Supercharge Your Email Marketing!
With only seconds to seize your audience’s attention, how can you boost your marketing email’s visibility and prompt action? Discover the key to optimal outcomes in your email marketing campaign and explore strategies for continual improvement.
It comes down to basics such as setting goals, crafting relevant content, and evaluating your efforts.
Get your email marketing campaign into shape with five best practices for success!
Establish Clear Goals
Whether you’re aiming for more patient reviews, increased appointments booked, or more referrals — you must prioritize this crucial step.
Every impactful campaign starts with a well-defined objective. Before committing resources, time, and effort, understanding your goals is paramount.
Define your goals explicitly and outline your vision of success. What specific achievements do you expect from your email efforts? With your goals clarified, it’ll be easy to know if and when to adjust key tactics, or even develop a more effective message. In order to bring your goals into sharp focus, you should thoughtfully consider what truly matters to you and your practice.
Use a Professional Platform
It’s possible to launch a DIY email campaign using a basic email service such as Gmail, but nothing takes the place of more modern, professional platforms that are specially designed for email marketing. They allow you to create templates with a more sophisticated look and feel, and reduce the risk of your emails ending up in the junk or spam folders because it looks like a bot sent them.
Using a professional email marketing platform is always your best bet because you’re able to design an email to look like your brand, utilizing your logo or colors. You can also create different links and images that really capture and hold viewer attention. People don’t pay attention to plain-text emails, especially when you’re trying to market something.
Professional-grade platforms also help you:
- Track metrics such as click rate, open rate, bounces from bad addresses, and more
- Ensure the email will display correctly across different mobile devices, desktops, and operating systems
Write an Irresistible Subject Line
Other than the sender’s name, what’s the first thing you notice in an email? It’s likely the subject line. Marketing emails live and die by this essential element.
The subject line can be the most important part of an email — you want people to want to open it, and then read your content. You want them to be inspired to take all the correct next steps, like clicking on a link or making that phone call to schedule an appointment.
Guidelines for Crafting Effective Email Marketing Subject Lines:
- Know your audience: Understand your target audience by empathizing with their needs and interests. Put yourself in their shoes to create subject lines that resonate with their motivations.
- Tell a Compelling Story: Consider the subject line as the opening of a captivating narrative. Craft it in a way that sparks curiosity and encourages recipients to delve into the content.
- Keep it Concise: Limit the subject line to a maximum of 50 characters, including spaces. This ensures that it’s fully visible within the email window, increasing the likelihood of engagement.
- Address Motivations Directly: Tailor subject lines to directly address your audience’s motivations. Utilize strategies such as educational prompts, problem-solving queries, urgency cues, anticipation teasers, enticing deals, relevant current events, and empathetic tones. Some examples include:
- Education: “5 Ways to…”
- Problem-solving: “Fed Up With…?”
- Urgency: “Last Day to…!”
- Anticipation: “They’re Here! Get Your…”
- Deals: “Save 50% Off…”
- Current Events: “Best Back-to-School…”
- Empathy: “We Hear You & We’re On It…”
- A/B Testing: Experiment with two different subject lines whenever possible. Distribute version A to one half of your audience and version B to the other. This allows you to gauge which approach yields better results, enabling continuous optimization of your email marketing strategy.
Maximize the Preview Text
If the subject line launches the story, and next you have “preview text” (those one or two lines of copy that sometimes appear beneath the subject line in your email inbox), put that one-two punch to its best use. It offers another chance to pull the reader in.
A subject line may be paired with preview text to tease more details. For example:
Subject Line: “Tired of replacing phone batteries?”
Preview Text: “Come see our new line of solar-operated devices — buy 1, get 2!”
Just be sure to keep the preview text to 75 characters — including spaces — so it all fits within the designated window.
More and more email marketing programs are supporting preview text. It’s very beneficial because it allows you to elaborate on that subject line.
Deliver Intriguing Content
Capturing attention is just the start — sustaining that attention involves delivering useful, compelling, and timely content that builds and maintains a meaningful connection with patients and prospects. While the email subject line can be a triumph, the responsibility lies with your copywriter to maintain the reader’s focus.
What’s the message you want to get across? Consider what will not only convey your message effectively but also provide an extra incentive to captivate your audience. Think of e-newsletters, for example, as educational — they can nurture those relationships with your customers. Newsletters will educate clients on what’s happening at your practice, but they can also include a great recipe, a coupon, or some topical local or national news.
A proven tactic involves presenting concise lists of information that are valuable to your patients and prospects, complemented by spotlighting new products or services. For instance, share five compelling reasons for maintaining well-tuned hearing aids, accompanied by a coupon for their upkeep.
Content can also be created around subjects that simply keep your practice top of mind for your customers. If your content is event-based, be brief and to the point. Make sure you list the time and place, but also let folks know exactly what they can gain from attending. Why should they come to your event, or register for it? Give them a reason to care.
Keep Constantly Improving
The world keeps spinning — technology evolves and consumer habits change. These harsh realities make it extremely important to consistently analyze your marketing campaign results and keep an eye on trends. These excellent habits will keep you on top of your email game.
As mentioned earlier, goal setting helps determine what to measure in evaluating results. The number of registrants for an event or the increase in monthly appointments, for example, can tell you a lot. However, a key measurement for any email campaign is the “open rate,” which tracks the percentage of recipients who opened the message.
A good average open rate within the health care industry would be around 22%, which might seem low but is actually quite good for this sector.
“Click rates” are a lot lower in this industry. A click rate is the percentage of recipients who select and click on at least one link within your content — a button, for example, that leads to more information.
A 2% click rate is very good, and that could just be a click to schedule an appointment or wanting to learn more about the content that you have in your email.
Before you start worrying about the number of people you must find to grow your click rate, here’s some exciting news: It does not take a lot of patients or prospects for that 2% to make a difference. A smaller business, for example, doesn’t necessarily want customer traffic to quickly swell beyond what it can reasonably handle.
Success hinges on the goals you’ve defined for the email or campaign. For instance, a click leading to someone scheduling an appointment, followed by an in-person purchase, constitutes a meaningful triumph for your practice. This outcome holds greater value compared to a high volume of appointments scheduled or a ton of inquiries about your services. Be specific in your intent and you will win every time.
Supercharge your email marketing! Allow the experts at Audigy to handle it for you, or let us support you as you tackle email marketing yourself. Elevate your campaigns with clear goals, professional platforms, captivating subject lines, compelling preview text, and top-notch content.