Do You Have An Email List? Here’s How To Start Building One
Communicating with your patients is something we talk a lot about here at Blitz. After all, we know how important it is for you to work with your community and be a presence for positive change in your patient’s lives.
A particularly important and useful way to continue to communicate with your patients - outside their appointment or the waiting room, is through email. Not all your patients will be social media junkies, and the art of the letter is long past (although it does have it’s place in your practice).
Email, on the other hand, allows you to connect with your patients, educate and inform, and provide updates, starting a discussion with your patients that lets them know you’re still thinking of them, even after they’ve left the practice.
Not to mention, email is often credited with having the best ROI of any form of online marketing. Not a bad reason to get started!
Become a source of trusted advice with your audience and start building your email list. Even if you have never thought to have one, you can start this process today with a few easy steps.
1. Understand Who Your Audience Is
The question here is: who are you speaking to with your emails? What do they most need to know from you? Create your perfect patient avatar by getting to know the kind of person who you already see as a patient, and who you’d ideally like to see more of.
We know that you already know your patients well, so this should be easy – start writing down your observations of who they are, what they most need more information on, or a need they have that you can answer.
2. Have your website and social media in order
Your emails are a great way to communicate, certainly – but you need to have a presence where your community can really gather and communicate back with you. This means having a website and potentially also social media.
Your website can also have a place for people to sign up for updates from you – same as your social media presence. Of course, you can also ask existing patients to keep in touch at your physical practice or alongside other patient forms. But you also leave the door open for your email list to communicate back with you, and keep the discussion flowing!
3. Choose an email marketing service
You’ll need a place to start building templates and from which to send out your emails. This means choosing a platform – and there are plenty to choose from! Many have a free version for starters and become paid once you reach a certain subscriber count, start introducing complexity or if you want to make highly customised emails.
Your platform should let you:
- Use a variety of signup forms.
- Send to different lists.
- Monitor how effective each email is.
- The ability to segment your subscribers.
- The ability to send automated messages to different lists and segments.
When we talk about segments, we mean differentiating between parts of your audience – you might send a different email, for instance, to a regularly returning patient, than you would to someone who hasn’t been in touch for a while. Just as you say different things to different people in life, your email list is just the same.
In general, however, your email platform should help organise your email list and actually send the emails. You must ensure that you are gathering emails in a safe and legal way, and this requires your audience to actively opt-in to receiving email marketing.
4. Give your audience a reason to keep in touch
This comes back to the question: what does your audience want and need? Whether you’re offering resources, blogs, information, videos, special offers – anything can be enticing to the right audience! But you have to tap into what they really value.
Think about what you are offering with your emails. After all, if you’re starting a discussion, you do have to talk about something! So, think about how you can really deliver them value, and have a worthwhile conversation.
Planning out a campaign can be tricky, and we can certainly help with this. But different kinds of emails you might want to send out could include things like:
- A welcome email or appointment confirmation email, with information ahead of a visit.
- A post-appointment follow up email, inviting them to remain in touch.
- An explanation of different aspects of the care you offer.
- Answers to frequently asked questions.
- Links to new blogs, videos or other practice updates.
- Introducing your care plan.
- Social proofs or testimonials.
- Event invitations.
There are plenty of worthy reasons to email your list. Be sure to think this through and don’t send too many emails too often – save it for when there’s something really important to say!
5. Start with what you already have
Start with the people you already have – your existing patients, and existing audience. Keep up to date with your list’s email addresses and build from this core group. This is where your social media, website, and all other components of your presence can come into play, supporting your email list building efforts.
Also, don’t overlook the importance of keeping in touch with the people who do form this core initial group. And remember, it’s never ever worth going out and buying an email list. These are often spam traps and don’t lead to quality connections with a real, engaged audience. It’s also often a violation of GDPR (for anyone on that bought list who resides in the EU).
With new subscribers to your email list, you have an engaged list of individuals who are ready to become loyal customers and return patients. Remain consistent in your communications and retain those individuals. For help making the most of populating your email communications, get in touch with us today.