Email can be an effective marketing method for imaging centers. Whether you’re currently sending out emails, or not, this article will explain exactly what you should write about, who you should send to, and much more.
Should Email Be A Cornerstone Of Your Diagnostic Imaging Marketing Strategy?
Is your diagnostic imaging marketing plan not producing the results you want? We all get emails in our inbox, but sending emails out isn’t so easy, especially for an imaging center. There are plenty of resources out there that detail how to sell products through email, but not many that are specific to the medical field, much less email marketing for an imaging center.
But don’t be discouraged, email can certainly be an effective marketing method for imaging centers. Whether you’re currently sending out emails, or not, this article will explain exactly what you should write about, who you should send to, and much more.
Remember, even though email can be an effective marketing option, it should be one of many tools in your marketing toolbox. Your diagnostic imaging center reputation should have a management plan to keep your audience, patients and physicians alike, interested in doing business with you.
Don’t Let Your Competition Win Over Your Patient Base!
Email Marketing to Physicians for Referrals: Do it Right and You’ll Easily Get More Patients
Healthcare providers are obviously people you want on your side. If you have a designated Physician Liaison they have likely delved into this to some degree. However, marketing to physicians for referrals is a tricky business. Monetarily, it seems providers offices wouldn’t have much to gain by sending patients to any particular imaging center since it doesn’t directly impact their bottom line. Upon closer inspection, however, it’s clear that when patients are happy with an imaging center, and their doctor, everyone benefits.
It’s up to you to show providers not only that you are interested in their referrals, but that you are taking stock in their practice and the well-being of their patients. Your center’s diagnostic marketing emails to physicians should reflect this.
Provide value in every email you send
Like most of us, doctors don’t have time or patience for emails that are generic and salesy. People want to open emails that are chock full of useful information that is specific to the problems they are facing. This is important to keep in mind when incorporating emails into your diagnostic imaging marketing plan for gaining new referrals. Here are a few ways you can provide valuable information in your emails to referring providers. Help them help their patients. Anything from scheduling advice to training tips on staff and patient interactions, to the delivery of test results can be good information. Do some research to find what your specific providers would find most valuable. Help them help their practice. With healthcare, there are always new medications on the market and treatment options being developed. Help doctors stay up to date with recent research and popular topics related to their specialty.
Pro Tip 1:Don’t include a request in your emails. Instead, include key information about your imaging facility to help providers see the value and quality care your radiology center offers.
Pro Tip 2:Do your research. Take the time to learn as much as you can about each provider you’re reaching out to. It’s also important to research their specialty to better understand what value you can provide. For example, you might find articles that are of particular interest to Orthopedic Surgeons.
Get More Patients Through Radiology Email Marketing
Your diagnostic email marketing strategy is incomplete until you are sending effective emails to your existing patients. You may wonder how sending emails to current patients will help you get more patients coming in the door. The answer is community awareness.
When people read about something interesting, have a great experience, or save a ton of money, they tend to tell their friend, family, and coworkers about it. Here are a few ways to encourage your patients to spread the word.
Remind them how much money they saved. Find out how much the local hospital charges for the same exam and let patients know how much they would have spent elsewhere. Send patients interesting and actionable health information. There are countless article topics that people may find interesting. Find some articles that really help people understand their health, risk factors, and symptoms. Ask patients to like your imaging center on social media. If you’re confident that a patient was happy with their experience (you can find out with a satisfaction survey) there’s no harm in asking them to like or follow you. Just make sure you’re providing useful information on your social media sites to keep your followers engaged.
Pro Tip 1:Personalize and segment your patient emails. What is true for provider emails, is also true for patients. Generic emails are always a no-go in diagnostic imaging marketing.
Pro Tip 2:Track your results. The goal is to increase patient volume. If you don’t track your results, you will never know what emails are engaging and how many new patients are coming into your imaging center due to your efforts. Track your open and click rate for each email and be sure to ask new patients where they heard about your radiology center.
