E-Newsletters

Using E-Newsletters More Effectively

E-mail newsletters are hotter than ever before in medical marketing. After reviewing business trends and talking to key market leader physicians, we are convinced more than ever that newsletters are vital to your marketing program.

E-mail Newsletters are a great extension to your communication toolkit and offer your patients an excellent channel by which they can reach them. Having an email newsletter is a very effective method of collecting information from your prospects. If you do not have an e-mail newsletter then you are missing out on a very effective medium for turning your prospects into customers and your customers into lifetime prospects. No matter whether you perform cataract surgery, sell optical products or diagnose glaucoma you can benefit by having a newsletter.

In ophthalmology we often talk about vision for life, how can you market vision for life and not use e-newsletter marketing? With everyone so busy in your medical practice who has the time to create and send an e-newsletter? With the current state of email sending problems due to spam complaints and opt-in approvals, sending emails has never been harder. Despite these barriers, newsletters remain a strong focus for marketing departments in medical marketing. The big question for your practice is what is the most efficient way to do this and what options are most effective?

Before starting your newsletter project.

Before you get started with your e-mail newsletter — or even if you’ve been sending out e-mail newsletters for a while — Ask yourself these questions:

  • What are my goals with this project?
  • Who is my audience?
  • How can I best serve my audience?
  • How often will I or can I send one out?
  • How will I measure the success of my e-mail newsletter?

Tips for E-Mail Newsletter implementation

What is your motivation for your newsletter? Are you looking to educate patients? Are you specifically seeking leads only? Are you interested in retaining customers for life? You must create an engaging e-newsletter that grabs the attention of the reader by writing on intriguing topics. In medical marketing we feel it is vital to have education play a role. Although creating solid call to action and offers will help with conversion optimization it is important to remember that educating and entertaining your customers can be of long term value. If your newsletter is too focused on sales activities you may turn off many patients. I am sure they get enough of that from other industries such as the car and mortgage businesses. Be yourself, create a focus and pound your message.

Now that we’ve discussed your practice business goals for the e-mail newsletter and how to support it with the design, let’s briefly consider the construction. Back in the old days, composing e-mail newsletters in plain text was safer and more common. Since then, people have discovered that they don’t really like reading long emails.

We never send an e-newsletter on Monday or Friday. This way you captivate people when they are in the full swing of the week without weekend distractions. Friday afternoons are perhaps the worst time to send an e-mail newsletter. If you are looking for low click-through and non-lasting impressions send it Friday afternoon and it will be out of mind by Monday morning.

Respect your e-mail newsletter subscribers by putting out quality newsletters. An inbox is a noisy and busy place for most people and they have a limited time to be there. Don’t send junk unless you want to be deleted or ignored.

You need to make unsubscribing easy to do. If you make it easy you will get the people off the list that really do not want your information and really do not care. There is really no point in emailing customers that are not interested in what you have to say.

You can get extra search engine optimization value if you post your newsletters on your website or if you post them on your blog instead.