Any health-care professional knows the importance of bedside manner. It builds a powerful relationship with your patients, instilling trust and safety in a setting where they may feel vulnerable. This relationship is key for delivering optimal care, retaining your patient base, and building your reputation. However, it can be difficult to extend that level of […]
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Any health-care professional knows the importance of bedside manner. It builds a powerful relationship with your patients, instilling trust and safety in a setting where they may feel vulnerable. This relationship is key for delivering optimal care, retaining your patient base, and building your reputation.
However, it can be difficult to extend that level of care if you only interact with patients once or twice a year. One way to nurture patient relationships outside of the exam room is through email marketing.
Here are some tips to use email as a means of building stronger, long-lasting relationships with your patients.
Make it useful
While the entire purpose of email is to send and receive messages, recipients delete more than 10 percent of emails sent by businesses before even opening them. So, make sure your message includes something useful to your patients.
Share information that is both health-related and practice-related, such as news of recent office hires, promotions, or health tips. All of these reinforce the role your practice plays in patients’ wellbeing. For easy reading and predictable delivery times, consider packaging these messages into a monthly newsletter.
At a loss for news? Consider sending emails relating to national health observances, such as American Diabetes Month or National Immunization Awareness Month. These provide a great opportunity to educate your patients.
Make it personal
Do any of the marketing emails you receive address you by your first name? Adding personalization to your message can be a crucial step to making your email conversational, rather than coming off as disinterested, bland, or one-sided.
Write messages in the second person, using pronouns like “you” and “your,” which reinforce building a personal connection with patients.
To ensure your emails are even more personalized and useful to patients, you can segment emails by interests. For instance, if you know a portion of your patients are mothers, consider sending them information and articles about children or developments in pediatrics.
Something as simple as sending an email wishing each patient a happy birthday, or recognizing a patient’s anniversary with your practice associates you with goodwill. This gesture recognizes a day special to your patient and honors the personal connection that you’ve developed during appointments and treatments.
Make it easy
The last thing you want to do is waste anyone’s time. Make sure your messages are easy to understand, simple, and to the point.
Today, 54 percent of emails are opened on a mobile device, so there’s only so much room on the screen for content. Review what you write and ensure that your message is clear and explicit, getting the point across as quickly as possible.
Assuming your patients aren’t experts in the health-care field, avoid using acronyms, industry terms, or jargon.
Finally, make it easy for your patients to connect back with you. Link back to your practice’s contact information, hours, social-media platforms, website, or any additional contact information you’re willing to share.
Track, refine, and repeat
Email marketing should be an ongoing process, and tracking a few simple email metrics will help define your email success. To gain the best results you can will take some trial and error.
Fortunately, email-marketing effectiveness is fairly easy to measure. Delivery success (the number of emails that are successfully sent and were not bounced back to you because the email address is incorrect); open rates (the number of people who opened your email); unsubscribe rates (how many people opted out of receiving your emails); and click-through rates (how many times people clicked a link or image in the email) are all good metrics to determine the success of your email campaign. Evaluate what works and what doesn’t, and then adjust your approach accordingly.
Email is a communication platform that continues to grow. Take advantage of it to nurture relationships with your patients, as well as keep them informed and engaged.
Chris Panebianco is chief marketing officer at Bankers Healthcare Group, a provider of financing to health-care providers. In the past two decades, BHG has provided more than $3 billion in working capital and worked with more than 100,000 licensed health-care professionals. Contact Panebianco at chrisp@bhg-inc.com