How to Make Sure Your Emails Get Read

What’s old becomes new.

These days, social media platforms are all the rage. They grab all the headlines and garner all the attention—and for good reason. They work.

However; through it all, email remains the medium through which today’s business gets done. According to Constant Contact, email will be used by some three billion people worldwide by 2020. Of those who don’t use it, many of them don’t have the electricity for it. And because email marketing is so cost-effective in terms of driving ROI, it remains one of the go-to options for any digital marketer who needs to build a large following without investing a lot of their own brand’s money.

But while these statistics suggest that email marketing is as alive and well as it has ever been—and may be headed for even more success—there’s something else we have to note. Other marketers know about email, too. That means that marketers trying to reach healthcare professionals, for example, will have to fight it out in the inbox of said healthcare professionals. What’s popular soon becomes old again. That means there have to be new and exciting ways to cut through the clutter if you’re going to take advantage of the full ROI of the medium.

Before we begin, here’s a quick fact: According to a study by Healthlink Dimensions, 92% of physicians prefer being contacted by email. The numbers are staggering.

Your Checklist for Effective Email Techniques

If you’re targeting healthcare providers, there are some things you’ll want to pay attention to as you try to send out effective emails, including:

• Making sure you’re reaching the right potential targets – whether it’s a physician or a patient/caregiver. There’s no point to sending out large email blasts unless you’re confident that your target list is current.
• Work with existing email services like Pulse to make it easier to reach your market in a speedy fashion.
• Create interesting visual design elements to make your emails stand out from the crowd.
• Utilize data! If you don’t have the information, you won’t be able to use the precise targeting you need to resonate properly with your health care provider audience. It’s all about hyper-segmentation and finding lookalikes.
• Work with a platform that speaks your industry language – a healthcare company will find greater success working with a healthcare email platform.
• Integrate email marketing into your sales funnel so that it works synergistically with the rest of your marketing channels.
• Bells and whistles are critical for success but if you don’t have anybody managing them -they are just that, bells and whistles – find the right partner that can deploy the messages, analyze the data and create the proper segments.
• Split-testing is paramount. Not just A/B split testing, we’re talking A/B/C split testing. Test the subject lines. Test the creative. Test the call to action placement. Test the time of day it’s going out. Test everything.

Why Targeting Matters So Much

Having an email list is great. But what makes it great is how well you can target your message to specific customer segments. Without this ability, you’re simply hoping for the best. But with effective targeting of physicians, you can create messages that matter to them. It’s all about hyper-segmentation in the world of physician targeting. That means – focus on lookalikes, whether it’s based on prescriptions written, location, level of brand engagement. However; beyond hyper-segmentation, perhaps focus on enhancing the content offering. Maybe a video? A smart statistic? An invite to a webinar? Even just a friendly message to stay engaged. That type of adjustment can take a low value prescriber to a mid-level prescriber, which is magic. And you need to pay attention to the results, as well—if you find that the ROI simply isn’t worth the investment, don’t treat it as a failure, but as feedback that your targeting needs to change.  Perhaps your health care providers prefer to receive their messages in another medium.

On the Relevance of Speed

The most obvious advantage of email is speed. But simply clicking and hoping for the best isn’t enough. Try to work with a partner like InTouchMD or an email marketing supplier that can help you manage the channels in your overall marketing funnel—including your website or even direct mail. When you do this, you can then use something you’ve written for email and refurbish it for another medium. When you work with an email marketing provider that can do enough for you, it will reduce your overall work load and make cross-platform communication that much more effective.

Let Machines Do the Work—But Keep in Mind That Humans Ultimately Read It

When someone receives an email from you, they don’t see all the work that goes into it. They only see the email copy, links, and graphics. But there’s a lot of work going on behind the scenes. Email targeting, segment marketing, and a wide variety of data collection go into optimizing the overall experience. They also can’t see that you might be running an A/B/C test to see which emails work the best.

The good news is that you don’t need a human to run every aspect of email marketing. The spam filters of today and AI tools can completely change what it means to land in someone’s inbox. With high-quality spam filters, there’s not as much worry about being lost in the haze. If you have a great email campaign designer and handle that for you, you’ll stand a greater chance of being seen. That helps your emails stand out and ensures that the work you do in making great email copy and visual elements won’t go to waste in someone’s spam filter.

Use Email’s Data-Collection Tools

Email messages have to be targeted, as you’ve already seen. But how do you do this? Having the right data. If you can manage the data supplied by clients in an effective way, you’ll have much better insights into what they want—and what’s most likely to get them to open an email. You should keep track of this data to get a sense of what campaigns are most likely to work with a prescriber’s practice. What do they care about? What do they respond to? You can’t know these answers unless you effectively grab email data.

Incorporate Email into an Overall Marketing Funnel

Use an email partner that doesn’t just love email marketing, but making email marketing with within the context of an overall system. That way, your emails won’t only be more effective—they’ll actually fit with what it is you want to do when marketing specific health care providers, giving you a greater ROI and a better sense of what works for you.