Let’s Write an Email (Email Marketing Part 1)

For the vast majority of medical marketers, email marketing has long become a lost art, a treasure trove of patient conversions hidden in a tomb somewhere deep in the jungle, forgotten, overgrown with vines and with a thick layer of dust settled comfortably on top.

Email marketing has been largely disregarded because, like so many still useful relics, it just wasn't the sexy new thing anymore. Before social media sucked the life out of the internet's attention span, email marketing was one of the best and most popular ways to communicate with patients. 

The secret, though, is that it never stopped being effective. People just decided to focus on becoming Insta-famous instead, slapping 14 layers of photo editing on a 4 MP image of a Starbucks frappe on their way to the office and calling it a day. 

"It's just so artsy," we all collectively thought to ourselves as we double-downed on the egregious black borders and hyper-saturation plaguing every shitty post from the early 2010s.

Email marketing might be a lost art, and it might take some exploration to find it again, but it's a trek worthy of Indiana Jones himself. This series focuses on rediscovering email marketing, and part one is about realizing that email marketing isn't dead at all — you just forgot how to use it.

Why Should You Bother With Email Marketing?

Let’s start with this: there are 4.48 billion users worldwide. It is safe to say that every single person who could potentially become a patient of your practice uses email to some degree. And, as we already mentioned, those emails don’t change very often. 

So, if you are looking for a singular platform to potentially reach every single patient… email is it. 

People will opt out of social media, choose not to engage with your website, ignore your ads and all of your other marketing, but if you can get access to someone’s email, you have a direct path into their world that is much more intimate and curated than anything else they participate in.

When 88% of people check their emails every day, and the average clickthrough rate is between 1.7 and 2.5%, email marketing has some of the best ROIs in the marketing game. Generally, for every dollar spent on email marketing, you can expect to see a return of $36. 

(Plus, most patients are three times more likely to make purchases from email marketing than social media. So, consider that before getting Insta-famous is made the goal.) 

When it comes down to it, if you are trying to get the most bang for your buck… email is it.

Email marketing is personal, it is intimate, and it is permissive. People who receive your emails want to hear from you and your offers, and as long as you are doing them right, they really are quite the treasure for your practice. You just have to know how to work them right.

So, without further delay, let’s hack the vines, blow away the dust, and open up the tomb — let’s write an email.  

Establish Your Objective

You might have heard us say it once or twice (or a million times) before – but strategy is paramount. Before we do anything else, we need to understand what it is we are trying to achieve.

So, for the purposes of this exercise, let’s create a fictional medical aesthetic practice: Awakened Med Spa. (I know this sucks, don’t eviscerate me on the branding or naming.)

This practice is about 30 minutes away from a major beachside metro. It focuses entirely on nonsurgical and minimally invasive options and has had great success with injectable treatments.

We have two injectors and an aesthetician who are highly trained and engaging, online and offline, and that has garnered them a great reputation and a ton of word-of-mouth business. But, they want to be able to expand the other offerings in their practice that are not injectables to hopefully boost revenue.

They just purchased a new laser resurfacing machine, the Blemish-B-Gone II, and after following the “marketing plan” provided to them by the manufacturer… they have had virtually no signs up to offset the massive cost they incurred from the device.

(Hopefully, this doesn’t trigger any of you. If it does, you might also need to read our series on medical device marketing.)

They want to to an email campaign to help alleviate, but preferably solve, this issue. So, here is our objective: get patients to sign up for BLEMISH-B-GONE II treatments through email marketing.

Determine Your Audience

With our objective in mind, we need to start thinking about who our audience is for this treatment and what demographics we should focus our efforts on.

Hopefully, you’ve created patient personas to help you through this process. If you have, great; this makes your job a lot easier since personas have already segmented your patients and audience into different categories.

And, in the email marketing ecosystem, segmentation is a fundamental concept.

Segmentation: the practice of dividing an email subscriber list into smaller, more targeted groups based on specific criteria.

If not, no worries – you’ll just need to do a little extra legwork to get your segmentation set up. Consider all of your patients and find a few central demographics that you think would be the most interested in laser resurfacing treatment. 

When you are so close to the beach, discoloration, such as sunspots and sun damage, becomes a huge concern. So, it's probable that people in their mid-thirties to late forties who are near the physical location of Awakened Med Spa would be interested in addressing some of those issues.

