Email marketing remains a powerful tool for businesses across various industries in today’s digitally-driven world. As it provides multiple benefits, email marketing can be a game-changer for Life Science and Healthcare (LSH) companies focusing on healthcare marketing.
It offers a unique opportunity to connect with Healthcare Professionals, researchers, and stakeholders in a personalised and efficient manner, amongst other benefits.
This blog will look at the various ways Life Science companies can harness the potential of email marketing to continue to thrive in the Healthcare industry.
Email Marketing Importance in Healthcare
While many might view email as a traditional or outdated tool, its potential and impact, especially in Healthcare marketing, are profound. Through email campaigns, LSH companies can share valuable insights, research findings, and product updates directly with patients and HPCs.
The following reasons shed light on why Healthcare marketers should prioritise and focus on email marketing.
Develop relationships with HCPs
The main advantage of creating an email marketing campaign is that it allows LSH companies to build strong and lasting relations with HCPs that encourage trust and engagement.
LSH enterprises can share specific research updates, reports, and helpful information through tailored email content to develop brand goodwill and understanding.
Generates Leads: Advantages HCP
When Life Science and Healthcare (LSH) companies use email campaigns, they effectively draw more attention and interest to potential clients or partners. This increased engagement is more than just numbers; it transforms into meaningful opportunities. For example, Healthcare professionals benefit from this strategy by receiving crucial information and innovative solutions tailored to their needs.
Increases Website Traffic
An effective life science marketing strategy can drive more traffic to your website, where potential customers can access in-depth information about your products and services.
Email marketing educates them, positions life science companies as a reliable source of valuable information in the Healthcare domain, and further builds brand awareness.
Cost-Effective Tool with a High ROI
When creating a digital marketing strategy, it is important to understand what action can initiate a high Return on Investment (ROI); email marketing is one of the top strategies to increase one’s ROI. This is because it usually receives better audience engagement than any other channel.
Increases Brand Awareness
As explained previously, there are various benefits in creating an email campaign for an LSH enterprise, such as higher traffic to your website and stronger customer relationships; email marketing campaigns raise one’s brand amongst patients and HCPs, thus making a life science company more recognisable and becoming a trusted name in the life science industry.
Manage Messages Efficiently & Transparently
Email marketing enables efficient and traceable communication, ensuring that messages reach the right recipients and allowing for easy tracking of engagement and interactions.
By using these email marketing tactics, a company can gain a deeper insight into one’s email performance by leveraging email marketing platforms, such as HubSpot or MailChimp. These platforms can show you who opened the emails, which links were clicked, and even the time spent reading the content.
Track Patients & HCPs Engagement
Email marketing enables efficient and traceable communication, ensuring that messages reach the right recipients and allowing for easy tracking of engagement and interactions.
By using these email marketing tactics, a company can gain a deeper insight into one’s email performance by leveraging email marketing platforms, such as Hubspot or Mailchimp. These platforms can show you who opened the emails, which links were clicked, and even the time spent reading the content.
Delivering Value to the Target Audience
Email marketing can provide HCPs with timely medical updates and best practices while offering patients personalised health tips and treatment information, encouraging informed decisions and better health outcomes.
Email Marketing Strategies for the Healthcare Industry
When writing a compelling email to the target audience, it’s important that it stands out to the client’s eye. Various strategies LSH enterprises can use to reach HCPs creatively and effectively.
Life sciences companies should extend their marketing efforts to create a successful email campaign by using various tactics to target their HCPs. The main tactics are described below:
Personalization is Key
Personalised content resonates more with a company’s target audience, ensuring they receive relevant information.
Including key tactics that make an email more personal is vital in order to reach HCPs, as this ensures that relevant information is received.
Various platforms, like Hubspot or Mailchimp, provide examples of detailed information on strategies, tips and other tricks for creating emails that engage with HCPs.
Customised emails generate higher open rates as the recipients are more likely to capture the recipient’s attention, leading to higher open rates. Tailored content resonates better with healthcare professionals, leading to higher click-through rates and engagement with the content inside the email. Lastly, personalised emails make HCPs feel valued and recognised, boosting a sense of trust and loyalty.
Segmentation
Before sending out emails to potential clients, it’s important to understand them and know who they are; that way, it is easier to create personalised content. Therefore, the target group is segmented into various categories such as business type, role, geographic location, engagement level, size and scale of operations, trade-show attendance…etc
Healthcare professionals have specialised areas of expertise, whether it’s oncology, cardiology, or any other domain. Segment the email list based on these specialisations and tailor your content to address each group’s interests, challenges, and needs.
For example, if you have a breakthrough in cardiology research or products, ensure that cardiologists in your list are the first to know.
Educational and Evidence-Based Content
Healthcare professionals value scientific evidence and education. Instead of mere promotional content, prioritise sharing recent research findings, case studies, whitepapers, or webinars relevant to your products or services.
To establish a successful customer relationship management strategy (CRM), emails should offer more than just transactional notifications or standard updates. Life science companies aiming to differentiate themselves should embed their communications with rich, value-added content.
This includes providing comprehensive insights into the latest medical breakthroughs, offering analytical perspectives from renowned industry authorities, and showcasing advancements in health technologies or methodologies. LSH companies cement their position as thought leaders by consistently delivering high-quality, relevant information.
