Discovering Advanced Email Tactics (Email Marketing Part 2)

Now that we’ve learned the mechanics of writing a good email, it’s time to explore more conceptual topics. We aren’t just wading through the jungle, looking for the lost treasure anymore — we’ve found our way to the tomb, and now we have to solve the puzzles and ciphers that will let us in.

In email marketing, those riddles include a host of more complex strategies that weave into every aspect of your email production and distribution. We might’ve touched slightly on some of those things already, but to rediscover the lost art of email marketing, we can’t just be another TikTok nutrition expert condemning yet another brand of salt… we have to, you know, actually know what we are talking about. 

I am going to warn you, though: the stuff we are going to be covering in this article isn’t for quitters. There’s some detailed information here you’ll need to spend some time with. Then again, if you were the type of person who wanted to just phone it in, you probably would have gone into diagnostic radiology… am I right? 

Right. So, let’s find out what separates the armchair archeologists from the Indiana Joneses of the world and dive into advanced email tactics that you can use to reliably improve your email marketing program. 

Segmentation

In part one of this series, we did some basic age segmenting that served as a good primer for the segmentation process, but it was a very surface-level exploration. To really make the most of your email marketing program, you’ll need to know how to do more than just those segments.

For starters, demographics can be expanded on much more deeply than just age. You can also target:

1. Location
2. Gender
3. Birthday
4. Language

Once you’ve mastered those foundational components, you can move on to more sophisticated behavioral data, which can target factors like:

1. What services they have purchased in the past
2. What they are considering purchasing now
3. When they purchased in the past
4. What they viewed or clicked in previous emails
5. How often they open emails and click on links
6. How often they purchase products or services
7. What devices they use to check their emails

If this sounds intense… you’d be right. There is an intricate art and science behind powerful email marketing, and a lot of the science involves extrapolating patient behavior and creating content geared specifically to them.

Let’s get a real-world example. Let’s say that you are once again part of Awakened Medical Spa and are looking to push out a really compelling and successful microneedling campaign.

You have been sending out a lot of emails lately, and you are cognizant of a somewhat elevated unsubscribe rate in the last one or two campaigns you’ve delivered. 

So, how can we leverage segmentation here to find the correct audience without annoying our entire email list?

To begin, let’s find the right demographic. 

The vast majority of your previous microneedling patients are women between the ages of 25 and 44. So, easy enough — we just set up a segment for that email for that group only.

Then, we take a look at some more advanced behavioral data: 

• Who has purchased microneedling services in the past, but not in the last 60 days?
• Who has recently clicked on links leading to microneedling services?
• Who has opened promotional emails consistently (>50%)  in the last 30 - 60 days?

So now, our segmentation looks like this:

• Women between the ages of 25 and 44 with email open rates of at least 50% who have already purchased or viewed microneedling services but have not had a treatment in at least 60 days.

Phew, what a mouthful. But we now have a very specific segment of people who are likely to sign up for the targeted treatment without leaving our marketing platform entirely. Well done, everyone. 

Make sure that you are being cognizant of your email lists and who is getting sent what content. Even small things can trigger intense reactions. We’ve had issues in the past that are hard to predict. At one point, a doctor providing transitional surgery had an issue with a patient who had recently undergone female-to-male surgery. The office sent out an email to their entire email list that told people to embrace their femininity. This was obviously not well received by the individual who had just transitioned, but the whole thing could have been avoided with a simple gender segmentation. Use these tools to your advantage. — Mona Sharif, Incredible Marketing Chief Innovation Officer

As we move into the next section, one thing to keep in mind is that segmentation and personalization go hand in hand, so much so that many marketers consider the two concepts to be one and the same. 

Personalization

The concept of personalization isn’t actually all that complicated of a puzzle to figure out, especially since we touched on it in our previous piece. Essentially, personalization is the practice of tailoring your content for a specific recipient.

Now, a healthy email list has thousands of people on it, so you can't realistically write a handwritten letter to each of them like some sort of super granny from years past. You’ll have to rely on something that smells much less like mothballs and wet cat food: email automation.

