After the success of our previous write-up, we are sharing another aspect of tactical healthcare marketing, to help you engage with doctors in a more personalized way.
In this write-up, we are exploring effective ways to create high-impact Email Marketing Campaigns for Healthcare Brands. It is a vast subject, and therefore, we have picked the three most important tactics.
1. Avoid digital content overload and create organic email marketing campaigns
It’s been more than a year since COVID-19 jeopardized the world. The medical community has been proactively looking out for streamlined insights on the pandemic.
Among all the digital channels, “Email” has been the most leveraged, as HCPs have historically responded better to email content (and they continue to). But the tendency of relying heavily on this channel has raised one pertinent concern – Digital oversaturation.
Some pharmaceutical companies have gone into overdrive and aren’t focusing on targeted/personalized emails, which is desensitizing HCPs big time. They are creating redundant touchpoints by sending separate emails for mutually exclusive/dependent pieces of clinical information. There is a highly effective tactic to avoid digital content overload. Read here.
HCPs are generally short on time, even more so during the current crisis. Your content must acknowledge and respect this “lack of time”. Your audience wants to hear from you and support you, but your content must deliver empathy, humanity, and value in return.
Regardless of the situation, you should keep in mind the following pointers while engaging HCPs via emails.
i) Push video content more via emails (considering the time constraints).
ii) Offer advice that you are uniquely qualified to give
iii) Share case-studies more (HCPs always look forward to evidence-based insights)
iv) Avoid using overused, salesy phrases like “Are you looking for” while writing subject lines.
We recently did an email campaign for an interview that we did on the COVID-19 test. Here’s a glimpse of that.
If you observe the subject line, we have used ‘8 Mins’ to show our consideration for the reader’s lack of time. It is an honest subject line, which helped us achieve a good open rate (23%). By using words like “Watch” and “Interview” in the CTA, we tried to create a favorable impression in the minds of readers, as most people will prefer “watching interviews” over reading long paras of information.
2. Timing your email marketing campaigns to perfection
Randomness can kill your email campaigns, and because you are targeting HCPs, you have to be even more precise with your timing. Timing plays an extremely important role in email marketing for pharma.
We, for example, send our emails between 10-11 AM and 7-8 PM, to address our community of 3,80,000+ doctors, as we have observed that HCPs are most receptive in these time slots only.
Apart from choosing the right time, you can pick specific days for specific types of emails. This way you can develop familiarity and brand consistency in the minds of your target audience. After a while, HCPs will develop a natural response to your emails, all because your timing and days are fixed.
Timing plays an important role in promotional emails too (the ones that you send to inform HCPs regarding the upcoming medical conferences, health days, webinars, etc). Ideally, you should send the first email a week before the event, followed by a reminder (a couple of hours before the event). Two days after the event, you can send an email sharing the highlights of the same.
Even when you use an email as a connecting link between your sales executives and HCPs, then also the timing matters. You can always coordinate with your sales team and time your emails accordingly so that HCPs read them either just before or after the visit.
3. A/B Testing can’t be ignored
Change is the only constant. It can’t get truer for email campaigns, and healthcare marketers must keep testing the waters or your emails may fall on deaf ears.
By trying out different templates for your email campaigns, you can get to the most effective template for your audience and at the same time, bring innovation and freshness into your communication which can help retain the interest of HCPs. This process is what we call A/B Testing.
It is a potent way to improve your open rate, click rate, and eventually your conversion rate. There are different elements in an email for which you can do A/B Testing, and it’s important to test one element at a time to get accurate results.
Here we will talk about the layout of an email copy, as it greatly impacts click rate. It can be text-based or graphics-based, having a single column or multiple columns. We, for example, use both text-based and graphics-based templates to reach out to our online community of doctors. Out of the two, the latter has given us a relatively better click rate.
Switching from text-based templates to graphics-based templates is an experimental shift, therefore, you should create sets of 500 HCPs, to begin with. As experiments fail terribly at times, it is better to limit the number of HCPs for initial trials. While creating such sets, make sure that each set belongs to the same Therapeutic Area.
In case you are making slight changes to your email template, like using multiple columns instead of a single column, then you can create even bigger sets of HCPs.
Most email campaign software like MailChimp, Campaign Monitor, and Active Campaign have built-in tools for A/B testing. But if the software you are using doesn’t support A/B testing, then you can even do it manually.
For example, you can create two separate databases (List A and List B) having 500 HCPs each, sending the first version of your email copy to List A and the second version to List B. Later you can compare the click rate of both versions manually. Don’t forget to export your data to a spreadsheet, as that will make things easier for analysis.
As a digital and strategic partner to Healthcare brands, we always enjoy seamless collaboration. We are there to share our experience and expertise in creating your customized email campaigns and taking your brand to our community of 3,80,000+ HCPs.
To know how we have maximized the digital outreach of Healthcare brands with our customized email campaigns, feel free to write to us on solutions@docplexus.net.
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