Furthermore, this approach goes a long way in nurturing and deepening relationships with other businesses, encouraging an environment of mutual trust and collaboration in the Healthcare industry.
Use Visuals and Infographics
In most cases, Healthcare Professionals easily digest visual infographics, diagrams and other visual figures. Furthermore, they are an attractive technique to keep the audience engaged with the email.
If the aim is to inform Healthcare Professionals about new complex data, incorporating visuals, diagrams, and infographics is more effective. These can effectively convey research findings or product benefits at a glance.
Clear Call-to-Action (CTA)
Clear and detailed communication becomes vital while focusing on email marketing in the Healthcare sector. To reach your patients and HCPs, the call-to-action (CTA) in their emails is a pivotal bridge between providing information and achieving a desired response.
Whether the intention is to prompt the client to schedule a consultation, inform about a groundbreaking research study in the specific field of the target audience, or explore a novel healthcare solution, the CTA must be unmistakably clear and compelling.
By ensuring this clarity, life science companies can drive their B2B partners and stakeholders toward meaningful interactions, thereby maintaining conversion rates and encouraging deeper business relationships.
Mobile-Friendly Design
With increasing number of users accessing emails on mobile devices, ensuring that your email design is responsive and mobile-friendly is crucial. An uninterrupted reading experience, irrespective of the device, enhances user engagement.
Offering a fluid and hassle-free reading experience, regardless of whether the recipient uses a desktop or a smartphone, can significantly uplift user engagement. In essence, ensuring mobile optimisation is not just about convenience; it’s about ensuring continuity of communication at each touchpoint.
Compliance with Regulations
The healthcare industry deals with sensitive information. Ensuring email campaigns comply with regulations like the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) is essential.
By demonstrating compliance, life science companies protect sensitive data and can build a reputation as trustworthy and diligent partners. In a domain where data breaches can have profound ramifications, regulatory adherence in email communications emerges as a cornerstone of encouraging lasting relationships with HCPs and patients.
Regular A/B Testing
A/B email testing, often referred to as split testing, involves sending two different versions of an email to see which one performs better. It’s a method to determine the most effective email content, design, or subject line for a particular audience.
In this process, one variable (like the subject line, CTA, or email design) is changed while everything else remains consistent. The performance of each version is then measured based on metrics like open rate, click-through rate, or conversion rate. The version that achieves the best results becomes the reference for future email campaigns.
Consistency is key
While regular communication is good, constant emailing can be counterproductive. Striking a balance ensures that the audience remains informed without feeling overwhelmed.
Many CRM platforms, like Hubspot, provide valuable insights on when it is best to send emails. All of this information can be done by creating a workflow in these platforms. Lastly, most social platforms provide information on which days it is best to send an email and at which time.
How to Measure Your Email Marketing Success?
Email marketing is a powerful tool for life science companies in the healthcare industry, but you need to track its performance effectively to maximize its impact. Here are some essential KPIs to monitor:
Click-through rate ( CTR)
The click-through rate (CTR) is a pivotal metric that evaluates how successful your email’s call-to-action (CTA) is at engaging recipients. If many people click on the links inside an email, that’s a good sign; it means they’re curious about what you share, like new health technologies or research collaborations.
Regarding the life science industry, the average CTR tends to hover around 1.5% to 3%. However, this may depend on various factors such as the demographics, location, and job roles… etc.
Conversion Rate
The conversion rate reflects the effectiveness of an email campaign in achieving its intended goals, which could include actions like requesting a product sample, attending a medical conference, or participating in a clinical trial. This metric reveals the percentage of recipients who completed the desired action after engaging with the email.
For LSH companies, a conversion could manifest in several ways, depending on the campaign and the firm’s objectives. It could be a sign-up to a webinar about new medical technologies, a download of a white paper on a groundbreaking clinical study, or a request for a demo of novel lab equipment.
Open Rate
The open rate measures the percentage of recipients who opened the email. A high open rate suggests that a firm’s subject lines and sender identity are compelling, driving recipients to explore your content further.
However, remember that the open rate doesn’t guarantee engagement beyond email opening.
Bounce rate
Email bounces can hinder the delivery of messages to healthcare professionals and researchers. There are two types of bounces:
Hard Bounce: These occur when the email address is invalid or doesn’t exist. Removing these addresses from your list is crucial to maintaining a clean and accurate email database.
Soft Bounce: Soft bounces are temporary issues, like a full inbox. You may consider reattempting delivery to soft bounce addresses in future campaigns.
The bounce rate represents the percentage of emails that bounced relative to the total number of emails sent.
A high bounce rate can negatively impact your email deliverability. This is mainly because it can cause your emails to land in the spam folder.
Unsubscribe Rate
The unsubscribe rate indicates the percentage of recipients who opted out of receiving your emails after opening or engaging with them.
Monitoring this metric is essential to assess the quality of your email content and ensure that your subscribers find value in your communications.
List Growth Rate
The list growth rate measures how rapidly your email subscriber list expands over time. A healthy list growth rate demonstrates that your email marketing efforts attract new subscribers and increase your outreach within the life sciences community.