We explored these briefly in the last article, but we will need to go much more in-depth now to fully understand the power that personalization can bring to your practice’s email marketing. 

Good Personalization

Here are some examples of rudimentary personalization tactics you can use in Mailchimp specifically.

Subject Line

Any of these can be easily inserted into the subject line of your email to create a customized message: 

*|FNAME|* - Inserts your contact’s first name, if it's available, in your audience.

*|LNAME|* - Inserts your contact’s last name, if it's available, in your audience.

*|EMAIL|* - Inserts your contact’s email address.

*|PHONE|* - Inserts your contact’s phone number, if it’s available, in your audience.

*|ADDRESS|* - Inserts your contact’s address, if it’s available, in your audience.

To be completely honest, the first name will be the only one you really rely on — there’s no practical reason to ever include someone’s phone number in a subject line. But, depending on your email marketing platform, there may be more options to include, so make sure to check out their full list. 

Imagery

Depending on the audience you are targeting, it is entirely possible to have two different versions of an email that use different imagery. This is a great opportunity to use pictures that resonate more intimately with your different personas — match images to the audience's age, gender, or lifestyle (kids, career, retirement, etc.) and you will be leagues above many of your competitors.

Timing

Figuring out when to send is a very important optimization to make. The issue is that there are dozens of datasets out there that point to different optimal times and days. Here are five extremely popular email and marketing platforms and their recommendations:

• Hubspot: Any day, 9 a.m. to 12 p.m. and 12 p.m. to 3 p.m.
• Brevo: Tuesday or Thursday, from 10 a.m. to 3 p.m.
• Twilio: Tuesday, 11 a.m.
• Mailchimp: Monday through Friday, 10 a.m.
• Moosend: Thursday, 8 to 9 a.m.

As you can see, the general trend is to maybe send them early in the day… kind of? The reason this data is so finicky is because every single person who sends emails has a unique audience; what performs best for you won’t perform best for McDonald’s or the smoothie shop across the street.

You can absolutely use this data to find a preliminary starting point, but ultimately, this will be a trial-and-error process. As you send out more emails, you will figure out your optimal schedules based on the data from each campaign. (And, often, the service you are using will help you find those optimizations.)

So, be intentional about your delivery times, even if it is just to observe and figure out what works best for your audience.

Even Better Personalization

When you are ready to step it up, we can move into slightly more advanced personalization tactics:

Dynamic Content

Just like the imagery of your email, the written content can also be changed and partitioned based on the recipient. A younger crowd might appreciate more informal language that talks to them instead of at them, whereas an older audience might appreciate a more sophisticated tone that makes them feel well looked after. 

Remember, at the end of the day, the email content all boils down to your personas and how you decide to communicate strategically with each persona individually. It’s not just about what you are saying, but also largely how you say it.

Sales and Promotions

Constantly running sales and promotions is not a good way to create a sustainable business. But sprinkled in sparingly, they can be a great way to target certain types of patients and give them a more personalized experience. 

Rather than sending your entire email list a BOGO offer for Botox — which will likely include many people who are not interested in Botox — break up your sales and promos into a general BOGO promotion and offer different products to the audience based on their interests.

Best Personalization

Below, you will find some of the most advanced ways to personalize your content. These are not for people who are new to email automation, we highly recommend spending some time familiarizing yourself with the more foundational tools at your disposal before jumping into these.

Product Recommendations

If you’ve ever seen an email like this, you’ve probably been on the receiving end of product recommendations:

Marketers aren’t shy about using the phrase “recommended,” either — in fact, using the word in some kind of phrase is a pretty potent marketing tool that communicates to your audience that these solutions are custom-tailored to their specific needs. 

Implementing cookies and other data-driven recommendations can be a very advanced approach, but it is also entirely possible to do this manually. 

Here is the same template, but branded for Awakened Medical Spa and optimized for an audience that has already had injectable treatments performed:

With some easy content swaps, we now have a much more personalized email experience for whoever is on the receiving end. 

Membership and Loyalty Program Progress

If your practice offers a membership or loyalty program, using that information to provide a custom email experience can make your emails much more valuable to the audience. 

