Diagnostic Imaging Marketing Emails Can Be An Effective Method of Getting More Patients & Referrals

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.

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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.

Pro Tip 3: Personalize and segment your emails. 77% of email marketing ROI came from segmented, targeted, and triggered campaigns in 2015. And it makes perfect sense. Nothing throws a wrench in your diagnostic marketing efforts like a generic email, so make sure you tailor everything you send.

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.

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Effective Radiology Marketing Using Emails to Physicians From Your Diagnostics Center

Marketing to physicians should be a cornerstone of any imaging center’s overall strategy.

Effectively marketing to physicians comes down to professional relationships. Building and maintaining relationships with both current and prospective referring physicians is the name of the game. Email is an effective and surprisingly personal method for doing just that.

But what should your radiology email marketing convey? When should you send them? And how do you determine what’s working and what’s not?

Needless to say, setting up automated email funnels for various groups can be tricky. Today we are here to help you build your roadmap to email success.

But before we dive in, remember, your marketing is only as good as your reputation.

If your reviews are less than stellar, not only will patients look elsewhere for care, physicians will look elsewhere when sending referrals.

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Writing physician emails to increase patient referrals

First and foremost, your focus should be on your physician emails. Since doctors are the ones referring patients to your facility for diagnostic tests, they need to be your focus. As a diagnostic center, one of your most valuable relationships is with referring physicians.

There are three groups of physicians to consider here.

Potential relationships: Doctors who have not referred anyone to you, but that you would like to build a relationship with. (Cold leads)
Previous relationships: Doctors who have referred patients in the past, but not within the last few months. (Warm leads)
Current relationships: Doctors that have recently referred patients. (Hot leads)

Each of these groups needs to have their own automation funnel which we will go over next.

If you’re new to email funnels, this article will get you up to speed on the basics.

New Physicians: Using a radiology newsletter to build relationships

Gaining traction with a provider that has never referred to your center is the most difficult group to engage so it’s very important that you are selective with the content you include in your radiology newsletters to these offices.

For radiology email marketing, the most important question you can ask yourself here is:

How can I best provide value to the person I am reaching out to?

Here are some proven tactics to use:

Personalize each email by medical specialization. By targeting the physician’s specialty you can provide information that is specific and therefore most useful to that office.
Let them know you researched them. If you’re sending cold emails you don’t want people to think you’re emailing every doctor this side of the Mississippi, but that you chose to reach out to them for a reason (which should be the truth anyway). Tell the referring provider exactly why you chose to reach out to them. These reasons could be:

- - Their location is close to your imaging facility
- - They are new to the area
- - Their specialty is also your specialty
- You have a relationship with one of their partners

Introduce your facility. Let them know who you are and why they may be interested in building a relationship with your radiology center. This is your chance to focus on your strengths.
Ask them a question. Give them an opportunity to tell you what they are looking for or what they are having trouble with. You can send out a survey asking things like:

- - What difficulties do you face when referring patients to a diagnostic facility?
- What are the biggest factors you consider when choosing a facility to refer patients to?

Important note: Always be respectful and courteous of their time. When marketing to physicians that you have not worked with previously, make it very clear that they can choose to stop receiving your radiology emails marketing at any time and make it easy for them to do so.

Winning back physicians who have referred patients to you previously

There could be a number of reasons that a physician who has previously referred patients to your imaging center is no longer doing so. Marketing to doctors in this category means striving to understand what caused them to stop referring and what you can do to make them interested in sending patients once more.

Here are some strategies to use when reaching out to this group:

Update them on what’s new with your facility. If they haven’t talked to you in a while, they likely aren’t up to speed on any new equipment, software, and referring guidelines you may have. Letting them know what they missed could mean you’ve already resolved the thing that made them leave in the first place.
Remind them of your referral process. Sometimes reminding people of how easy it is to work with you makes a big difference.
Let them get to know your staff better. Did you hire a new office manager? Let people know who to contact to get in touch with you. Giving everyone the chance to learn who’s who on your team will help strengthen relationships with physicians. Putting faces to names also helps make your business memorable.

Maintaining relationships with physicians who are currently referring patients

Making sure you’re fostering strong relationships with currently referring physicians is vital. The content you send to this group is highly dependent on the nature of your current relationship. So, always be sure you’re only sending emails to these doctors if and when they are wanting to receive them. If you have determined that these providers are interested in getting emails from your imaging center, here are some tips:

Tell them something they don’t know. Do some research so they don’t have to. Maybe there is a new imaging technology that is being developed for their specialty or maybe there are some new findings in how to interpret the results of a scan. Find the information that is most valuable to show them you care about their interests.
Make every email personalized. Maybe you have a doctor that is interested in hearing about new medical technology, and another doctor that is interested in hearing about upcoming community events. Ask people not only if they are interested in getting your emails, but also, what they are interested hearing about.
Learn how you can help them. It may be that there are ways you could help your referring providers out that you don’t know they need. So why not ask them? Finding out how you can best help people means you will understand what you can do to provide value to them.

Effective email marketing to referring physicians takes time

Maintaining mutually beneficial relationships doesn’t have to be hard, but it does take work. With these tactics, you can write effective radiology email marketing to your referring physicians that provide value to your referring partners. Every physician’s office is unique and research is an ongoing process. Measure your progress often to find what emails are best for your diagnostic imaging center.

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