Pro Tip 3:Make sure you’re staying HIPPA compliant and that patients you email have agreed to be emailed. Of course in your email marketing for your imaging center, maintaining HIPPA compliance is a must. You may want to utilize an email opt-in selection on your patient registration forms so you know who to send emails to.
Email marketing to patients is an effective way to build a following and empower your patients to take an active role in their health care choices. Well informed and empowered patients also are more likely to schedule follow up exams when their doctor recommends them.
Build and Nurture Relationships With Emails
Email is not only a great marketing tool, it can also help you nurture your existing relationships with physicians and patients. Maintaining and increasing patient retention should always be a top priority and paying attention to what your patient need and want is key.
Keep people in the know by using emails to send out:
Appointment reminders and follow up reminders
Updates about new additionals or processes at your imaging center
Invitations to any events your radiology group is sponsoring or hosting in the community such as free health screenings.
If you’re already sending out emails to patients and physicians, and you are not getting the response you expect, it could be that your emails are not being received due to spam filters. In other cases, it may be that your emails are not being opened because your subject lines need some work. If you’re seeing low open rates, especially with your email marketing to physicians for referrals, you should address the issue before implementing new strategies.
Admittedly, marketing to physicians for referrals isn’t easy, even if you are an experienced email marketer. But, the rewards are well worth spending the time to craft your messages carefully. Always strive to give more than you ask in return and to respect the time and wishes of everyone you send to.
Analyzing your results regularly will help guide your future efforts. It’s crucial to know your open and click rate on each email so you can fine-tune your approach to marketing your imaging center. A/B or Split Testing is a great way to test out various content or subject lines to find what is most popular among your readers. Most email marketing services such as MailChimp offer an easy way to set up an A/B test.
Email is an effective approach to diagnostic imaging marketing if you do it right
Sending out emails without a clearly defined strategy is like cooking for dinner guests without a recipe. It might start out great, but once you get going you’re bound to run into some problems. And serving a burnt casserole at your party is not so impressive.
With some research, individual consideration, and careful planning, you will find that email is a very useful tool for gaining new business and nurturing existing relationships.
Taking a step back to assess what your patients and referring physicians really want and need from you will help you effectively incorporate email into your diagnostic imaging marketing plan with a solid path.
How would you like to market your center to referring physicians with Medical Practice Growth Tips and Doctor to Doctor articles?
Effective Email Marketing to Doctors Starts With a Solid Radiology Marketing Plan
Promoting a diagnostic imaging center using email marketing to doctors can be a great way to increase patient referrals and build partnerships with referring physicians. That is if it’s done right.
Like virtually everyone else in the working world, physicians open emails and check social media during their workday too. It can be a means of brief distraction or a need to research something specific for a patient. So how can your emails be the ones they open so you are opened up to get more referring physicians?
The fact is, 55% of people don’t read their emails regularly, but that doesn’t mean your emails need to be of those that instantly get dumped in the digital trash.
You can break out of that group by:
Determining the best time of day to send
Personalizing your emails based on physician specialization
Educating the physicians AND the front office about topics that matter to them
Most importantly, your main focus should be providing valuable content to the medical provider that sets you apart from your competition
Looking to improve your imaging center’s marketing to referring providers?
Doing some research is the first step, and should not be overlooked. Let’s start by asking …
How many medical providers open emails anyway?
You’ll want to have a clear benchmark for how many medical providers open emails in order to set goals and see where you can make effective changes to your email marketing tactics as you go. Well, there’s a metric for everything and email open rates are no different. Here’s the formula:
Open Rate = # emails opened / (the number of emails sent – # emails that bounced)
Take a look at the medical industry’s average open rate are in the chart below.
Industry
Open
Click
Soft Bounce
Hard Bounce
Abuse
Unsub
Medical, Dental, and Healthcare
22.43%
2.42%
0.72%
0.72%
0.03%
0.30%
That means less than a quarter of emails are opened in the healthcare industry. That isn’t as bad as it might sound. It is just the industry norm.
Now, let’s talk about how to increase your open rate to get more referring physicians
The timing of your email matters
When you choose to send your emails can mean the difference between your imaging center getting more referring physicians, and the “Delete” button.
