Healthcare email marketing: A complete guide

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Without an effective healthcare email marketing strategy, you’re missing out on valuable opportunities to nurture patient relationships and grow your business.

Unlike traditional marketing methods like print advertisements and billboards, email marketing for healthcare providers enables you to interact directly with your patients. You can deliver valuable information straight to your patients’ inboxes, win their trust, and maintain a competitive edge.

This guide will discuss healthcare email marketing in detail, including its importance and how to craft a winning strategy. You’ll also find practical examples to help streamline your efforts.

Benefits of healthcare email marketing 

With the growing adoption of digital healthcare, patients expect timely, relevant, and personalized communication. In fact, 92% of consumers prefer brand communications that deliver a consistent and seamless experience. Healthcare email marketing can meet this expectation with personalized and targeted campaigns.

Aligning your healthcare email marketing with patients’ preferences achieves the following benefits:

Improves patient engagement

An Omnisend report shows that email open rates reached 26.6% in 2024, while click-to-conversion rates increased by 27.6%. This means that a well-crafted healthcare email marketing strategy can capture your patients’ attention and drive them to take meaningful actions like investing in your services.

Strengthens patient trust 

Consistently sending personalized and relevant healthcare emails can help you build patient trust. By sharing valuable resources, guides, and health tips, your audience will perceive you as a trusted source of information and feel more confident in your services. 

Encourages patient loyalty

You can leverage healthcare email marketing to nurture relationships and increase loyalty. For instance, sending birthday greetings, wellness check-ins, or post-visit follow-up emails shows that you care about your patients’ needs, making them more likely to return.

Cost-effective and increases ROI 

Since email marketing is cost-effective and delivers a great ROI, the healthcare industry can leverage this channel to reach a large audience without incurring high advertising costs. With healthcare email marketing with Omnisend, for example, you can get an email ROI as high as $68 for every dollar you spend. 

Automation increases efficiency

Manually managing patient communication can be time-consuming and inefficient. Healthcare providers are often busy attending to patients, making it difficult to reach out to each individual. But with the right email automation tools, you can easily schedule prescription refill notifications, appointment reminders, and follow-up instructions.

Healthcare email types and examples

Depending on your goals, you can use different email types to engage your audience effectively. Here are some of the most impactful healthcare email examples you can send to your patients:

Appointment reminders and follow-ups

Missed appointments disrupt your patient’s healthcare, lower operational efficiency, increase scheduling complexities, and reduce revenue. 

Sending timely appointment reminders and follow-up emails nudges patients to attend scheduled visits and adhere to post-treatment recommendations. You can combine your email with an appointment confirmation text to reinforce your message and reduce no-shows. 

Here’s an excellent example of an appointment reminder email. It informs the patient about their upcoming appointment, specifying the exact date, time, location, and essentials required:

Patient education emails

Patients prefer working with healthcare providers who genuinely care about them. Sending educational emails demonstrates that you are committed to your patients’ well-being by keeping them informed about their health. 

This email from Novos educates patients about their gut health. It breaks down the complex topic into several engaging and digestible sections:

Promotional emails

Email marketing for medical practices also involves sending promotional emails informing patients about special offers on health checkups, screenings, or wellness programs. Such emails encourage patients to prioritize their health, resulting in more product sales, appointment bookings, and increased revenue for your clinic. 

Withings uses urgency to its advantage. The “Last call” headline nudges readers to act quickly before the $20 discount expires with clear CTAs, prompting readers to purchase the healthcare product:

Newsletters with health updates and clinic news

Email marketing healthcare newsletters are an effective way to inform your patients about the latest health news, clinic updates, and upcoming events. They help build a sense of community, increase brand awareness, and reinforce trust in your healthcare practice. 

This newsletter example communicates important healthcare topics relevant to the season, such as sun safety, back-to-school health, and vaccinations:

B2B outreach for partnerships

If you want to partner with healthcare providers, insurance companies, or pharmaceutical firms, B2B healthcare email marketing can help you establish these connections. Personalize your emails and mention the mutual benefits of the partnership. 

You can draw inspiration from this B2B healthcare outreach template. It includes a personal touch and explains how both companies can align their strengths for a mutually beneficial partnership. 

Successful healthcare email marketing strategy

Crafting an impactful healthcare email marketing strategy requires striking a balance between providing valuable information to your patients and respecting their privacy. Here are the steps to building a winning healthcare email marketing strategy:

Build a HIPAA-compliant email list

The Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) enforces strict regulations on patient privacy and security. To remain compliant, ensure you obtain explicit consent from your patients when collecting email addresses. 