If you are keeping track of points, show them the points they have earned or provide them with information about ways to earn bonus points. 

Businesses like Best Buy do a great job of this, going as far as giving you an exact dollar amount you have earned — and can currently choose to spend — at their business: 

Mimicking this for your practice, creating and sharing benchmarks for your loyalty and VIP patients, and gamifying the treatment process can keep your most engaged demographics interested in your products. 

If they are 10 points away from free treatment, offer them a way to earn those 10 points quickly. If they are a couple of purchases away from a new VIP standing, walk them through the process of getting to that level. 

Mobile Optimization

Mobile optimization might stand out a bit unnaturally when you put it next to segmentation and personalization, but the truth is that the majority of email digestion happens on a mobile device — so, if you aren’t paying attention to how your email looks on a cell phone, you aren’t setting yourself up for success.

In fact, not focusing on mobile first isn’t just ignoring optimization; it can have devastating impacts on your overall email marketing conversions. Here are some of the key components you need to consider for a strong mobile experience:

Link Tapability

I don’t want to hear any sass from the grammar police out there; I know “tapability” isn’t technically a word, but it should be. Especially considering how critical it is for your email to feel tapable. (Also not technically a word.)

When users are on their phones, there is a deeply ingrained expectation that they will be taken on a journey optimized for their devices. Buttons on emails should take users where they want to go, and anything that is clickable should be easy enough for a toddler to click without missing.

For the love of everything good in this world, don’t make your audience spam tap a link on your email because it was too small. And please, please do not make every single aspect of your email clickable — the last thing you want is for them to leave your email before they are ready because they were trying to scroll down your email and accidentally tapped a link in what should be dead space. 

This is a recipe for getting them to nope out of your email content out of pure frustration. 

For the most part, every element of an email that isn’t empty space should be clickable to some degree. Not all of them need to direct the user to the same place, though. You can be creative about what elements direct potential patients where and then look at a heat map after it’s sent to see which links performed well. 

Here’s an example of an email from im+ a few minutes after sending that lets you get a little inside baseball with us:

As you can see, a lot of the clicks (almost 30%) came from the logo and the header image. That’s pretty typical — most people reading email expect to be able to click these large elements and move forward in the funnel.

However, this data also shows us something interesting in the body: which articles people found the most intriguing. Naturally, part one of this series really got a lot of attention, but for those who didn’t click on part one, there seemed to be a relatively even split between the rest, with part two taking the lead. 

If these links were to procedure for your practice, you’d have a much easier time figuring out what this particular audience was interested in and finding a way to use that data for future email blasts. 

Write for Mobile First

When you are writing for the web, full sentences and paragraphs help to shape the ideas you are trying to convey. And when people are on the web, they are generally happy to engage with some degree of long-form writing.

But they do not have the same inclination in emails. They are usually on their phones which receive on average more than 45 push notifications per day. Not to mention the hundreds of other micro-distractions they get from a single doom-scrolling sesh.

Long story short, your content needs to be brief and catchy while still pushing the narrative forward. Keep your sentences concise: about 10 to 15 words. This will make sure that they remain aesthetically pleasing across different platforms by avoiding long walls of text that will almost always cause the reader to eject from your email. 

This rule is somewhat malleable, though. For example, at im+, our audience is full of highly educated individuals who are actively seeking information, which means we can and should be a little more detailed than a typical email. 

If you find yourself serving a much more sophisticated, educational crowd, don’t be afraid to give them a little more than you would expect. On the other hand, if you know you are dealing with average professionals in a time crunch, you may even want to consider restricting your text even more. 

Generally speaking, medical professionals should prefer a more simplistic content style since they often tackle very complex topics. This isn’t only good marketing, either; the HHS and other major health organizations also recommend that medical information remain simple and easy to digest.

Responsive Design

Responsive design refers to an email format that changes based on the device you use to view it. This means that a single email will look different on a laptop, tablet, cellphone, and everything else in between. 

