Email Marketing

Email marketing for a medical practice

Email newsletter marketing is one of the most effective forms of communicating marketing messages and cultivating a practice’s reputation. By creating a well-designed, well-written and engaging e-newsletter to send to opt-in subscribers, you can share new health education content, practice news, initiatives you are promoting, and other patient resources that link back to your practice’s website.

Benefits for patient & practice

The message a good medical practice email newsletter sends to patients is that their physician cares about their health and is making an effort to share in an easy manner relevant information they can use.

• This builds trust in providers and patient loyalty, which can increase word of mouth recommendations.
• The email newsletters we create for our clients serve as an extension of the practice website and PR and marketing initiatives.
• We craft the tone and style to develop the persona of a practice and to support its brand messaging.
• The articles we feature with compelling copy that give the gist of the topic in a few words make a strong impression, even if a reader doesn’t follow an e-newsletter link to the website.
• But they do. Our clients’ email newsletter open rates are almost always above the national average, as are our article click to rates.
• A Vanguard e-newsletter outperforms others because we know what patients are looking for and how they want it presented to them.
• We track our clients’ e-newsletter subscriber rates, which also generally arc upward. And we regularly augment and purge the subscriber roll, adding new patients and dropping those who routinely aren’t engaged.

Similar to social media, e-newsletters enable people who already know something about your practice to learn more and see you as a leader on a specific topic. And our e-newsletters also promote engagement with your social media platforms, such as Facebook and Twitter.

Our strategies make your email newsletter pop

We use several strategies as guidelines when creating each of your email newsletter issues. By following these directives, we can ensure that your e-newsletter has the best chance of being read and appreciated by your target audience. Since a dictum of e-newsletters for our clients is to keep them short and sweet, we may not utilize every facet of these guiding principles in each issue.

Your email newsletter reflects who you really are

An e-newsletter can induce a better understanding of your practice and the services you offer. But it also can expand the horizons and give your audience a broader picture of who you really are.

For example, your fertility clinic may offer all the latest treatments (and doesn’t everyone say that?), but do your patients know that your whole staff voluntarily laced up Saturday at 8 a.m. to raise funding for infertility awareness in a walkathon at a local park? They will if we’re doing your e-newsletter, and they’ll have a better appreciation for you staff’s dedication – to their field of medicine and to their patients.

Advertising and brand marketing for your practice

Email newsletters can be one of the best sources to promote new services within your practice brand, which serves the purpose of an advertisement without looking like one. For example, over two or three issues we can highlight a new service, such as a prostate screening initiative your practice is focusing on. Similarly, your e-newsletter can get the word out about an upcoming seminar on a nonsurgical enlarged prostate treatment you have begun offering. 

The mix of articles in each issue reflects your practice’s brand messaging in topic selection and tone. This mix also promotes your full range of services. An orthopedic patient may relate to an article on shoulder replacement, which she has had, and also be drawn to an article on preparing for physical therapy that her friend with a knee injury would be interested in.

Providing relevant content

Your e-newsletter should be educational, which is particularly the case in healthcare. Subscribers look for relevant and timely information. We research what your readers are most captivated by and send email newsletters covering those topics. Our analytics track which articles are clicked on most and which ones are least viewed, information we use to constantly keep your e-newsletter relevant and appreciated.

A good medical practice e-newsletter has a balance of content that offers useful healthcare information while personalizing the physicians and staff. We want it to be viewed as good news from good people. 

Engaging design in a tight editorial package

Visually boring newsletters don’t attract anyone, nor are they read. We make your practice’s e-newsletter stand out in the crowd by using captivating designs that catch the reader’s eye. We refrain from bombarding them with lots of copy and a multitude of story items.

Our typical medical practice e-newsletter has a feature story and 3-5 additional items. Each one is a tight, compelling message comprised of complimentary elements that include an image, headline, brief body copy, and a call-to-action button to the website link.

Promoting your expertise

Newsletters can be a great way to subtly promote your physicians as approachable sources for health news and expertise. You want to be seen as leaders in your field, and your patients want you to be just that. We do this by relating new health topic pages, your own insightful blogs, involvement in research, and media coverage featuring you as the expert.

Building long-term relationships

It is best to send newsletters at regular intervals, so your practice remains visible to subscribers. Through our MedMarketLink program we allot for 4-10 e-newsletters a year. We find this range gets your e-newsletter in front of patients not too often to be a junk email nuisance and not too infrequently to be deleted as an unfamiliar message. We want your patients to look forward to the next issue.

By maximizing the frequency of this form of marketing, we can help you maintain strong relationships with patients through consistency. And while our average turnaround time for issue production and practice review is 4 weeks, we can speed this up if your practice has a timely announcement you need to get out sooner.