With a myriad of marketing options available, it can be easy to overlook email. However, a monthly newsletter could be the most effective marketing tool you have available to generate referrals and reactivations.
This classic marketing tool is as productive as ever – perhaps more so, when you consider how well it integrates with other marketing strategies. Using this channel along with your website, blog and social media interactions can produce powerful results for your aesthetic medicine clinic.
An effective monthly newsletter can be key to your practice’s long-term growth success, and patient referral and retention. Your patients are invaluable and keeping in touch is key to seeing people come through your doors – as well as generating referrals. If you keep in touch, you are the first person they think of when they need any kind of aesthetic help. This is where your newsletter comes in.
One of the fundamental reasons for producing a patient newsletter should be to educate your patients, so make your newsletter of real value to your patients. Those who subscribe, care. Your newsletter can help generate new patients, so treat it as a marketing exercise to potential new patients.
Content that converts
Email is the ideal way to stay in touch with website visitors or subscribers. Rather than typical marketing emails, a newsletter is a distinct type of email marketing that is more content-focused.
For clinics looking to reach their audience directly, crafting a newsletter may offer a unique set of benefits.
As consumers continue to open, read and click-through a brand’s newsletter, brands may build trust by delivering high-quality content that keeps the reader engaged and educated.
Wondering what you can include in your newsletter? Consider your patient strategy: ask yourself what you are trying to communicate to them at present. Importantly, make sure you promote your new and existing treatments and services – don’t assume your patients will already know about them.
Rather than typical marketing emails, a newsletter is a distinct type of email marketing that is more content-focused.
Effective emails include these key elements:
- Powerful subject line that entices people to open and read your message
- Compelling ‘preview pane’ content
- Succinct body copy with valuable information
- Links to your website or blog
- They’re not overloaded with graphics or images
- Irresistible calls-to-action
- Addressed from a real person, not company names
- Optimised for mobile viewing
Are you getting the response you want? Each email campaign has a goal – to generate new leads or referrals, schedule more consultations about certain aesthetic enhancement procedures, sell more products, boost blog subscriptions, increase Instagram followers, and so on.
It’s important to study and carefully assess all your inbound marketing results because they will tell you what you’re doing right and where you are missing the mark. That way, you can continuously refine your marketing to make it even more successful.
For email, key points to look at include:
- Open rates – your message is wasted if no one sees it
- Click-through rates (CTRs) from the email to your website
- Email list growth rate over time
Click-through-rates are particularly important because they show conversions – the purpose of your email campaign. You can see details, such as which target segment(s) are converting, what offers they’re responding to, and you can weed out individuals who have not responded at all over time.
Two factors motivate email readers to convert (click-through): relevance and timeliness. You may have a goal for your campaign, but people want to know what’s in it for them. AMP
Why newsletters have made a comeback
While social media took the lead in the late 2010s, many marketers proclaimed that email marketing was dead. Social media posts and more recently, ‘influencer’ marketing, were preferred by marketers for their real-time qualities and their ability to reach consumers.
However, with new TGA regulations around paid testimonial by social media influencers and while the huge amount of content on social media is often overwhelming , it can be difficult to know what’s relevant. With organic reach on social media at an all-time low, marketers are returning their focus to email. According to Salesforce’s 2023 State of Marketing report, 76% of marketers use email newsletters as a part of their marketing strategy.
What’s more, newsletter marketing tends to have a longer shelf life. Email marketing may allow the consumer to receive the marketing message and content at a time that’s most convenient for them. It’s also now easier than ever for brands to reach consumers on the go. Another Salesforce study revealed more than half of subscribers read emails on their mobile devices at least 50% of the time.
With an ease of access, longevity and brand awareness opportunity, newsletter marketing will likely continue to grow as a channel of choice to build patient referral and retention.
