Healthcare Email Marketing Best Practices, for Practices that Care!

Show Them You Care: Best Practice Email Marketing Approaches for Healthcare Professionals

Email is one of the most effective channels for finding and retaining customers for any industry- and that includes the healthcare sector and healthcare professionals.

Why? Well, email marketing for hospitals and beyond is one of the best ways to build a real relationship - if you do it right. There are so many ways to engage out there, and the benefits of email should be obvious - offering a direct line of communication with your patients and clients. 

From that initial welcome email, to valuable wellbeing email newsletters, to thoughtful health-realted drip campaigns, you can gently guide prospective customers and patients through each stage of their health journey.

So don't just create an email and hit send! Nurture every person you encounter instead into a long-term, happy, and healthy customer, and use email marketing to its greatest advantage. 

This marketing guide walks you through our recommendations for healthcare practices and providers who are ready to make email marketing work for them - and for your patients, even when they don't need your medical assistance.  

We'll cover:

1. What Makes Healthcare Email Marketing So Different?
2. Does AI Have a Place in Your Healthcare Email Marketing Strategy?
3. Email Lists: Great Practices for Healthcare
4. Researching and Mapping Your Prospective Patients Journey: Beyond a Template
5. How HubSpot Helps You Optimise Your Digital Marketing Efforts and Email List
6. The Key Tools You Need for a Full Healthcare Email Marketing Campaign
7. Nurturing Healthcare Prospects by Tracking Customer Behaviours
8. Lead Scoring Systems for Healthcare Sales Success
9. Effective Email Marketing? Meet a Smarter Way to Measure Email ROI

What Makes Healthcare Email Marketing So Different?

Many healthcare providers wrongly assume that traditional marketing methods will work just as well for promoting their plans or treatments. 

However (and as you well know!) healthcare has to be dynamic, flexible, and person-centred. The types of emails you send can have a huge impact on your prospective customers. 

To improve your healthcare email approach, it's important to remember that the people who opened your email are just that: people.

Is there an experience that’s more human than wanting to be well and healthy? We didn’t think so.

When it comes to the healthcare industry, your work is inherently human - whether a customer is looking for a care plan for an elderly parent, private medical treatment for a sick child, or managing a longer-term health condition: the personal touch is the one that makes all the difference.

That means that the right email to send might not be an email at all - but a phone call, instead. Don't be afraid to adapt your marketing channel when you need to.

When it comes to offering healthcare services, your prospective client’s touchpoints differ, and their needs change. Savvy communicators know that they'll need to get more creative with their sales and marketing software so that every message they send is genuinely relevant. 

From empathetic email campaigns to informative landing pages, and general ideas for your content - remembering that everything you write and share will be read by a real human with very real needs can help to keep you focused. 

When it comes to maximizing every single email marketing campaign, your business needs a platform that not only meets customers' requirements, but helps them see just how much you care.

Does AI Have a Place in Your Healthcare Email Marketing Strategy?

As we are all aware, artificial intelligence is poised to play an increasingly vital role in email marketing in the coming years. Using AI in partnership with email software (plus email automation!) is a great way to get a lot done in a short space of time, but it's important to remember that you get out what you put in. 

What will the impact of AI be on helping you maximize new patients' email addresses, levelling up your marketing program, and understanding what creates a successful healthcare email?

At first glance, it's obvious that AI will become a go-to for smarter content creation and data analysis. 

Ahead of the curve, HubSpot recently launched its very own AI assistant, called ChatSpot. This AI tool is similar to ChatGPT, and can analyze CRM data in seconds. 

With this tool, marketers can ask ChatSpot to provide insights of all kinds, asking questions such as “Who are the 10 most engaged contacts who have recently clicked on marketing emails?”. From your email open rate, to the total number of email recipients, to your email design, or even when you should send emails - an AI tool can take your strategy to a whole new level. 

This kind of AI-enabled analysis makes for infinitely more targeted and effective email campaigns, and can give you a serious competitive edge - from follow-up emails to the right number of emails to send: make second-guessing a thing of the past.

Gone are the days when a simple CRM would do the job. We're now at the dawn of the "Smart CRM", where AI can help take customer relationship management to the next level. In an industry like healthcare, every email you send is a chance to double down on those all-important relationships.

