Email marketing has emerged as one of the most powerful marketing tools in the digital age. Email marketing allows businesses to leverage their brand by growing a large and loyal audience of readers into becoming potential customers.

Introduction

The internet is one of the greatest disruptors in the world of business. Businesses that adapted to the changing dynamics of the internet and how people interacted with it were able to carve out their niches in this changing world. Existing businesses that also adopted the new technology in time and managed to study it were also able to reap the benefits.

Newer technologies and new marketing techniques allowed businesses to use the internet to advertise their brands and products with more efficiency than ever before. Healthcare brands like the Mayo Clinic were among the early adopters who struck gold.

One of these golden techniques is perhaps one of the oldest forms of using the internet to market your products – email marketing.

Email Marketing

Email marketing is perhaps one of the most well-studied and oldest forms of marketing that exist on the internet. Used as early as the 1970s, email marketing involves a business directly sending mass emails to prospective customers for purchasing a product or service. While this direct approach worked well at the very nascent stages of the internet, by the 1990s email marketing had to contend with automatic spam filters and wary customers.

Over the next decades, email marketing has transitioned from those direct sales pitches to a more subtle longer forms of marketing like newsletters, offers mails, and more, just to increase the chances of potential customers reading the emails and reduce spam filtration.

Email marketing is a cheap method of marketing with outsized returns. It is this fact that led to a large number of companies adopting the techniques, which then forced their competitors to start using email marketing as well. Today, email marketing is used by nearly 90 percent of all marketers for their organic content distribution requirements. If you aren’t using email to connect with potential customers, 9 out of 10 of your competitors are already doing so.

For SMBs (small and medium businesses), email marketing cuts down on the costs of customer acquisition and retention significantly. Regular emails sent to existing customers promote brand loyalty, while emails to prospective customers increase brand awareness and drive customer acquisition.

But despite being one of the oldest forms of marketing on the internet, marketers, and advertisers are still finding ways to increase its effectiveness. One of the newest findings is that interactive emails tend to do significantly better than traditional emails — a difference in click rates of over 4-times as much.

Email Marketing Benefits

Healthcare businesses can use the same strengths to leverage their brand but also gain additional benefits using email marketing. One of the biggest benefits of email marketing for healthcare businesses is the fact that they are able to build on customer engagement through the very beginning of the healthcare journey. Welcome emails, appointment reminders, and even directed email newsletters are wonderful ways to connect with new customers and establish loyalty in the customers.

Additionally, the use of email marketing campaigns is great for healthcare businesses as healthcare businesses are able to leverage the high return on investment for email marketing. Email marketing on average has an ROI of $42 on every dollar spent.

But healthcare businesses need to also be wary of the pitfalls that differentiate successful marketing campaigns from the unsuccessful ones. One of the biggest issues in email marketing is ensuring that emails do not end up in the spam folder. Email delivery rate is only at 73 percent for the US, the remaining are either lost or destined for the spam folder.

Additionally, even if emails are getting delivered, healthcare organizations need to ensure that patients and customers are actually opening the emails. Emails with poor clickthrough rates don’t serve to benefit the organization.

In order to achieve both goals, content that is both persuasive and personalized should be used. The potential audience should be carefully segmented based on certain parameters and highly interactive email copies should be sent to encourage higher click-through rates. The information presented should also compel the readers to continue reading, improving metrics for your email marketing campaign as well reducing spam flagging.

Finally, the use of long-term healthcare email marketing like newsletters, and integrated email notifications for healthcare channels serve to bridge the final communication gaps between patients and healthcare organizations.

All of these factors taken together can result in healthcare organizations being able to use the effective tactic of email marketing for their businesses and marketing campaigns. The use of healthcare email marketing best practices can also improve the efficacy of emails for healthcare organizations.

Conclusion

Email marketing is a great tool to build a consistent connection with your prospective customers and existing engagement. By engaging in email marketing, healthcare brands are able to have higher patient engagement and thus, drive patient satisfaction levels higher.

With the help of BraveLabs, healthcare brands are able to capitalize on automated email marketing services to have consistent engagement with their, while also growing an audience of potential customers.

Contact BraveLabs today to understand which kind of email marketing will work best for your healthcare brand.