Hospitals and care centers must build their audience and connect better with clients. They need a medium to deliver more information and be accessible 24/7. Email marketing is the answer.
In the healthcare industry, email connects health professionals to patients and carries valuable information, whether health data, offers or deals, or newsletter subscriptions.
Hospitals should utilize email marketing to the fullest to get the best results. This article gives you benchmarks for hospital email marketing that you can use in this strategy.
24% Email Open Rates and 3% Click-Through Rates (CTR)
The email open rate is the proportion of recipients who opened the email versus those who did not. CTR is the percentage of people who clicked on the link in your email out of those who merely opened it. With about 333.2 billion emails going around worldwide daily, getting your emails noticed by recipients could be tough.
Campaign Monitor reported that the average open rate of healthcare emails as of 2021 is about 23.7%. If you send an email to 100 recipients, a 60% open rate is high. That means more than half the recipients opened and read your message. Open rates below the benchmark mean your emails may not be connecting well with your audience.
The same report revealed an average CTR of 3.0% in healthcare emails. A higher percentage means your emails are working and your audience is close to converting. Getting results below the benchmark, meanwhile, means that your email content may not be useful to your audience.
Digital Authority Partners says that healthcare email marketing is hard because the audience is so varied and the rules are always changing. You need an email marketing plan that makes it easy for your prospects to go from clicking on your message to making a purchase. Here are some tips.
- Improve the open rate with catchy subject lines. Use funny or shocking subject lines to get people interested: announce freebies, deals, or offers, or make them laugh.
- Remember spam filters. Keep your emails out of the spam box by avoiding words spammy like “free,” using lowercase letters on the subject line, and adding an unsubscribe option in your message.
- Use emojis. These show emotion, engage your audience, and add color and friendliness to your marketing message. Stick to positive emojis like happy, celebrating, smiling, laughing, etc. but do not over do it.
- Increase CTR by creating relevant content. Start by segmenting your email list and sending personalized emails to your recipients. Make CTAs clear and visible to better connect with your recipients. Remember, a good CTA makes emails more effective marketing tools.
- Use call-to-action (CTA). Use relevant CTAs but the fewer, the better to lead your audience directly to your offer. Avoid confusion by placing your CTA front and center.
0.3% Unsubscribe Rate
Parting ways is such sweet sorrow, but it is not always the case with email marketing opt-outs. Unsubscribes help you focus your efforts better because you can save time and effort dealing with recipients who are not interested in your services or products.
Your unsubscribe rate is the number of recipients who have decided to end their email subscriptions or who no longer want to receive future emails. Although having a low number of unsubscribes is normal, always watch out for a sudden increase. This could mean you need to rethink your digital marketing strategy.
Healthcare emails get around 0.3% unsubscribe rates, according to Benchmark. Anything higher than this could mean poorly engaging content and mismatched patient expectations. It could mean you need to improve your email marketing strategy. Lower than this benchmark means your recipients like your content and want to continue receiving messages from you.
These tips can help you improve your email techniques.
- Set email schedule time. One of the reasons why people unsubscribe is that they get too many or too frequent emails. Tell your recipient how often you will email and stick with it. Place this message on your newsletter or email subscription page.
- Segment the recipient list by their interests. When someone signs up for your email list or newsletter, ask them questions that will help you figure out what they do online or in business. Doing this allows you to send relevant email messages that encourage your audience to click through.
- Avoid misleading your recipients. People click because they are interested, and they exit once they do not find what they need. Prevent these by making your content relevant and avoiding provocative and aggressive subject lines like “Open up! This email is important!” or “You are a loser if you do not click!”
9% Bounce Rates
The bounce rate is calculated by subtracting the number of emails successfully sent from the total delivered. Two types of bounce rates exist: hard bounce and soft bounce. It would be best to fix complicated and soft bounce rates ASAP to improve conversions and ROI.
Hard bounce rates could be caused by an error that won’t go away, like an email address that doesn’t work or doesn’t exist. A soft bounce is caused by a temporary problem with the email provider or server of the recipient. The average bounce rate for health care is 9.37%, according to Constant Contact.
A bounce rate greater than 9.37% may indicate that a large number of emails sent are not reaching their intended recipients. Preventing hard and soft bounces is beyond your control. But it would be best to remove contacts who are not getting your email messages because of technical issues.
Also, verify email addresses to ensure that you have the correct ones on your list. To avoid soft bounce problems, use a sign-up form for an email or newsletter or a custom form with a verification feature.
Summing Up
Contrary to what people think, email remains an effective way to connect with customers, even those of different generations. According to a 2022 survey of US consumers, 70% of millennials use emails to communicate with brands. About 56% of the Gen Z respondents do the same.
Using email marketing is still ideal, especially with the expected 13.3% compound annual growth rate in email marketing revenue worldwide from 2020–2027.
But just like any marketing strategy, you must monitor and evaluate how well your campaigns are working. These email benchmarks should be included in your routine checks.
Throughout the year, our writers feature fresh, in-depth, and relevant information for our audience of 40,000+ healthcare leaders and professionals. As a healthcare business publication, we cover and cherish our relationship with the entire health care industry including administrators, nurses, physicians, physical therapists, pharmacists, and more. We cover a broad spectrum from hospitals to medical offices to outpatient services to eye surgery centers to university settings. We focus on rehabilitation, nursing homes, home care, hospice as well as men’s health, women’s heath, and pediatrics.