With AI capabilities for generating content and extracting actionable insights from data, email marketers will be able to improve campaign performance and offer more value, whichever Smart CRM platform they use.

▶️ Watch the video now to learn more how to manage contacts in HubSpot

Email Lists: Great Practices for Healthcare

Did you know that 89% of all business emails have the company name as the email sender, rather than a human being? 

We are all inundated by emails, almost every moment of every day. At AutomateNow, we believe that your patient's inbox is a sacred space - not a dumping ground for meaningless updates or transactional email messages - no matter how much you might want to take advantage of email. 

Given how important it is for healthcare companies to properly nurture their prospects, it should be easy to see where a lot of healthcare marketing email campaigns fail!

Your team decides to send out a one-size-fits-all blast to your email list in the hopes of driving some engagement or making a quick sale - sending the same message to everyone and treating every single prospective customer in the same way.

Despite their best efforts, your team have probably caused some serious leaks in your marketing funnel. Yikes! How many of us have unsubscribed after receiving an email that was clearly a lazy attempt to make a sale? 

Your healthcare customers are no different. Email marketing makes it easy to get in touch with prospective clients, but the best email marketing experts know that they have to have a reason for doing so. 

The key is not to see your prospects as a transactional list of addresses. Instead, you have to focus on the person at the other end of each email. Think of it this way: every interaction is a personal conversation.

You wouldn't show up to someone's house, shout at them constantly about how great you are for weeks on end, and expect them to buy from you, would you?

Instead, start listening. Get to know your prospects' concerns, their fears, their hopes and dreams. Talk to them like you would a fellow doctor or nurse, treat them with respect, and share relevant, thoughtful content. Tailor what you do to where they are in their wellness journey. This human-to-human approach is crucial for marketing healthcare services in the right way. 

That being said, we also know that, for healthcare organizations, competition is fierce, time is tight, and your team has targets to meet. This is why you need healthcare-aware email software that blends personalization seamlessly with automation. 

Researching and Mapping Your Prospective Patients Journey: Beyond a Template

The first step in effective healthcare-focused email marketing good practice is researching your patients’ personas and mapping their typical healthcare journey, and thinking about email content from their perspective.

What concerns might they have? What keeps them up at night? Is their healthcare need their own, or is it a family member who needs support? How are you uniquely placed to help? 

Understanding all of these things is fundamental to running successful email marketing for healthcare. 

Why? Well, this understanding allows you to meet people where they are with relevant messages. Whether it’s a welcome email that specifically addresses their areas of interest or concern, or a happy birthday email that reminds someone to get a yearly check-up - there’s no one email template for true care.

How HubSpot Helps You Optimise Your Digital Marketing Efforts and Email List

Nuance like this is where a platform like HubSpot is essential. Its purpose is not to replace the healthcare sales journey, but to optimize it so you can scale your success without compromising your integrity (or that of your new patient or existing patient relationships). If you take just one thing away from this email communication guide, let that be it. 

HubSpot empowers healthcare practitioners to take that personalized approach and scale it with specific email marketing software and market-leading tools that are directly integrated into your CRM.

Offering everything from a single email sequence to full-blown campaign analysis (how many people read your emails or reported your email as spam?!) you can map custom journeys, identify sale-ready behavioral signals, and use that insight to deliver targeted marketing automation and an awesome customer experience. 

HubSpot makes it easy to spot and thoughtfully respond to patient email behaviors and preferences. The platform automatically tracks key email marketing metrics, and engagement signals like subscription sign-ups, logins, and feature usage.

You can leverage this data to build detailed journey maps and develop appropriate content for each stage - meeting your prospects where they are.

The Key Tools You Need for a Full Healthcare Email Marketing Campaign

We both know you’re here because you want to nail email outreach for hospitals, healthcare institutions, or practices.

To do that at scale, however, you’ll need some smart, specific tools and focused healthcare newsletter ideas, to make sure your email content is intelligent, effective, and customer-focused so you meet your marketing goals. Luckily, HubSpot has everything you need. 

Sequences and Workflows

HubSpot has two great tools for nurturing your prospective patients at scale. These are called sequences and workflows. On the surface, they can look fairly similar, but they're two distinct tools and have key differences relating to different stages of the marketing communications journey.