What day is best?
This can be tricky as schedules vary among medical providers. Having said that, knowing the day and time of an email impacts the likelihood of it being opened is valuable information that can be tracked and analyzed.
Like many of us, potential referring physicians are generally busiest on Mondays and Fridays, so the chances they’ll be opening emails is much lower.
If they are a Monday thru Friday practice, then Tuesdays, Wednesdays, and Thursdays are your best days to send.
If the practice is open on weekends, then Saturday and Sunday may be an effective time to reach out.
Avoiding sending emails on the most exhausting work days of a targeted practice is essential to improving your open rate. That may be as simple as a conversation your sales rep has with the front desk receptionist.
What time is best?
While the specific days are important, the time of day is almost as impactful.
The good news is you don’t have to guess, at least not for long. Start off by testing these broad guidelines with a sample set of emails. Then analyze the data to find the day and time that had the highest open rate. Most email marketing systems have reports built in just for this purpose. Additionally, you may want to send out an A/B or Split Testemail to compare day or time. Once you have the data, you can find the sweet spot.
Personalize Your Emails to Doctors by Creating Segments
When sending emails to doctors it’s important to remember that not all doctors are the same. Consider the specific interests and business practices of each recipient. One of the fastest ways to get people to delete your email is to send everyone the same content. So segmenting is key!
Are you trying to reach an orthopedics office, a neurologist, or any other specialist? A brilliant and simple way to get more referring doctors is by sending them content that is useful and valuable to what they specialize in. One study found that email open rates increasedby almost 15% from segmenting alone.
Partnerships with medical providers occur because of the level of trust you have built together. Even though your email funnel may be a part of your radiology marketing plan, your aim should always be to provide value to those you reach out to. Gaining patient referrals takes more than marketing to physicians in the traditional way.
Plan out which emails should go to orthopedic surgeons, neurosurgeons, ENTs, primary care physicians, and even the front office managers. And yes, they should all be different.
By segmenting your emails to a more specific target audience, you can drive down unsubscribe rates, build trust between the medical providers, and increase medical provider referrals.
Like in any relationship, you need to take the time to get to know someone
When setting up your email marketing to doctors, do your research. Maybe you know a medical office that is struggling in a specific area. Perhaps you have the expertise to help them out with the emails you provide. When you care enough to find out what their pain points are and what topics are directly applicable to what they are doing you can save them time, money, and improving their practice. If you can do that, you’ll certainly be on their good side which makes it much easier to approach doctors for referrals.
Make sure your valuable content is actually getting to them!
When marketing to doctors online it’s certainly imperative that your message has the opportunity to be seen. You put in the time to do this email thing right. It would be a shame if all of your hard work never got to your recipient’s inbox, or worse, never even got to their spam folder.
Why wouldn’t your emails end up in the inbox?
When you send out emails through a third party system like MailChimp or Constant Contact, your message has to pass more checkpoints to get to its destination. Spam filters are finicky and email delivery is complicated. But all you need to know is that if you’re worried your emails aren’t getting to people, your first step should be to setup Custom Domain Authentication which means altering your DNS records.
If you’ve already done that, and your recipients are still not getting your emails, it could be an issue on the receiving side. For new prospects, your email address may not be whitelisted in their system. What’s more, many providers may not know how to whitelist your email address.
This is not something that is done automatically and the front desk receptionist will be your best point of contact. Two ways this can be accomplished are by adding instructions to your Thank You page or by adding a pop-up feature from the email in which they can whitelist instantly. The pop-up feature is going to be your simplest and most realistic way of getting this done.
Give the medical provider a heads up on the content coming in
The physician’s office is more likely to welcome your “Welcome” email if it is well crafted. The email should be personal, actionable, practical, but also concise. If they are new to your campaign, pay them a visit in person and provide a quick explanation of what information is included in the emails. If they know what to expect, they’ll be less likely to delete and more likely to send your imaging center new patient referrals.