A while back, Google made responsive designs (and mobile optimization at large) a core component of how they rank websites for their search engines… and for good reason. It is imperative your users have a good experience, and you’ll be missing the mark on more than half of your audience if mobile isn’t a priority. This rule also applies to email. 

Luckily, many email marketing platforms provide this natively, but you should always preview and test your content on mobile devices before sending it out to make sure all the different elements, such as headers, text, buttons, and other HTML elements, are working as intended for a mobile audience.

Use Correct Image Sizes

Image sizes could technically fall under responsive design, but they are important enough to get right that they do constitute their own section.

Unfortunately, we can’t offer a one-size-fits-all solution here. You will need to customize the images you use to fit the platform, templates, and design you are going for.

However, there are two concepts that can help you get closer to the finish line that are often confused:

1. File Size: The larger the file, the longer it takes to download. The smaller the file, the less resolution it has. Finding a balance between loadable and high enough quality can be a tricky task. In most situations, aim for images to be about 200 KB, but no more than 1 MB. 
2. Image Dimensions: If file size is the amount of data in the image, then your image dimensions are how stretched out that data will be. In most cases, you will want your images to be between 320 and 400 pixels wide for mobile so that they fit comfortably on a handheld device. 

Analytics, Analytics, Analytics

In our content textbook (coming soon), we cover — in great detail — which analytics are important to the different sectors of your marketing program. For email marketing, there are about five extremely high-value metrics that you should be regularly tracking: opens, open rate, forwards, unsubscribes, and click-throughs.

• Opens — This is the raw number of total opens your email received. This number is important because it gives you a quantifiable number of people you are reaching with each email, which can be useful as you look to strategize your marketing efforts in the future. If you know that your emails are reaching an audience of 1,000, while your SMS marketing is only reaching a couple hundred, then you know that when resources are tight you should be prioritizing email marketing. 
• Open Rate — Open rate is the percentage of people who received your email and opened it to read more. This is an imperative stat to measure because it gives you insight into how engaged your audience is and how well certain types of subject lines and preview text are performing. Over time, you’ll be able to tell what kind of language and formatting your audience responds best to. Do they like offers and value propositions in the subject? Do they like a more conversational tone? How do they respond to emojis? All of these questions and answers can help you improve your conversion rates over time. 
• Forwards — The number of people who found the information in the email important enough to share with their peers. This is a good way to see how much value your emails are providing to your audiences. More forwards generally mean more valuable content.
• Unsubscribes — This is the number of people who found the information you have provided so unuseful that they no longer want to be bothered by your communications in their email box. It’s a tough pill to swallow, but unsubscribes are not the end of the world. The self-pruning that happens helps your data become much more applicable to the audiences that will more likely engage with you. 
• Click-Through Rate — This is the percentage of people who opened your email and found the content interesting enough to click on a call to action to learn more about whatever you were communicating to them. This is another critical metric to track since it can give you insight into what your audiences are most interested in from a content perspective. 

Test and Track All the Things

A/B testing can also be performed manually on many different emails and structures. Quarterly or annual email audits are a great way to determine what your audience has responded the most positively to. 

By systematically testing and analyzing each of these elements, you can gather valuable insights into what works best for your audience and provide your copywriters, designers, and content creators valuable data to leverage as they create assets for your brand and practice. 

And, to be completely honest here, A/B testing never ends. Here is a “short” list of everything you can be testing and analyzing in your email marketing program:

• Subject Line
• Preheader Text
• Sender Name
• Email Greeting
• Email Body Content
• Content Length
• Call to Action
• CTA Design 
• Images and Graphics
• Email Layout/Template
• Text Formatting (fonts, colors, sizes)
• Personalization 
• Send Time
• Day of the Week
• Email Frequency
• Subject Line Length
• Incentives (discounts, free shipping offers)
• Social Proof (testimonials, reviews)
• Video Content Inclusion
• Interactive Elements (surveys, polls)
• Plain Text vs. HTML Emails
• Footer Content
• Link Placement
• Mobile Optimization
• Tone and Style of Writing
• Special Characters and Emojis in Subject Line
• Urgency and Scarcity Messaging

So, yeah. Feel free to test and test to your heart’s content. There are plenty of things you can be optimizing.