What's a workflow?

A workflow is a series of automated processes that move contacts through a set of predefined steps based on the actions they take. These actions can be things like registering with your practice (if the patient is proactive with their health), subscribing to your healthcare email newsletter, or signing up for promotional emails. 

Once that action takes place, it triggers a workflow, which is best to think of as an email that goes out in a one-to-many relationship, and usually from an info@ email. A welcome email is an opportunity to trigger a workflow, as is an introductory email with essential emergency or clinic contact numbers (even if they don't need direct medical assistance at that time) - these workflows are a way to let your patients know that you're anticipating their needs.

Hospitals and healthcare centers can use smart content to help build out the body of the email, too. So if you’re sending out a promotion email with a referral code, you can send a bigger referral fee email to someone who's clicked on their link before and shared it with others.  

Workflows automate repetitive tasks and communication with your contacts for a thriving healthcare content marketing approach, and they can be sent to multiple contacts at a time.

And what's a sequence?

Unlike a workflow, which is more conditional and complex, sequences are like an automated drip campaign that's made up of a series of predefined emails that are sent in a set order.

Depending on your HubSpot license and your healthcare comms strategy, your sequence can be triggered by a workflow, but even if you don’t have a license that has every function, your sales or marketing team can still trigger a sequence manually.

Contacts can only go through one sequence at a time, and they're more linear and straightforward than a workflow.

What’s brilliant about sequences is their ability to streamline personalized emails and follow-ups for your leads. Simply choose a list of leads you’d like to engage with and choose an email template to send from your personal email.

But rather than hitting “send all”, sequences make it super easy to personalize each email so that you can ask about your prospect’s recent appointment, their upcoming holiday, and more! Things like an appointment confirmation email can now be made more personal and welcoming for patients who might be anxious about coming in. 

Sequences are one of those essential tools that make email so effective. As we’ve discussed, that personal touch is the key difference between a positive patient relationship, or making someone feel like they’re just a number in your head. 

Oh - and if a prospect replies at any point in a workflow or a sequence, then these tools automatically stop their flow and let your team take over. 

▶️ Watch the video to find out more about how to start with HubSpot Reporting

Custom Behavior Tracking

This handy-dandy tool helps you to track customer behaviors across your digital marketing channels. It measures:

• What a prospect clicked on
  

• When they clicked on something
  

• When they logged in
  

• What they've downloaded
  

This stops your email content from just being content, and transforms it into a lens that helps you understand what a prospect is really intrigued by – making your follow-ups more specific to them.

Build an Email List and Track Customer Behaviors the Smart Way

There are so many email marketing tactics when it comes to nurturing leads, so let's explore a more detailed example that shows how you can use the tools above as part of your healthcare marketing mix.

Picture this: your prospective client signs up for a free trial of your online video consultations - they prefer these because they work from home and live in a rural area, so getting into the city to go to the clinic is difficult for them.

You send out a confirmation email and your automation tool (in our case, HubSpot) then triggers a series of emails that provide more info, tips for how to get the best out of your appointment time online, and directs them to downloadable guides for coming prepared to a consultation (a powerful marketing tool in their own right).

By using dynamic content, you can customize emails based on the prospect's specific behaviors. If a customer clicked somewhere specific in a previous email, you could reference that in a future message.

Every interaction is an opportunity to show your customers how much you care - from sending an automated birthday email, to how you actually acquire email addresses - kindness and compassion will go a long way.

But to nurture prospects on this personal level at scale, it's essential to use the right software. This level of combined personalization and automation simply isn't possible without a platform like HubSpot. We love to think about it this way: when email is planned out in a smart way, you’ve created a 24/7, always-on digital customer service rep, who can educate and nurture your prospects. 

So how do you do this? Begin by setting up email workflows triggered by specific prospect behaviors that nurture them down a desired path. When they engage with an email, the automated sequence pauses so your team can continue the conversation. Your automated email service takes care of nurturing your prospects even while you're out of the clinic - helping people feel valued 24/7.

Nurturing Healthcare Prospects by Tracking Customer Behaviours

Understanding the touchpoints a prospect encounters is one of the best marketing recommendations we can make. 

From sending an onboarding email to creating a sequence of personalized messages that will be sent after someone downloads a specific healthcare guide - you can create an automated campaign that is genuinely personal.