Let them know:
How often they can expect to receive emails from you
How your emails are going to be helpful to them
How they can help you understand their needs (and therefore send the most relevant emails)
Email Marketing to Doctors Doesn’t Have to Be Complicated
Remember, email is a fantastic option to get more referring doctors – if you can get them to open! Determine the optimal time to send, segment your emails to make them more personable. Always make sure you’re providing value in your messages. Follow these tips in your email marketing to doctors and you will find building relationships with physicians is easy.
Looking to boost your 5-star reviews to get the attention of patients and providers?
Effective Email Marketing to Doctors Starts With a Solid Radiology Marketing Plan
Promoting a diagnostic imaging center using email marketing to doctors can be a great way to increase patient referrals and build partnerships with referring physicians. That is if it’s done right.
Like virtually everyone else in the working world, physicians open emails and check social media during their workday too. It can be a means of brief distraction or a need to research something specific for a patient. So how can your emails be the ones they open so you are opened up to get more referring physicians?
The fact is, 55% of people don’t read their emails regularly, but that doesn’t mean your emails need to be of those that instantly get dumped in the digital trash.
You can break out of that group by:
Determining the best time of day to send
Personalizing your emails based on physician specialization
Educating the physicians AND the front office about topics that matter to them
Most importantly, your main focus should be providing valuable content to the medical provider that sets you apart from your competition
Looking to improve your imaging center’s marketing to referring providers?
Doing some research is the first step, and should not be overlooked. Let’s start by asking …
How many medical providers open emails anyway?
You’ll want to have a clear benchmark for how many medical providers open emails in order to set goals and see where you can make effective changes to your email marketing tactics as you go. Well, there’s a metric for everything and email open rates are no different. Here’s the formula:
Open Rate = # emails opened / (the number of emails sent – # emails that bounced)
Take a look at the medical industry’s average open rate are in the chart below.
Industry
Open
Click
Soft Bounce
Hard Bounce
Abuse
Unsub
Medical, Dental, and Healthcare
22.43%
2.42%
0.72%
0.72%
0.03%
0.30%
That means less than a quarter of emails are opened in the healthcare industry. That isn’t as bad as it might sound. It is just the industry norm.
Now, let’s talk about how to increase your open rate to get more referring physicians
The timing of your email matters
When you choose to send your emails can mean the difference between your imaging center getting more referring physicians, and the “Delete” button.
What day is best?
This can be tricky as schedules vary among medical providers. Having said that, knowing the day and time of an email impacts the likelihood of it being opened is valuable information that can be tracked and analyzed.
Like many of us, potential referring physicians are generally busiest on Mondays and Fridays, so the chances they’ll be opening emails is much lower.
If they are a Monday thru Friday practice, then Tuesdays, Wednesdays, and Thursdays are your best days to send.
If the practice is open on weekends, then Saturday and Sunday may be an effective time to reach out.
Avoiding sending emails on the most exhausting work days of a targeted practice is essential to improving your open rate. That may be as simple as a conversation your sales rep has with the front desk receptionist.
What time is best?
While the specific days are important, the time of day is almost as impactful.
The good news is you don’t have to guess, at least not for long. Start off by testing these broad guidelines with a sample set of emails. Then analyze the data to find the day and time that had the highest open rate. Most email marketing systems have reports built in just for this purpose. Additionally, you may want to send out an A/B or Split Testemail to compare day or time. Once you have the data, you can find the sweet spot.
Personalize Your Emails to Doctors by Creating Segments
When sending emails to doctors it’s important to remember that not all doctors are the same. Consider the specific interests and business practices of each recipient. One of the fastest ways to get people to delete your email is to send everyone the same content. So segmenting is key!
Are you trying to reach an orthopedics office, a neurologist, or any other specialist? A brilliant and simple way to get more referring doctors is by sending them content that is useful and valuable to what they specialize in. One study found that email open rates increasedby almost 15% from segmenting alone.
Partnerships with medical providers occur because of the level of trust you have built together. Even though your email funnel may be a part of your radiology marketing plan, your aim should always be to provide value to those you reach out to. Gaining patient referrals takes more than marketing to physicians in the traditional way.