Here are some tips for building a compliant email list:

• Use secure opt-in forms on your website to get marketing consent 
• Include a privacy policy that explains how you’ll use patient data
• Provide a clear and easy way for patients to unsubscribe from your list

Segment your audience

Segmenting your audience into smaller, more specific groups allows you to send emails that resonate with each patient group, increasing engagement and conversions. You can segment your audience according to these factors:

• Demographics (age, gender, location, education, occupation)
• Location (state, town)
• Health conditions (chronic illnesses, mental health diseases)
• Visit history (new patients, upcoming screenings)
• Engagement levels (active subscribers, inactive patients)

Write engaging and informative content

Every email you send should provide value to your patients and help them solve a problem. Some professional medical email examples you can send include educational content about health conditions or tips for improving patients’ well-being.

To create engaging and informative emails, follow these best practices:

• Craft compelling, concise, and informative subject lines
• Address patient concerns directly and offer value upfront 
• Use simple, jargon-free language and a professional tone

Here’s a professional medical email example from Pulp & Press. It educates readers on the importance of gut health, clearly outlining the symptoms of poor gut health and how patients can address them.

Automate your campaigns

Email automation helps save time and ensures consistent communication with your patients. Tools like Omnisend allow you to set up automated workflows for welcome emails, appointment reminders, post-visit follow-ups, re-engagement emails, and more. 

Measure and optimize performance

After launching your healthcare email marketing campaign, it’s crucial to monitor its performance to ensure it’s delivering the desired results. Tracking key performance metrics will help you gain insights into your campaign’s performance and make necessary adjustments. 

Here are the metrics to track:

• Open rates: Determine how many recipients open your emails
• Click-through rates (CTR): Track how many subscribers click links in your emails
• Appointment conversions: Evaluate how many recipients book consultations 

Watch this video to learn more about developing a successful healthcare email marketing strategy:

Healthcare email marketing trends and best practices

Personalized, accessible, and tech-integrated solutions are becoming the norm in healthcare digital marketing. Staying ahead of healthcare email marketing trends and adhering to best practices are the keys to building stronger patient relationships.

Current trends in healthcare email marketing

Keeping up with the latest healthcare email marketing trends empowers you to refine your communication strategy, enhance patients’ experiences, and gain a competitive edge. Here are the current email marketing trends influencing the way healthcare providers interact with their audience:

Personalization and dynamic content

Patients now expect relevant content tailored to their health history and wellness goals. Dynamic email content allows you to customize messages based on patient demographics, conditions, and previous interactions. You can utilize a tool like Omnisend to insert dynamic content blocks that change based on recipient data. 

Increased focus on mobile-friendly designs

With the number of smartphone users projected to reach over six billion by 2029, more healthcare providers are optimizing their emails for mobile devices. 

Responsive email templates, readable fonts, and easy-to-click buttons provide your patients with a seamless mobile experience. This makes your audience more likely to interact with your emails, resulting in higher click-through rates and conversions.

Integration with patient portals and telemedicine platforms

Patient portals and telemedicine platforms allow healthcare providers to email important healthcare updates to patients while ensuring HIPAA compliance. 

This integration streamlines patient care, making it easy for patients to schedule appointments, receive reminder notifications, join virtual consultations, and access test results. 

Best practices for healthcare email marketing

Implementing healthcare email marketing best practices allows you to craft informative, engaging emails while ensuring patient privacy and regulatory compliance. Here are some best practices to follow when executing your email marketing campaigns:

Ensuring HIPAA compliance

To protect patient privacy and comply with HIPAA regulations, avoid including electronic-protected health information (ePHI) in email content. If you must send ePHI files, manually encrypt them for security and include a privacy statement at the bottom of your emails. Consent is essential for safeguarding patient privacy and ensuring compliance with regulations.

Using accessible language and design

Your emails should be easy to read and accessible to all patients, including those with disabilities. Use plain language, high-contrast colors, large fonts, and alt text for images. Including these features maximizes patient engagement and leads to better health outcomes.

Including clear calls to action

Add clear and prominent CTAs that guide patients toward the next steps, such as booking an appointment or signing up for a wellness program. Strategically placed CTAs inspire patients to take action, leading to higher conversion rates. 

Healthcare email examples

To create engaging email campaigns, you need to tailor your message to the unique needs of your target audience. Here are healthcare email marketing examples and what makes them truly effective:

Appointment reminder email

We found this inspiring appointment reminder email example sent by Happy Teeth Dental. Addressing the recipient by name makes the email feel more personal and special. The email also includes essential details such as the date and time and clear CTAs prompting a response. You can use Omnisend to automatically send this reminder along with an SMS as the date approaches.