Once you've mapped the different user journeys and identified behavioral signals, you can use these insights to create a much more effective engagement strategy - from the moment you automatically send a welcome email - to the moment they join your practice. 

Lead Scoring Systems for Healthcare Sales Success

Of course, it's not enough to track behaviors - you need to make sure you're actually engaging with the right people, too.

Any successful strategy hinges on the right person reading the email copy! It's no good tracking the behaviors alone - what if someone's carer or assistant is checking their emails for them?

This is where a lead scoring system comes in. HubSpot uses lead scoring to determine an individual's readiness to sign up, based on their actions.

Now, we know that sounds a little bit intense - but it enables you to spot when someone is ready to engage, just by measuring the language in their email - words like "we" instead of "I" could mean your prospective buyer is ready to purchase a healthcare plan as a family. 

Effective Email Marketing? Meet a Smarter Way to Measure Email ROI

So you’ve set up your sequences and workflows around the prospect’s sales journey, you’ve personalized your automated email copy, you’re tracking behaviors and keeping an eye on a lead’s readiness score. Great job! (See also: Lead generation for healthcare)

But with all of that going on, even in an integrated platform, it can be tricky to measure ROI and manage all your metrics at a glance as your marketing team will well know.

When you're time-poor, need to report on your email success quickly, or figure out the more widespread effectiveness of your digital comms efforts, you need a tool that's designed to do exactly that.

If that sounds ideal, may we introduce you to HubSpot's Campaigns Tool? This tool is heaven-sent and, in our view, captures the very essence of marketing.

How much revenue did your content marketing create? Are people more likely to engage you as their healthcare provider after reading your emails? How many click-throughs, individual email opens, or downloads did you achieve? 

Let's say your healthcare comms strategy means you have a campaign promoting an interactive eBook on great tools and techniques for getting active in the Spring, when the weather gets warmer. 

Your aim is to get people to download and engage with the eBook, and you're doing it via email, landing pages, social media marketing, ads, and more. How do you measure the impact of every element of your campaign from the email subject lines to the right time for someone to receive the email? Well, with HubSpot's campaign tool, you can see things like:

• Sessions
  

  • These track traffic to your campaign pages and assets, showing how many prospects visited your landing page to download the eBook.
    
    

• New Contacts
  

  • This metric measures new leads generated from the campaign, attributed to the activity that directed them to your website for the first time.
    
    

• Influenced Contacts
  

  • This handy metric measured new contacts who engage with assets like your emails or social posts - those who were "influenced" by your campaign.
    
    

• Revenue
  

  • For gated assets, this shows closed-won revenue from influenced contacts who signed up, but might not be directly attributed to your campaign.
    
    

• Attributed Revenue
  

  • This measures revenue that can be directly credited to your campaign activity.
    
    

With these campaign metrics, you can quantify engagement, leads, and ROI for your interactive eBook, measuring the success of your email marketing efforts with a unified view of overall performance.

Make second-guessing the impact of your strategies for your email marketing list a thing of the past.

Wrapping Up Our Guide to Email Marketing: The HubSpot Advantage

With its unified CRM and in-built marketing platform, HubSpot makes creating nuanced healthcare marketing strategies straightforward, and streamlined. The HubSpot approach to marketing is one of the best ways to track prospective buyer/seller behaviors, build customer journey maps, measure successful email campaign activity, and gather meaningful insights.

HubSpot has several healthcare email campaign tools to help your team nurture, engage, and genuinely connect with potential patients as you grow your healthcare client base. Email as a channel will only be effective if you connect the dots across their healthcare journey, and manage your interactions accordingly. 

As we’ve explored, email marketing automation for healthcare solves the issue of trying to care at scale: engaging prospects at exactly the right time with relevant, personalized content, while your awesome team build relationships with patients you could really help.

If you’re looking for scalable growth powered by repeat revenue, HubSpot offers you the much-needed infrastructure to turn email from a static communication tool into an intelligent system that engages your patient community in a human, genuine way.  

If you're ready to transform the way you use email to acquire, retain, and delight people for your organization, let’s talk! Book a demo with us today to see how HubSpot can improve your email marketing. A smarter, automated, human-to-human approach is ready and waiting for you.