Textural concerns like fine lines and acne scars can also be treated by the new machine. Any of their patients who had acne concerns throughout puberty or are beginning to develop wrinkling might be interested in having a solution.

Laser resurfacing generally tackles all of these concerns to some degree. But which one is the most advantageous to focus on?

To determine that, we need to examine our patient demographics closely. Discoloration is a common issue, but sunspots and intense sun damage are much less ubiquitous than fine lines.

Not to mention, most of Awakened’s practice’s clientele is between the ages of 35 and 49 – so acne scars probably won’t be something they are actively worried about at that stage of life. 

Based on all of this information, patients between the ages of 35 and 49 with early signs of fine lines and wrinkles are a good demographic to target.

Disclaimer: This is an abridged version of a full segmentation strategy. To understand fully how to put your audience into more effective silos, check out our series on patient personas.

Segment Your Email List

Now that you know the group of people you want to target, segmenting your email to reach that demographic is as easy as checking a few boxes on whatever email marketing platform you are using. Mailchimp and Constant Contact are two of the most popular, but there are plenty out there for whatever your budget and needs are.

It’s important to know that you can segment your list at any point. The best time to segment was when you opened your practice; the next best time is now. — Sam Peek, Chief Executive Officer

In any case, the process of creating a segment should be relatively similar between platforms. Here are the steps to doing this process on Mailchimp:

Step 1: Navigate to the “Segments” tab under the “Audience” category.

Step 2: Choose “Advanced” or “Regular” segments based on your level of comfort and then select “Create advanced/regular segment.” 

Step 3: Name your segment and then click “Add filter.” For our purposes, we will use “Skin Resurfacing Candidates.”

Step 4: Select your metrics. Remember, we are looking to target people between the ages of 35 and 49 as closely as possible. For this specific example, we have to go outside of our target range just a bit by using two different age ranges. 

Step 5: Select “Review segment” at the top right.

Step 6: Make sure the segment is populated, and then click “Save segment.” Congratulations, you’ve now created an email segment. The process will be very similar to this, regardless of the platform you use.

Write Your Subject Line

Listen closely: the subject line is the most important part of your email. 64% of email recipients open an email based on the subject line. If people do not open your email, literally nothing else matters. 

As a general rule, there are three goals of a subject line: making an announcement, solving a problem, and creating urgency. Not all three of these need to exist on every subject line; in fact, it is possible to craft a good subject line that focuses entirely on one of these concepts:

Subject: “Now Accepting New Dawn Health Insurance | Eligibility Requirements”

Subject: “Now Accepting Affirm Financing | Details Inside”

The point is that finding a way to focus on these strategically and intentionally can drastically improve your open rates.

An announcement or change in your practice that is substantial enough — say, a new way for patients to pay for treatment — might merit and succeed without any need for an intentional focus on problem-solving or urgency. In fact, problem-solving and urgency might just end up being a natural byproduct of a good announcement. 

(Save this for those big sweeping announcements. You adding a new drip coffee machine to the lobby probably isn’t going to move the needle.)

Here’s an example we can use:

Subject: New Injectable Filler | Say Bye to Wrinkles 👋 | Limited Product Available

In this particular subject line, we have three sections covering the three subject line goals:

Making an Announcement: “New Injectable Filler”

Solving a Problem: “Say Bye to Wrinkles”

Creating Urgency: “Limited Product Available”

These aren’t hard formats that you need to follow; “Limited Product Available” could just as easily be “Only 20 Available Slots” or “For 10 Patients Only.” They are rough sketches of what you should be aiming to accomplish.

Let’s make one for our very own Awakened Med Spa by filling in this same chart for our new laser resurfacing product. Here is our audience:

“patients between the ages of 35 and 49 with early signs of fine lines and wrinkles”

We know two things immediately: the announcement (new laser resurfacing available) and the problem it is solving (fine lines and wrinkles). So, let’s plug those in without thinking too much about it:

Making an Announcement: "New Facial Treatment”

Solving a Problem: “Say Goodbye to Fine Lines”

Creating Urgency: ???

What we don’t have yet, however, is urgency. This part can be manufactured with sales, discounts, and promotions, but those aren’t really sustainable and not the way you want to compete on the market. Use them once in a while to reward your audience and generate buzz, but stay away from perpetually offering some kind of discount. 

