When it comes to marketing a business, any business, email marketing is extremely important. Even though the health sector has to play by different rules than most other sectors, this does not mean that marketing isn’t as important. A good healthcare marketing agency will use email marketing as one of their main methods of acquiring new clients for their healthcare clients. We will now take a closer look at exactly what makes email marketing so special when compared to other forms of digital marketing, how it benefits the organization as well as its importance. So, with that said, let’s get started.
Email Marketing: The #1 Method For Marketing Healthcare Businesses
As you know, there are many ways that you can market a business such as on social media, ads, SEO, YouTube etc. However, email marketing in particular has been proven to be the most effective at getting new customers and is actually 40 times more effective when compared to social media platforms like Twitter and Facebook. Email is actually the main activity online and the majority of internet users have an email account. 94% of American adults use email as their main source of communication whereas only 61% use social media. As a result, email is basically where the majority of patients, prospective patients, doctors and other health practitioners can easily and quickly connect.
If you need proof of this, just look around your home, office or even in public settings. You’ll always see people checking their phones and emails in particular, whether they are just browsing a mall or on a date. Email has become one of the constants in our lives, which means it is the best digital marketing method. To further support this, 75% of adults actually want to connect with businesses and brands through email and 90% want their doctor’s office or other healthcare business to contact them via email.
The Benefits Of Using Email Marketing
One of the first benefits is that it allows you to quickly and easily reach your target audience. Basically, the people that will sign up to your email list, actually want to receive emails from your healthcare business. This is quite different from other forms of digital marketing which are much more intrusive and people and generally not asking or looking for these ads. A person that signs up to your email list, has actively agreed to receive marketing material from your healthcare business, which means that a higher percentage of your email list will convert into customers. So, if you don’t build an email list and do email marketing, you’ll be literally leaving money on the table.
Also, when you are building your email list, you can target a wide range of people where the email acts as a filter. For example, you can have an email sign up form on your website so that when people visit your site, they can decide whether they want to opt in or not. Also, you can create ads on various social media platforms which includes a link to your email list. You can easily do various A/B testing to get more conversions to your email list by experimenting with copy, free material for signing up to the list, discounts and special offers etc.
Next, when you use email marketing, you have the ability to communicate with each individual on your list and customize your marketing accordingly. For example, you can segment your email list so that you send different emails to different types of patients. So, if your healthcare business offers optometry, psychiatry, dermatology, cardiology etc, you can then promote specific offers to individuals who are interested in each particular specialty. So, if one group of people is particularly interested in counseling services, you can promote discounts on these particular services to them and not promote your dermatology services to them since they’re not interested in that. This will increase your conversion rate across the board due to a higher level of email personalization.
Another reason to use email marketing over any other type is the low cost. Even though the cost isn’t zero, the overall costs are quite low, especially when you look at how much you’d have to spend on other types of digital marketing such as social media content and ads, SEO etc. Also, when you build an email list, you’ll be building an asset that you can continue to market to, whenever you want, without an additional cost. The cost of email marketing would mainly be the monthly cost of the email marketing service provider you choose such as Aweber, Mailchimp etc. These services will provide the back-end database to store all the emails and customer details that you collect and send them emails.
The Importance Of Marketing Your Healthcare Organization
Next, we will look at why you should market your healthcare business. Unfortunately, many healthcare businesses think that they should not engage in marketing and they should be able to get clients organically. While you will likely be able to get these type of clients, the truth is, without any marketing, your business will suffer. The healthcare business landscape has gotten more competitive over the years and there are many more healthcare businesses competing for the same set of potential clients. So, if you want to be able to get enough patients to not only break even but build a profitable and successful business, marketing is critical.
Conclusion
To wrap things up, we have just looked at email marketing, how it benefits healthcare organizations, its importance and why you absolutely need marketing for your healthcare business. Even though email marketing is just one type of marketing, it is the most affordable, efficient and most effective type of marketing that will drive results and get you more customers within weeks.
Related Resources:
Healthcare Marketing
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How To Beat The Competition
Why Email Marketing is So Powerful
Healthcare Marketing Tips & Techniques
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