OK. You purchased a new wedge for your golf game online. Now you receive an email from the company every single day. You question the logic of such frequency — how can anyone need that much new golf equipment? It feels like a nuisance, although you don’t go on to unsubscribe from the company’s email.
When it comes to using email to market your medical or dental practice, you’re reluctant. You don’t want to be a pest to your patients.
The truth is, email marketing works incredibly well, and it is anything but hated. Its return on investment is unmatched, and when the patient receives the message at the right time it can lead to an instant move to schedule an appointment.
At MyAdvice, we’re big fans of our client practices using email marketing to not only maintain a dialog with clients, but to also educate, and to offer timely offers and suggestions.
In this mid-summer blog, let’s get into some interesting facts about email marketing.
Email pays off
Email marketing has an incredible return on investment. It’s estimated that for every $1 spent, the return is $42 to $44. That’s a 4200% to 4400% return on investment. That’s much higher than any other form of marketing, digital or traditional.
There are a couple of obvious reasons for this. Creating an email message is simple. You can do it right in your practice, or you can have our team at Advice create them. Either way, your costs are very low. You pay your email marketing service to send your messages to your list, but those costs are also quite low based on the size of your list. Contrast this with traditional media, such as radio, where you have production costs, talent costs, and you have to buy time. Pay per click advertising is extremely targeted and cost effective, as you only pay when someone clicks on your ad, but it still can’t compete with the ROI of email marketing.
Email is commonplace and used by everyone
Wonder how many email messages are flying through the electronic space every day? That would be 306 billion emails, which is expected to grow to 361 billion by the end of 2024. Over 92% of online adults use email; 61% use it every day. Email is used by over 4 billion people around the world. That’s half the world’s population.
Email gets to the target immediately
When you make a post on your practice’s Facebook page detailing a monthly special, there’s no guarantee your Facebook fans will see it. It’s estimated that only about 2% of your Facebook fans see your posts in their News Feed.
With email, 90% gets delivered to the target’s inbox. This is especially true if your patients have opened your messages in the past, as their email platform won’t view them as spam and potentially block them.
Your messages get opened quickly, as well. Research shows that 21 percent of emails are opened within the first hour of delivery. By the end of three hours, 41 percent have been opened. That means you’re getting almost immediate interaction for your message, so it can be timely with what you’re talking about or offers you’re proposing.
People like getting your emails
Because we all get so many emails, it’s kind of assumed we don’t like them. Not true. Various studies have shown that 61% of consumers enjoy getting promotional emails weekly, with 38% of those wishing messages came more frequently.
When compared to social media, 72% of people prefer to receive promotional content through email, compared to 17% who prefer social media.
Roughly 60% of email users spend from 15-60 minutes browsing through their marketing emails every week.
Think about that golf example at the beginning of this blog. Despite getting a daily message from the online golf company, you never go on to unsubscribe. In fact, you open at least two of the messages every week when the messages talk about something you’re thinking about buying, like new shoes, or just to see what’s new. Then, when it comes time to buy, you click on the discount offered in that day’s email and make the purchase.
That’s the reality of email marketing.
Automation makes things simple
Automation makes email marketing even more simple. You can set automatic messages to go out with various parameters. You set the time you want your messages to go out, create them long before, and forget about it. You can set some automatic messages, such as reminders for patients to come in for regular checkups (dental practices and dermatologists). If you’re an aesthetic practice, you could even automate messages to remind patients when their dermal filler injections would likely need to be repeated as the fillers are reaching the end of their duration.
Segmentation and personalization are easy
If you’re an aesthetic practice, such as a plastic surgeon, you have patients in different areas. You likely have patients who come in for non-invasive treatments, such as fractional laser resurfacing or radiofrequency skin tightening. You also have patients who’ve had cosmetic surgery. Others may see you only for BOTOX injections.
You can easily segment your email recipients into these sorts of categories. That makes them more personal and relevant to the readers. For instance, a dermatology practice may have aesthetic patients who come in for filler injections and patients who come in to have their skin checked for skin cancer. Those two groups need different messages, and when you send them the recipients in the different groups will know you are speaking directly to them. Reminding a client to come in to refresh their filler injections is wholly different than reminding a patient who’s had a basal cell carcinoma that it’s time for their once-yearly skin check. With email you can tailor each message perfectly.
Email hits their phones
Email open rates from mobile devices have grown by more than 100 percent since 2011. This is likely due to the drop in data costs and increased access to wi-fi. Today, mobile devices account for about 60 percent of email opens. People are looking at their phones all the time, and they will be reading your email marketing messages on them too.
Email marketing is a really important part of your practice’s overall marketing plan. These points we’ve made show just how important. If you have questions about your messages, timing, or anything else to do with your email marketing, don’t hesitate to give your MyAdvice representative a call. Or, if you’re not yet a client, fill out a contact form or give us a call at (800) 260-9497 and let’s talk.
