8 Tips for Better Healthcare Email Marketing

Research tells us that email marketing is one of the best ways to attract new clients, build brand awareness, and keep you top of mind for your target healthcare practitioners. In fact, a recent Litmus study found that the average return on investment for email marketing is $42 for every dollar spent. This makes it one of the most effective forms of marketing you can invest in — but how do you maximize your ROI on email marketing?

Particularly when it comes to healthcare marketing, it’s important to make sure your messages don’t get lost in the flood. With the right strategy, your email campaigns can turn clicks into clients.

1. Beat the spam filter

Hospital systems and other large healthcare providers usually have robust firewalls in place to protect email security, so their spam filters are more discerning than most. Before anything else, it’s important to make sure your emails get past these filters in the first place.

Spam filters take numerous factors into account, including language, engagement rates and more. Make sure to authenticate your emails to prove your legitimacy to inbox providers, and clean up your email list often to optimize your engagement rate.

If you need help spam-proofing your emails, MMS’ NOWW Platform features a spam score review function to help you get your emails past spam filters and into your readers’ inboxes

2. Optimize your subject lines

The subject line is the first thing your readers see, so making a strong first impression can boost your open rates and improve engagement. As a rule, keeping subject lines short ensures that they display more completely across all platforms and devices — aim for 45-50 characters or fewer. Avoid excessive punctuation and capitalization, and steer clear of abbreviations like RE: and FW: — all of which put spam filters on high alert.

Perhaps most importantly, see what’s working by A/B testing different subject lines with smaller sample audiences. Pick the subject line that gets more engagement, and send that one out to the rest of your audience. For more tips on optimizing your subject lines, read our series on subject line tips.

3. Be mindful of email frequency

Sending too many emails is an easy way to get flagged by spam filters, and it might frustrate readers as they contend with busy inboxes. While there is no one-size-fits-all answer for the best possible email frequency, numerous surveys and reports have found that the majority of consumers prefer to hear from companies two to three times per month.

4. Avoid “spammy” language

Not only will certain words send your emails to the spam folder, but they might also alienate customers who consider the language too “sales-y.” As a general rule, avoid using words like “offer,” “opportunity” or “guarantee” in your subject lines and preview text.

5. Use images wisely

Most spam filters flag emails that use large images or an unusual number of images, so keep images to a reasonable size without distorting their quality. Large image file sizes can also slow email loading times, so JPG files are often preferable to larger PNG files.

Always send a test email to make sure all images are loading correctly, and check the results on multiple devices — many readers use email on mobile devices, so your images and email layouts should always be mobile friendly.

6. Tailor your campaigns with segmenting

Not every email will be relevant to everyone on your email list, so segmentation can help you deliver each email to the right audience. One easy way to get started is by letting readers specify their preferences when they sign up to receive emails from you — let them select topics they’re interested in and utilize group tags to send tailored emails to different segments of your audience.

You can also divide current subscribers into smaller groups to help you send more targeted emails. If you’re marketing to hospitals, for example, you might target different groups for pediatric hospitals versus adult hospitals. With MMS’ NOWW Platform, for instance, you can segment physicians by specialty, geography, and more to create personalized messages for each specific audience.

7. Keep an eye on the metrics

Open rates are important, but they’re not the only metric that matters. According to Mailchimp, healthcare emails have an average open rate of around 21% and an average click rate of only 2.25%.

By measuring open rates, click rates, and even bounce rates, you can gauge how readers are responding to your email marketing strategy and make any necessary adjustments.

8. Don’t forget a CTA

Don’t just give your customers something to read — give them something to do. Including a call-to-action (CTA) can boost click rates, increase web traffic and spur conversions. In particular, CTA buttons such as “Learn More,” “Request a Demo” or “Book Online” invite readers to get to know you and explore your offerings.