Value-Native vs. Value-Foreign

You will want to consider whether you are creating emails that are value-native or value-foreign. That is, does the email itself provide information or content of value, or will the patient have to move to a different platform from the email in order to retrieve said value?

Now, there is no need for all of your emails to be one or the other — you can mix and match them depending on the content at hand, but it should be a consideration in every single email you send. 

With that being said, there are some situations in which, as a medical aesthetic professional or plastic surgeon responsible for disseminating health information, you should lean toward either side of the spectrum.

When to Use Value-Native Emails:

• Immediate Education Needs: If you are explaining post-procedure care, providing tips on skincare routines, or delivering essential health information that the patient needs to know immediately (for example, right after a procedure), including this content directly in the email ensures it is easily accessible.
• Engagement and Retention: When you want to keep the patient engaged within the email itself, such as sharing success stories, testimonials, or informative articles that build trust and showcase your expertise, including the information in the email content itself is a good approach.
• Regular Industry Updates: For newsletters or regular updates where the goal is to inform rather than drive specific actions, embedding the value within the email can be more effective.

When to Use Value-Foreign Emails:

• Detailed Information Requiring Further Reading: If the content is too lengthy or complex to fit into an email, such as detailed research studies, comprehensive guides, or in-depth procedure explanations, it is better to link to a webpage or a downloadable PDF.
• Interactive Content: For content that benefits from interactive elements, such as videos, webinars, booking appointments, or detailed photo galleries, directing patients to your website or a dedicated landing page can provide a better user experience.
• Conversions and Actions: When the goal is to drive specific actions, such as scheduling a consultation, signing up for a seminar, or purchasing products, linking to a well-designed landing page that can capture and process these interactions is more effective.

By strategically deciding whether to use value-native or value-foreign emails based on the content and the desired outcome, you can ensure that your communications are both effective and efficient. This consideration helps you deliver the right information in the best format, enhancing patient engagement and satisfaction.

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Determine Your Email Design

You’ve done it. You’ve made it through the trials and tribulations and have finished a journey that the explorers of the world could be proud of. There is just one more obstacle to overcome, and one more decision to make: what should you do about your email design? 

At the very least, your email design should be decided strategically. This is another situation where you don’t always need to follow the same rule every time, but you should be thinking critically about the why behind your decision.

Plain Text vs. Rich HTML vs. Interactive

Plain text emails are the workhorses of the email ecosystem. They are the emails you use to communicate with your coworkers and other business professionals. They are easy to make, send, read, and keep track of.

But, they aren’t really going to stand out in a crowd of a thousand emails, will they?

Unless you are doing some kind of anti-marketing campaign and this kind of email fits into your brand identity, this flat, bland design isn’t going to drive business or conversions.

This is why most people in the email marketing game live and die by rich HTML email templates: they allow them the freedom to design and optimize their content more effectively and provide a much more elevated patient experience. 

Most HTML emails look like our previous examples, rich with images, links, text, and other visual elements:

Although interactive emails are not very commonplace, they go one step further: they provide content that can be explored and manipulated by the user. This provides an experience for the audience that feels very similar to a website or phone app—an ecosystem that audiences are becoming more accustomed to (and also come to expect).

Mobile applications take up over 90% of internet time. Source

The issue, though, and the reason all the Indiana Jones explorers out there aren’t using this approach, is that most email readers simply don’t support that kind of experience. There are some ways to get close to these elements with sophisticated hovering actions or scrolling elements, but a truly interactive approach is still largely unattainable for the average person. 

So, for the time being, at least, we recommend really leaning into and perfecting the art of HTML emails since they provide a familiar experience to your audience and robust marketing opportunities for your practice.  

You’ve Made It Through the Trials

Not only do you know how to make an email now, but you’ve also learned more about email fundamentals than 99% of your competition will know. Good on you.

But it’s been a lot to take it, so, in the next part of this series, we are going to show you some real-world examples of the most common email types for medical aesthetic practices.