Patient education email

This email from Parsley Health is an example of an educational healthcare email. The headline emphasizes the value readers will get from the content. 

The images are relevant to the topic and visually engaging, making the email more attractive. Using Omnisend, you can automate sending educational emails to nurture patient engagement over time.

Promotional email

This Calibrate promotional email builds trust with its compelling headline, “THE MOST EFFECTIVE PROGRAM I’VE EVERT TRIED.” It communicates that other patients have already reaped the program’s benefits, while the statistics add more credibility. The “$100 OFF” limited-time offer further incentivizes customers, and a clear CTA guides them to complete the purchase. 

You can customize your own promotional email using Omnisend’s pre-built templates with stunning visuals and high-quality healthcare content to maximize conversions.

Follow-up email after treatment

On/Go demonstrates that it cares for its patients through this helpful follow-up email. The email addresses the recipient by name and expresses gratitude in a friendly and reassuring tone. It also includes links to additional resources.

With Omnisend, you can set up automated follow-up email workflows and incorporate personalized content based on the treatment data.

B2B healthcare email

A professional email for B2B outreach should focus on building a relationship, not just closing a deal. This email achieves that with its well-thought-out approach. Its subject line immediately sparks the reader’s curiosity. The sender then personalizes the greeting and clearly explains why they’re reaching out and how both companies can benefit, with a response request to guide the reader’s next step. 

Omnisend’s dynamic merge tags can help you insert recipient-specific details automatically. If the recipient doesn’t reply, Omnisend can automatically send a follow-up email.

Healthcare email templates

Omnisend offers professionally designed, fully customizable email marketing templates that can help you streamline communication and enhance service delivery.

Here are some customizable healthcare email marketing templates from Omnisend that you can use to create engaging campaigns:

Appointment reminder template

You can make this Omnisend template your own to ensure your patients receive timely notifications about upcoming visits.

This template has concise text to ensure clients receive only the most important information without any promotions or offers. Replacing the welcome message with a personalized reminder, such as “Your appointment is coming up!”.

The CTA button can be updated to “Confirm appointment” or “Reschedule” to reduce no-shows and offer flexibility:

Seasonal health tips email template

If you want to keep your patients informed about seasonal health concerns, such as allergy management, this pre-built template from Omnisend can make that effortless. 

It features high-quality imagery, bold section headers, and clear product categories to guide customers effortlessly.

With customizable sections, brands can tailor it to promote seasonal skincare essentials, such as hydrating creams for winter, SPF-infused products for summer, or soothing serums for fall:

Wellness program promotional template

Omnisend’s wellness program promotional template is designed to help healthcare providers effectively promote their wellness programs with a professional and engaging layout.

The template features bold headings, compelling visuals, and well-structured content that highlights key health messages. Providers can easily tailor it with customizable elements to match their branding and program details.

The strategically placed call to action buttons, like “BOOK RESERVATION,” ensure seamless appointment scheduling, making it an excellent tool for driving engagement and participation in wellness initiatives:

Challenges in healthcare email marketing

While healthcare email marketing offers a powerful avenue to connect with your patients, it also presents challenges due to the sensitive information involved. Here are some common challenges and how to overcome them:

Challenges

• Maintaining compliance with healthcare regulations: Your healthcare email marketing must comply with strict data privacy acts like HIPAA. Non-compliance can result in huge fines and damaged patient trust. 
• Avoiding spam filters: Even your well-intentioned healthcare emails can end up in spam folders if they contain overly promotional language or excessive links. This can reduce your email open rates and engagement.
• Writing emails that resonate with patients: Patients receive countless emails daily, making creating content that captures attention a challenge. If you use complex jargon or fail to personalize your emails, your recipients might ignore them.

Solutions

• Use Omnisend for compliance-friendly automation: Omnisend allows you to automatically schedule and send emails only to recipients who have consented to receive communications. This way, your healthcare email marketing remains compliant with privacy regulations. 
• Focus on value-driven content to boost engagement: Create relevant and valuable content that addresses your patients’ concerns and interests. With Omnisend’s prebuilt email marketing templates, you can craft engaging emails that resonate with your audience’s needs. 

Conclusion

Healthcare email marketing offers a direct and effective channel to connect with your patients, maximize engagement, and build lasting relationships. You can run targeted campaigns that educate, inform, and support your audience to enhance patient trust and loyalty.

A successful healthcare email marketing campaign hinges on strict compliance with data privacy acts like HIPAA, effective audience segmentation, and high-quality content. Prioritizing these factors ensures that you send relevant messages that add value to your audience while safeguarding patient privacy.

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