With email marketing offering a higher ROI than some other digital channels, here are our expert insights on how you can create effective and visually appealing emails to captivate HCPs, leading them to not only open and read, but to act and engage.
1. Use personalisation in your email
A personalised email can help to build trust and credibility, increasing engagement and driving higher conversion rates. Consider your customers, what drives them to act? What do they need to know from you? What is relevant to them, their needs and their patients? And don’t just take our word for it, the stats back it up.
Personalisation in pharma emails can increase open rates by 29% and click-through rates by 41%.
2. Have an inviting subject line
When you’re just one email in a busy HCPs inbox, your subject line needs to stand out. Being direct can help you differentiate your email from something they would rather have been delivered to their junk folder.
Subject lines with 6-10 words have the best open rates, so try to keep the detail informative and concise.
Also, we thought this was interesting – subject lines that include a number have a 45% higher open rate than average, and personalisation – if relevant – in a subject line, can increase open rates by 26%.
3. Think about a segmented email list
Segmented emails have a 14.31% higher open rate and gain 100.95% increase in clicks compared to those that are not segmented.
What’s not to like?
Segmenting, when done right, allows you to focus in on your audience’s needs and preferences meaning your message will resonate.
And with the data used to segment you can also build more targeted email campaigns – and we know a one to few or one to one email campaign will convert better than a one to many mass email.
4. Provide valuable information
Don’t waste your HCPs’ time. Giving them something they need to know, offering best practice, education or up-to-date product information, will help to ensure that you position yourself as a trusted source who values your customers’ time.
And don’t forget to reference your claims and get final sign-off from all relevant stakeholders.
5. Pay attention to your CTAs
Think about where your calls-to-action (CTA) are situated, and make them snappy, clear and unmistakable.
Keeping CTAs to a minimum – one for a short email and two for a longer one – will avoid overwhelming your recipient.
According to Campaign Monitor, emails with a single CTA receive more clicks compared to those with multiple calls to action. And don’t forget design – button-based CTAs improve click-through rates by 127% compared to text links.
6. Optimise for mobile devices
It is estimated that 54% of emails are accessed on a mobile device, with one third opened on an iPhone. With HCPs being extremely busy during their working hours, they may prefer to check their email on the go (or the sofa) – but what happens if your target audience can’t read your email properly? You could potentially lose them from the get-go.
Using a template and email system that automatically optimises your email to both mobile and desktop devices, along with reducing image file sizes, can help with this.
7. Automated email campaigns
Keeping in with the idea that your customer receives information tailored to them, there might be a place for automated email campaigns, if you have a longer-term goal or sequence of messages to send. Automations can be dependent on the recipients’ latest action or response to your initial contact, or, related to events they have signed up to.
8. Think about design
When it comes to design aspects, it is important that your fonts are readable and that your email isn’t too copy-heavy. Having repetitive or too much text can be off-putting.
Consider that big images may take longer to load, and in turn, your recipient may lose interest before they have even had chance to read what you are sharing. Also, if you are using imagery in your email, make sure you include alt-text for accessibility and any information in the image is also conveyed in the text – just in case they don’t show up.
9. Adapt with change
HCPs are consumers, too – their needs and preferences will change and their prescribing status may change, so keep your CRM updated and work with your sales team to ensure the information you have on your customers is accurate.
10. Be consistent
Remember that it’s never one and done, you need to keep engaging your customers. If you drop into their inbox in March and then don’t communicate again until September, because that’s when you have something new to say, what impression does that give? A clear communications plan can ensure you stay relevant and keep customers engaged with the content they need.
And don’t just push out your brand messages either – you need to give and take, share education and balance that with promotional information to ensure they feel you’re giving them value, a partner in their practice.
Need support with your email comms? We deliver promotional, education and sequenced strategic comms plans for pharma and healthcare. And we have 11,500 consented HCPs in our database, too. Let us show you what we can do to engage your current and future customers to boost prescribing. Get started here.
Sources:
1. https://platforce.io/pharma-crm-email-marketing-a-powerful-guide-for-the-exciting-pharma-industry/
2. https://www.healthlinkdimensions.com/post/what-subject-lines-best-capture-hcps-attention/
3. https://www.yesware.com/blog/email-subject-lines/
4. https://www.campaignmonitor.com/resources/guides/email-marketing-new-rules/
5. https://mailchimp.com/resources/effects-of-list-segmentation-on-email-marketing-stats/
6. https://mailchimp.com/resources/email-segmentation/
7. https://www.campaignmonitor.com/resources/knowledge-base/do-ctas-help-to-improve-email-response-rates/
8. https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/how-optimize-your-hcp-email-campaigns-serina-prado/
9. https://www.smartinsights.com/email-marketing/email-communications-strategy/statistics-sources-for-email-marketing/
10. https://knowledge.hubspot.com/marketing-email/how-can-i-optimize-my-email-for-mobile-devices/
