
Feedback forms: Feedback forms are essential to gauging the patient’s satisfaction with your hospital. They also give you better insights into what the patient expects from you.
Website and email analytics: Find out the patient's interests and patterns of behavior by analyzing how they have interacted with your website and their responses to previous email campaigns.
Electronic Health Records (EHR): Electronic Health Records give you a comprehensive view of the patient's healthcare journey so far and thus enable you to segment them accordingly.

Writing Subject Line

Email communications, while effective, are also easy to get overlooked as your patient’s inbox will have more than enough emails for them to deal with. This is why you need an appropriate subject line comes in. Your subject lines decide whether your patient opens your email or deletes it without a second glance. Here’s what you can do.
Use the patient’s name if applicable: Using the name in the subject line will make your patient feel your dedicated care, encouraging them to open the email.
Choose simplicity over complexity: Dramatic subject lines don’t belong to a marketing email. Use simple, concise language that creates intrigue and urgency.
Convey your theme: Your subject line should be in line with your content and directly convey the theme, making its relevancy clear to the patient.
Avoid spam words: Don’t add words that might trigger the automatic spam filters.

Creating Engaging Content

You need to convey your message clearly without any ambiguities. Delivering tailored content that is relevant to the audience is of utmost importance. The content has to be highly personalized, informative, engaging, and in compliance with the industry regulations. Here are some things you need to keep in mind when developing the content.
Cater to the patient’s needs/interests: Nobody wants to be getting too many marketing emails. Make sure that the content you send is relevant to your patients and is of value to them.
Ensure simplicity in language: Healthcare content can be difficult to understand for an ordinary person. So, pay attention to keeping your language easy to understand and try not to go overboard with medical terms and jargon.
Include visual elements: Make your content visually engaging with images, infographics, and videos. They also encourage better comprehension as the content will be easier to digest this way.
Protect patient privacy: When it comes to healthcare, protecting patient privacy is a top priority. Use secure email platforms and also obtain explicit consent from the patients if you are using their information to send marketing emails.
Add a clear Call-to-Action (CTA): Remember to add a prominent CTA to all your marketing emails to prompt the patient to action.

Optimizing Design

Having a good design is crucial to the success of your email marketing. Your design needs to be both strategic and attractive to achieve maximum results. When designing, readability and engagement should be kept at the forefront. Here are some pointers for a good design.
Clean and simple layout: Do not clutter your marketing email. Use a clean layout with plenty of white space and arrange your content in a way that makes it easy to skim.
Relevant visual elements: Adding visual elements will increase the appeal of your email and also make the content easier to understand. You also need to ensure that the images are quick-loading.
Accessible fonts and colors: Readability should always be your first priority. Choose fonts and colors that are easy on the eyes.
Clear Call-to-Action: Your CTA should be placed prominently to draw attention to it.
Optimize for mobile view: Make sure that the design is appealing and responsive on mobile devices since most emails these days are opened on smartphones.

Analyzing Campaign Performance

You need to keep a clear track of your email marketing campaigns and their performance to understand what works and what doesn’t. This will help you tailor your future campaigns more effectively. Here’s what you need to keep an eye on.
Key Performance Indicators (KPI): Use metrics like open rates, click-through rates, conversion rates, and unsubscribe rates to get insights into how well your emails are being received and make changes accordingly.
Performance across segments: Track the response to your marketing emails from different segments. This is essential to your marketing as it helps target your emails better.
Engagement over time: Identify the trends in how your patients engage with your emails over time to gain more insights that will help refine your email marketing strategies.

Strategic email marketing can bring great results for your hospital brand. It is cost-effective, helps build a better relationship with the patient, and can be used to increase leads, conversions, and sales. You can also integrate email marketing with other digital marketing strategies to significantly enhance the campaign results by improving patient engagement. This is what we, at Moksha Media, can do for your brand.

Moksha Media, Hyderabad is a top hospital marketing agency with over 15 years of experience in serving the healthcare industry. At Moksha, we design and develop strategic marketing campaigns that are sure to bring the desired results. Our ability to deliver exceptional outcomes has enabled us to partner with the top healthcare brands in India and become a highly reputable name in the industry.

Connect with us today to know more about our services, we make healthcare marketing effortless.

13 August 2024 | Hospital Marketing, Digital Marketing for Hospitals, Healthcare Marketing