Most healthcare professionals don’t have time to do their own digital marketing.

Marketing gurus will tell you to post 5 times a day. They’ll tell you to update your website and have a Google my business. They’ll tell you to make reels and stand up and point here and there and everywhere, dancing to corny music. 

But that’s not what you want to make time for. You want to better the health of your community. 

While social media is helpful and when used strategically, can be great for building your customer base, your social media platforms can be gone in a blink of an eye. 

You can’t back up all the followers, comments, and DMs you’ve received in the past year if. But you can back up an e-mail list. And you can close sales faster to them too. 

If you’re trying to grow your health business or health practice with digital marketing, here’s why you should have an email list. 

Why Your Health Practice needs Newsletters

The purpose of an email list or newsletter is to talk directly to your customers or patients. Sure, you can do the same thing on social media, but if you’re not investing in ads on Facebook and Instagram, reiterating your audience to turn on the bell notifications for Youtube, there’s no guarantee that your audience will see your content. 

According to Hootsuite, only one in every 19 fans will see your non-promoted content. That’s less than 8%. 

Let’s say you decide to have a referral program for your patients. If they bring in another patient, they get a $100 gift card to Target. And let’s say you’re only offering this for 10 days. It’s unlikely that with social media alone, you’ll get your message out on time. Some people on LinkedIn only see my posts a week after they have gone out!

An email list helps you communicate with the people who’ve stepped into your website and are either interested or might be interested in working with you in some capacity. 

People can follow you on Instagram, but that doesn’t necessarily mean they want to buy from you. Likes and followers are vanity metrics and can be easily bought.

An email address, however, is very very expensive. People check their emails MULTIPLE times a day. Statista states that 44 percent of people in the United States and Canada checked their personal email one to three times a day.

When someone gives you their email address, they’re giving an incredibly valuable piece of information to you. Just think, how often do you check your email?

The purpose of an email newsletter is to interact and speak to people who want to do more than give you a like or  a follow on Instagram or Facebook. They potentially want to learn from you. Or better yet, heal from you. 

So now that you’ve got them on your email list, what now?

What to include in your newsletters for your health practice

1. Offer free resources to build trust while promoting your services

With email marketing, there are many platforms that will allow you to add a welcome sequence. A welcome sequence is how you introduce yourself to your audience’s inbox. It’s similar to going to a restaurant and the waiter doing the regular: ask if it’s your first time, ask where you want to sit down, gives you a menu, and takes your order.

But since you’re the boss of your newsletter, you can create your own welcome sequence. 

Let’s say you’re a therapist. Once you’ve got someone to sign up for your newsletter, you can 

offer a free guide on the basics of setting boundaries in your personal life and workplace. 

Or, a guide on self-care tips for the socially anxious professional that’s about to transition back to the office.

For my email list, the healthcare professionals and business owners who sign up get a Health and Wellness Calendar that highlights all the health awareness days and months of the year. You can research online for awareness days, but there are few resources out there that share awareness days specifically for health and wellness professionals. By featuring awareness months like American Heart Month, Men’s Health Month, and American Diabetes Month, this calendar is perfect for personal trainers, physicians, dieticians, fit tech business owners, and many more. Sign up for my email list to get yours delivered to your inbox here.

Free resources are a great vehicle for building trust. Due to the perplexity of the US healthcare system along with misinformation at every corner of the internet, many Americans find healthcare workers and learning about their own health to be intimidating. 

Take away some of that intimidation by offering free, informative advice. Instead of being seen as intimidating, now you are seen as someone that can be trusted. And building trust in the medical and healthcare field is essential for the future of American healthcare and health literacy. 

These free resources can also be used to help calm your patients’ nerves down when seeing you.

Many young women know that they’re supposed to see a gynecologist, but a lot of times, they are afraid to do so because they are afraid of feeling judged.

I know some women who are afraid to go or delay going because they haven’t shaved their pubic hair, not knowing that many women’s health professionals have seen it all and can work through something as natural as body hair. 

After someone signs up for your email list, you can send them a guide of how to prepare for a gynecological appointment. Sharing that they don’t need to shave and don’t need to worry if they are starting their period will help them see you as someone they can trust to not judge them. 

More examples:

A therapist might share common signs to know when it’s time to see a mental health professional.

A dietitian might share her favorite recipes using ingredients that are in season.

A pharmacist might compare at-home remedies for allergies and sinus issues compared to over-the-counter meds you can get at the pharmacy (and they might even be on sale for newsletter readers!).

2. Answer health questions from your potential patients

We all know that the battle of health information, dissemination, and misinformation has been haunting us for the past years. But instead of patients running to their favorite unlicensed “health enthusiast” influencer on Instagram for the latest health news, imagine if they opened their inbox and learned directly from you.

Newsletters can be a tool to promote and improve health literacy and health information to your (potential) patients and customers. 

Every time you get asked a question from a patient or customer, you should be taking a mental note of the question. Other people might also have that same question but might be too scared to ask it or don’t know who they can ask.  This is a great content marketing opportunity for your health business.

When people see that you’re answering the questions they might be too afraid or too busy to ask, they’ll be less intimidated to learn more about you and how you can help them reach optimal health. 

If you want to grow your healthcare brand and your bottom line, make sure you’re talking to your audience weekly by starting a newsletter. 

How to create a newsletter

There are a certain number of tools you can use to create your newsletter if you want to do it yourself. Mailchimp, Mailerlite, Convertkit, and HubSpot are popular email marketing tools that you can use. Mailchimp and Mailerlite, and HubSpot all have free versions.

With these email marketing tools, you can find newsletter templates, type in the content of your newsletter, and send this periodically to your email list. Set a schedule for when you will send out these emails. Be consistent! Make sure you have a call to action (or CTA) for every email you send. 

For this example, you could have the CTA be to sign up for an appointment if they haven’t already. 

If you’re feeling creative, you can use your graphic design skills to create your freebies and resources with a tool like Canva. I like this gynecology appointment checklist on Pinterest: https://pin.it/6AXUh6c

You can include this graphic in your email by linking it and making sure it’s a downloadable file that your potential patients can save to their phone. They can review it when it’s closer to their appointment time. 

When you start learning more about email marketing, you’ll see that you can even use segmentation to categorize different parts of your audience and send them different types of emails. 

You can segment an audience and divide them into those who have booked with you and those who have not (yet) booked. You can create emails specifically for those who have not booked an appointment to learn why they haven’t or to offer them more resources and information to build more trust. 

And for those who have, you can ask them to leave you a rating on Google My Business.

A PatientBond Consumer Diagnostic Survey reported that respondents 25-34 years old were more likely than anyone else to rely on social media reviews while selecting a doctor. 

If you’re a healthcare professional with your own practice that is leaning into selling products, you can offer a discount on your product to all members of your email list or all people who have booked with you. With audience segmentation and tagging, it’s easy to see who gets which discounts! 

Use Done For You marketing content to build your health business online

Don’t have time to create your newsletters? We can deliver 4 engaging and easy-to-read newsletters to your audience’s inbox, highlighting your practice’s services and sharing fun facts all month long. 

With the Done For You Marketing Package, we take care of your newsletter marketing, your blog posts, and your social media. You take care of your community. Sign up to increase your bottom line with digital marketing here.

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