You may be marketing a pharmaceutical or biotechnology product. Or perhaps a medical device. Or maybe a hospital. When marketing virtually any medical products and services, a database large or small compels you to include email campaigns in your healthcare advertising. Email offers numerous advantages:You can customize campaigns to your audiences by recipient’s title, type of business, geographic region, time of delivery, and more. Here are more reasons and ways to include email in your media mix.
Additional advantages of email: the monitoring, the metrics, the modest cost!
There are other great reasons to consider email campaigns for your healthcare advertising:
- They’re effective. The Direct Marketing pharmaceutical email database Association reported that in 2009, email ROI was $43.62 for every dollar invested.
- They’re cost-effective. No paper, no printing, no postage, and virtually no production. Email is all digital and costs a fraction of a penny for every email sent. The biggest cost is your time.
- They’re relatively easy. Once an email template has been created (by you or companies who specialize in it), you can adapt it to any message you want to communicate. Quickly!
- They increase web traffic. An effective email with links to your site will increase visits to your site…and your exposure to customers and prospects. And that can help improve your ranking with search engines.
- They produce immediately measurable results. You can monitor and measure the success of an email campaign daily. You can see at a glance such stats as deliver and open rates, bounce rates, click-through analytics, and so much more.
How to craft effective campaigns
- Be specific. Select one message for your email, and detail it thoroughly. If you over-complicate your email with too many messages, people may become confused and stop reading, or not take the action you want.
- Be brief. Detail the benefits of your brand in the most succinct manner possible. People are busy. No one’s going to take the time to read a belabored description of your brand’s features and benefits. (On the other hand, don’t be too brief; the FDA mandates the inclusion of a fair balance statement with any claims made about a drug.)
- Be engaging. You know your brand better than anyone. You can probably talk about it at length. But sometimes, people get inhibited when they sit down to write. Try this: when writing your email, make believe a prospect is sitting across from you. This will help you be more personal, less formal, and more direct.
- Be careful. Proofread, proofread, proofread! For typos. For grammatical mistakes. For awkward phrasing. If you aren’t qualified to proofread, find someone who is. The cost is minimal, especially compared with the cost of making a mistake. And with healthcare communications, proofreading mistakes can potentially go beyond embarrassing and become dangerous if information is inaccurate.
- Be adamant. Once you’ve made your case about your brand, tell-don’t ask-your reader to respond by clicking on a link to your website or email address. Remember-always “close the sale.”
- Beware of the subject line. This often determines whether your email is even opened. When crafting your subject line, be very specific-and make it relevant to the reader. Also, spam filters are designed to identify suspect words and trash emails that contain them. Be careful of taboo words, phrases, and symbols such as “Free,” “Don’t delete,” or even the specific names of pharmaceuticals-online pharmacies selling counterfeit drugs are rampant and a major source of email spam.
Engage a pro
It is vital that your emails be well-crafted, well-designed, and well-programmed. Don’t “fake it” or settle for “good enough”; this is important! If you’re going to do an email campaign, do it right. Contact an experienced healthcare advertising agency
