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In the excitement of the latest and greatest marketing tool—like video, snapchat, interactive content, or whatever it may be—it’s easy to find the good old newsletter to be a bit boring. But honestly? Newsletters sent by email are a really awesome way to reach patients. Pretty much everyone uses email—92 percent of us, to be exact. There are three times more email accounts than Twitter and Facebook accounts combined. And guess what? People like newsletters. They’re a way for patients to cut through all the “clutter” of social media or paid ads and stay in touch with the brands they like and want to hear from.
Newsletters are the backbone of a great marketing campaign. Relevant, helpful newsletters delivered to those inboxes can keep patients engaged and connected. Even more importantly, they are likely to incite action—meaning more appointments for you. Of course, first you’ve got to create a newsletter that will actually get read.
Segment Your Email List to Boost Performance
In order to connect with modern patients, content should be something they really enjoy and appreciate. People are crazy busy. You don’t want to be that annoying person wasting their precious time.
Consumers expect personalization, so it’s important that your organization’s marketing messages feel relevant. You can expect better results when messaging is specific to patient populations.
This means you may want to segment your email list based on criteria like age, gender, health condition, and so on. For example, if you are sending some exercise tips, you would want to give different tips to a young 20-something compared to an elderly patient. Promote a new cancer screening, for example, by targeting at-risk men. To push for HPV vaccines, target parents of tweens. The opportunities go on and on.
For one practice, a simple email newsletter—targeted to patients in need—resulted in more than 700 flu
shots. The previous year, the practice only used in-office signs to promote the flu-shots and administered 230 shots. Using automated, targeted newsletters announcing the flu shots as an additional outreach channel more than doubled the results. It was easy to implement and effective.
Another way to target messages is to segment patients based on email domain. Sending a Google Forms survey only to patients with a Gmail account would likely result in greater participation. Using location-based groups can also help you customize and target messages. Certain tools can automatically filter patients by zip code.
By creating some simple patient groups before sending a newsletter, you ensure each patient receives content that is personally relevant.
To finish reading all of the ways you can make your newsletters really POP, download the full guide.