Plan out which emails should go to orthopedic surgeons, neurosurgeons, ENTs, primary care physicians, and even the front office managers. And yes, they should all be different.
By segmenting your emails to a more specific target audience, you can drive down unsubscribe rates, build trust between the medical providers, and increase medical provider referrals.
Like in any relationship, you need to take the time to get to know someone
When setting up your email marketing to doctors, do your research. Maybe you know a medical office that is struggling in a specific area. Perhaps you have the expertise to help them out with the emails you provide. When you care enough to find out what their pain points are and what topics are directly applicable to what they are doing you can save them time, money, and improving their practice. If you can do that, you’ll certainly be on their good side which makes it much easier to approach doctors for referrals.
Make sure your valuable content is actually getting to them!
When marketing to doctors online it’s certainly imperative that your message has the opportunity to be seen. You put in the time to do this email thing right. It would be a shame if all of your hard work never got to your recipient’s inbox, or worse, never even got to their spam folder.
Why wouldn’t your emails end up in the inbox?
When you send out emails through a third party system like MailChimp or Constant Contact, your message has to pass more checkpoints to get to its destination. Spam filters are finicky and email delivery is complicated. But all you need to know is that if you’re worried your emails aren’t getting to people, your first step should be to setup Custom Domain Authentication which means altering your DNS records.
If you’ve already done that, and your recipients are still not getting your emails, it could be an issue on the receiving side. For new prospects, your email address may not be whitelisted in their system. What’s more, many providers may not know how to whitelist your email address.
This is not something that is done automatically and the front desk receptionist will be your best point of contact. Two ways this can be accomplished are by adding instructions to your Thank You page or by adding a pop-up feature from the email in which they can whitelist instantly. The pop-up feature is going to be your simplest and most realistic way of getting this done.
Give the medical provider a heads up on the content coming in
The physician’s office is more likely to welcome your “Welcome” email if it is well crafted. The email should be personal, actionable, practical, but also concise. If they are new to your campaign, pay them a visit in person and provide a quick explanation of what information is included in the emails. If they know what to expect, they’ll be less likely to delete and more likely to send your imaging center new patient referrals.
Let them know:
How often they can expect to receive emails from you
How your emails are going to be helpful to them
How they can help you understand their needs (and therefore send the most relevant emails)
Email Marketing to Doctors Doesn’t Have to Be Complicated
Remember, email is a fantastic option to get more referring doctors – if you can get them to open! Determine the optimal time to send, segment your emails to make them more personable. Always make sure you’re providing value in your messages. Follow these tips in your email marketing to doctors and you will find building relationships with physicians is easy.
Looking to boost your 5-star reviews to get the attention of patients and providers?
Healthcare providers are obviously people you want on your side. If you have a designated Physician Liaison they have likely delved into this to some degree. However, marketing to physicians for referrals is a tricky business. Monetarily, it seems providers offices wouldn’t have much to gain by sending patients to any particular imaging center since it doesn’t directly impact their bottom line. Upon closer inspection, however, it’s clear that when patients are happy with an imaging center, and their doctor, everyone benefits.
Like most of us, doctors don’t have time or patience for emails that are generic and salesy. People want to open emails that are chock full of useful information that is specific to the problems they are facing. This is important to keep in mind when incorporating emails into your diagnostic imaging marketing plan for gaining new referrals. Here are a few ways you can provide valuable information in your emails to referring providers.
When people read about something interesting, have a great experience, or save a ton of money, they tend to tell their friend, family, and coworkers about it. Here are a few ways to encourage your patients to spread the word.
Email is not only a great marketing tool, it can also help you nurture your existing relationships with physicians and patients. Maintaining and increasing patient retention should always be a top priority and paying attention to what your patient need and want is key.
Sending out emails without a clearly defined strategy is like cooking for dinner guests without a recipe. It might start out great, but once you get going you’re bound to run into some problems. And serving a burnt casserole at your party is not so impressive.