Instead, focus on the number of available appointments or products. 

Let’s go with something like this for Awakened Med Spa:

Making an Announcement: “New Facial Treatment”

Solving a Problem: “Say Goodbye to Fine Lines”

Creating Urgency: “Only 20 Slots Left for November”

For our subject line, we can deprioritize the urgency a bit since the announcement itself is pretty substantial. Let’s get creative and put a little more emphasis on the device results and see what we can come up with:

Subject: Say GOODBYE to FINE LINES | New Wrinkle Treatment Available | Now Booking

This is good, but remember, our audience is also already pretty intrigued with fillers. So, let’s leverage that and throw in an emoji for good measure. 

After all, 56% of brands that use emojis in their subject lines have higher open rates. (Unfortunately, if you are in Australia, emojis are a no-no, so ignore this statistic. Thanks, 💩hpra.)

Subject: Say GOODBYE to FINE LINES 👋 | Laser Resurfacing Available | NOW BOOKING Filler/Laser Combos 

If you really want to customize the subject line, and if you have the processes set up to target only those who have had injectable fillers performed, you could do something along the lines of:

Subject: New Laser Treatment for Injectable Filler Patients | Magnify Your Results | Filler x Laser Packages Now Available

Pick your emoji of choice (if emojis are your vibe), and Awakened Med Spa has a pretty catchy opener.

A quick note on automation and personalization

If you’ve ever received an email with your name on it, I am sorry to burst your bubble, but that wasn’t someone manually entering an email in Gmail and sending it to you. That process is automated. 

It usually means having some kind of tag that tells the platform to automatically pull some information. Here are two popular tags that make subject lines more personal on Mailchimp by using the recipient's name.

*|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.

To personalize the subject line we have and get the final version of the subject line we will be using, let’s play around a bit:

Subject: New Laser Treatment for Injectable Filler Patients | Magnify Your Results | Filler x Laser Packages Now Available

This was the original, now let’s add some personalization:

Subject: *|FNAME|*, a New Laser Treatment Is Ready for You | Magnify Your Injectable Results | Filler x Laser Packages Now Available

Get rid of the clunky code and do some trimming for length, and this is a preview of what we would end up with:

Subject: Alice, a New Treatment for Your Wrinkles Is Waiting | Get the Most Out of Your Fillers

Adding in the name and “is waiting” generated more urgency in the subject line, so we were able to get rid of the last third of the subject entirely and still have an option that feels compelling. We also still solved a problem (treatment for your wrinkles) and announced that something new is available. Easy peasy. 

Yes, Email Length Matters 

We just have one more problem: the length. The best practice is to keep your subject lines less than nine total words. If they are longer words, keep an eye on the character count as well. Anything more than 45 characters might get cut off in the inbox.

The reason I mention this last is because it's important to develop your subject line with the principles we mentioned first and focus on compressing second. If you get too caught up in length early on, you likely won’t go through the process of finding something compelling.

So, let’s condense:

Subject Line 1 | Alice, a New Treatment for Your Wrinkles Is Waiting - Get the Most Out of Your Fillers | 6 Words | 86 Characters

Subject Line 2 | Alice, a New Wrinkle Treatment Is Waiting Just for You - Bolster Your Fillers | 13 Words | 77 Characters

Subject Line 3 | Alice, a Wrinkle Treatment Is Waiting for You | 9 Words | 45 Characters

In the name of length, we’ve lost some context. But that’s okay. They probably don’t need to be reminded they had fillers, and a short, snappy subject line is higher on the priority list. Plus, there’s an amazing feature that will solve this problem for us in the next section: the preheader text.

Write Your Preheader Text

If your subject line doesn’t get your audience to open, the next plan of attack you have is your preheader text. (Often referred to as “preview text” as well.) This is the bit of writing that usually lives right under the subject line. It gives you a chance to elaborate more on what you are writing about. 

Take full advantage of that opportunity and find another selling point to drive home. Statistics and numbers are a great route to take. You’ll still want to stay between 30 and 80 characters, though, to perform best on mobile.

In the example we are building, we need to find a natural follow-through to our subject line.

