Email marketing is a powerful tool for engaging with physicians and healthcare providers, offering a direct line of communication to a highly specialized audience. However, marketing to this group comes with unique challenges. Physicians and healthcare professionals are often pressed for time, skeptical of promotional content, and require information that is both relevant and reliable.
To succeed in this space, it's crucial to craft email campaigns that are thoughtful, valuable, and respectful of doctors’ time. Below are some tips to optimize your physician email marketing campaigns.
1. Craft your message with physician needs in mind
Just like the rest of us, a physician is more likely to respond to an email if the message is personalized and tailored to them. Providers vary greatly in their specialties, practices, and needs, however, so it’s important to be mindful of these characteristics when drafting an email.
This is especially important if your product or service can be offered across many specialties. If you’re selling an EHR platform or practice management software, for example, then the insights you’ve gathered on each physician specialty can guide your communications—helping you tailor your message to address the unique needs, wants, and challenges of each segment.
Valuable elements to customize in your doctor email marketing campaign include statistics, case studies, or products or product features. If nothing else, modifying the body of the email to refer to a specialty group lets your recipient know you are at least mindful of how your solution can help them specifically.
2. Offer content that adds value
Healthcare providers are hard to reach. They’re highly knowledgeable, time-constrained, and often inundated with information. Remember that your email is probably not the only one to hit their inbox today.
So, if you want to capture a physician’s attention and foster ongoing engagement, your emails must offer content that is not only relevant but also enhances their professional work. Here are some examples of valuable content you can send:
- Educational resources: Physicians appreciate content that adds value to their practice. Include links to case studies, white papers, continuing medical education (CME) opportunities, and other educational resources that can help them.
- Industry trends: Help physicians stay ahead of the curve with information on new technologies, devices, or techniques relevant to their specialty. You can also offer insights into broader healthcare trends, emerging issues, regulatory changes, and more.
- Professional tips and assistance: Resources that streamline or support administrative or operational work can also be valuable. Consider sending bite-sized pieces of information in your emails like “Best practices for telemedicine consultations” or “Strategies to help manage stress and burnout” that are easy to digest and immediately applicable in daily practice.
3. Craft compelling subject lines to improve open rates
As the famous saying goes, “You never have a second chance to make a first impression.” Your email’s subject line is the first thing the physician will see—and might just be the deciding factor in getting them to open—so you better make your subject lines count.
Unfortunately, there’s no easy road to a must-open subject line. No one has cracked the code yet. Truthfully, writing subject lines is both an art and a science: you want to write a compelling line, but it might also take rounds of testing, iterations, and adjustments to reach a winning subject line.
There are a few effective techniques, however, that can help guide your subject line writing:
- Be clear and concise, a good rule of thumb is to keep subject lines at a 50-70 character maximum.
- Encourage action by using verbs such as “Learn,” or “Discover” which set the expectation of receiving actionable information.
- Avoid clickbait and sensational or misleading words; trust is crucial in healthcare marketing.
- Conduct A/B tests to determine if one style of subject line resonates more with your segment of physicians.
From my professional experience, emails with stronger open rates tend to answer the question: "What’s in it for me?" From the provider’s perspective, what is in it for them if they open your email? The subject line should be a brief but compelling reason to encourage them to open.
4. Design your email for mobile first
We’re all always on our phones these days and healthcare providers are no different. And with several studies showing that a significant portion of emails are opened on mobile devices, it’s more important than ever that you optimize your messages to be viewed on a phone.
Optimizing for mobile is far more nuanced and multifaceted than it might initially appear on the surface. There are many important decisions to be made, such as ensuring that there are prominent and touchable calls-to-action (CTAs), images load quickly, content is succinct and in a font suitable for small screens, the design is responsive and fluid, and much more.
Ultimately, a well-optimized email can significantly improve your open and click-through rates, leading to better engagement and stronger relationships with doctors.
5. Practice good email list hygiene
This tip is a simple reminder for you to do your due diligence. Maintaining a clean and up-to-date email list is important for effective email marketing campaigns. Poor list hygiene can lead to lower engagement rates, higher bounce rates, and can even cause your emails to be flagged as spam.
Here are a few ways to practice good list hygiene:
- Clean your lists regularly. Healthcare providers may change positions, locations, contact numbers, or even specialties, so it is important to scrub outdated or incorrect information every few months—or use a data vendor that maintains a frequently updated list for you, we recommend PhysicianView.
- Remember to remove inactive subscribers. Monitor your engagement metrics to identify recipients who haven’t engaged with your emails in a long time. Consider first sending a re-engagement message to see if they’re still interested, or run an always-on wake-up campaign to re-engage dormant contacts.
- Remove bounced emails. When an email gets rejected by a mail server, that’s considered a bounced email. This is usually not a large concern, but neglecting to handle your bounced messages could hinder your reputation. So, be sure to verify that your list of recipients wants to receive emails from you, run spam checks on your messages, and remove addresses that repeatedly bounce.
6. Optimize your send time based on specialty
The timing of your email drops matters, especially for healthcare providers. Specialty is important to consider here as it can influence when a physician is likely to open your message. Surgeons, for example, can have more variable hours than other types of providers. Depending on their scheduled surgeries for the day, a surgeon might begin their day earlier than most, or their work might extend into the late evening.
All of this is to say that you should consider when the physicians you’re targeting are most likely (and most willing) to open your emails, and then plan your campaigns accordingly. Always monitor your open rates and continue to test for optimal send times. Of course, avoid sending emails during weekends or holidays when your audience is likely to be less engaged.
7. Have a clear, easy-to-complete ask
In any marketing campaign—healthcare or otherwise—a clear call to action is key. Whether completing a registration form, downloading a piece of content, or booking a meeting, a smooth and efficient process is vital for determining conversions. The design, layout, and length of the lead form are all important factors to consider, as each element could be an obstacle that turns users away.
Recognizing this, the best piece of advice I can offer is to make the form-fill process as quick and painless as possible. Limit the number of required fields to the essentials, such as name, email address, and specialty. For low-commitment resources like newsletters or basic content access, consider allowing users to register with just their email address. This removes barriers and encourages more sign-ups. Remember that additional information can be gathered later through progressive profiling or follow-up interactions.
The landing page is another area where you should design with mobile in mind. Slow-loading forms quickly lead to frustration and drop-offs, and the page’s overall design should look clean and be user-friendly for different screen sizes.
Ready to engage healthcare providers?
Email marketing to physicians and healthcare providers presents unique challenges, but with the right approach, it can be an incredibly effective way to engage this specialized audience. Continue to monitor email performance and gather feedback, then revise and reiterate so your marketing efforts remain aligned with the evolving needs of your audience.
For even more tips, read our how-to guide on writing sales and marketing emails people will read. And to learn more about how we can help you design and launch more successful physician marketing campaigns, start a free trial with Definitive Healthcare today.
