Many pharmacies and clinics look at collecting patient emails as an afterthought. Outside of collecting emails through scheduling tools for their flu shots or consultations, it is rarely an emphasis for the business.
Let me be clear: your email list is a vital part of growing your business.
Not only will this blog articulate why you need to collect emails, but ultimately the best ways to leverage your emails to drive revenue.
First, let’s start with why you need to collect more emails from your patients.
The Three Types Of Traffic
“Can you run some ads for us?”
This is often one of the first things we hear from business owners when they reach out to us. To be clear, we love ads and use them for many of our clients, but they are not the only way to drive revenue.
Advertising is considered “paid traffic”. You had to pay money to get in front of your ideal customer. Think radio, tv, print, digital ads. Those are all paid traffic.
Those ads drive “traffic” to your website and or brick and mortar business.
Earned traffic is another form of traffic. Earned traffic in marketing is the result of organic efforts that attract and engage an audience without paid advertising. It includes sources like organic search, social media engagement, content marketing, influencer endorsements, and positive online reviews, driving visitors to a brand's website or online presence.
The last form of traffic is “owned” traffic. Owned traffic in marketing encompasses the audience that a business directly controls through its digital assets, including website visitors, email subscribers, social media followers, and app users.
The reason it’s called owned, is because you can communicate with them with total control. You don’t have to pay a platform like Facebook to communicate with them. You can send an email and it will go to your customers.
You are in control.
Now, how do we leverage our email list to grow our healthcare business?
1. Email Marketing
To no surprise, once you have an email list, you should start emailing your patients. You can keep them up to date on schedule changes and other administrative info, BUT you should ultimately leverage this email list to sell them something.
Products of the month that link directly to your ecommerce store.
Blogs of the month that talk about relevant topics to ultimately guide people back to one of your products or services.
Don’t just collect emails. Send them valuable information about your products and services and watch the revenue it produces.
2. Custom Audiences
Another thing you can do with email lists is use them to target people more effectively with your ads.
Want to show ads to your top spending patients? Upload that segment of your email list into a custom audience on Facebook or Google and run ads just to them.
Want to find other people just like your top spending patients? Upload that segment of your email list and create Lookalike Audiences to find similar people on those same platforms.
Your email list is data that you can feed platforms to make your advertising more effective. The more data you have, the more dialed in your targeting will be.
This can be incredibly powerful at increasing your return on ad spend (ROAS).
3. Patient Guided Decision Making
Growing your healthcare business can be achieved by better decision making. This is making more “right” decisions, but also less “wrong” decisions.
An example of this: Adding expensive technology or hiring expensive employees to solve problems your patients don’t care about.
So often, we see businesses buy “shiny objects” that they think their customers will love.
More often than not, this becomes a massive liability.
With your email list, you can:
- Poll your patients to get better feedback on what more they want from your business.
- Promote and pre-sell your new services, products, or hires to create excitement and demand in advance.
Do not hire employees or buy tech and THEN start to manufacture demand.
This will lead to frustration and potential sunk cost fallacy.
That’s an expensive and painful problem.
To put a bow on this blog, collect emails to grow your owned assets, send emails about your products and services to drive revenue (at a very cheap marketing cost), leverage this data to have more effective advertising, and use email to get feedback from your patients about how to improve.
Have any questions? Contact us today!