Subject: Alice, a New Wrinkle Treatment Is Waiting

Let’s find something about the new treatment we are offering to focus on. Let’s say the Blemish-B-Gone II is known for its 30-minute treatments and virtual total lack of side effects. 

Here are some options:

Preheader Text 1: Erase even deeper fine lines in as little as 30 minutes.

Preheader Text 2: Don’t miss a beat — This new treatment will have you back to work before lunch.

Preheader Text 3: Amplify fillers in 30 mins. No harsh side effects — just a youthful complexion.

Personally, I like number three the most. It takes advantage of the most space possible and brings back the filler supplementation we lost earlier in the subject line. 

Let’s see what it looks like together:

Choose a Salutation

Greetings aren’t really something you’ll need to have in every email unless you are trying to send something personal from yourself or your practice. But in the event that you do need to use a greeting, here are some general guidelines:

1. Know your brand. Are you a “Good afternoon, everyone” or a “Heyooo, it’s your doc here” kind of company? It’s important to know — your audience will expect a voice, and it will come off as disingenuous if you don’t meet those expectations. This is an opportunity to define throughout the entire article how you will communicate to your audience.
2. Know your subject matter. Are you apologizing? Issuing an official update on some event? Sending a happy holiday email? Announcing a new treatment? Providing some education? Whatever the vibe is, consider it. Nothing worse than switching up tones without warning right in the middle of a conversation.
3. Don’t forget about automation. Those tags we mentioned earlier for the subject lines can still be used throughout the body text. Nothing wrong with opening up the email with their name, even if you’ve put it in the subject line.

(Unofficial #4: Never actually say “salutations.” It’s the equivalent of saying “present” instead of “here” when the teacher called your name in school.) 

For our purposes, I think we can with something simple. Something like, “Good news, Alice.” That feels right, and it sets us up to continue the conversation in our next section. And, if we end up not needing it, we can just drop it and forget about it.

Here’s what we have so far:

Subject: Alice, a New Wrinkle Treatment Is Waiting

Preheader Text 1: Amplify fillers in 30 mins. No harsh side effects — just a youthful complexion.

Salutation: Good news, Alice.

Create Your Body Content

Oh, baby. We’ve arrived. The biggest and most oft-screwed-up part of an email: the body content. I get the struggle, though; crafting an email is complex, and there are about a million different ways you could write or structure an email. It’s not a hard thing to mess up. 

But it is possible to avoid flunking out early with a little strategy. For example:

1. Reconsider your objective. Before you write anything, go back to your notes when you figured out what the goal is for this email and then find a logical structure to achieve it. Are you trying to sell a new product? Then your email needs to be tailored to move your audience through the sales funnel. Are you making a simple announcement? Keep it short and sweet, and ditch most of the bells and whistles.
2. Reconsider your audience. How you say something is just as important as what you are saying. If you are looking to send an email to a younger demographic about a new treatment that improves skin glow, that content should sound different than what you would send an older demographic. 
3. Reconsider the problem you are solving. We did all that mental work earlier in your email development and figured out that unwanted wrinkles and fine lines were the pain points to target. So, target them. Make them the big headers or bullet points. Even once they’ve opened your email, you are racing against their attention span. Give them the important info, and do it quickly. 

Your email design is part of the email’s content. Even though it hurts my little writer's heart to admit, people care more about visuals than they do about words, and… visual information is processed by the human brain around 60,000 times faster than text content. Ouch. 

Side note: Good imagery can help you do more with less. A well branded email with good content can do a lot for your brand identity and building up your practice to your potential patients.

Good news for email marketing, though, since most sites like Mailchimp and even Gmail have templates you can access. With the accessibility of Gmail templates, there is absolutely no excuse for you not to have a thoughtfully designed email as part of your campaign.  

And, as you can see, there are plenty of options to choose from. 

Oh, this one looks interesting. Let’s give it a shot.

Alright, aside from me asking you to ignore the 2-minute Canva logo we are using for “Awakened Med Spa,” this is looking pretty solid to start. It’s simple and gives us plenty of opportunity to get the information that we need. 

If you are feeling concerned — trust the process. It’ll all come together.

Here is that same email with some color swaps. 

(I forgot to mention that Awakened is a black-and-white-only kind of brand.) 

Now, let’s swap some photos, write some new content, think up some headers…

…and, boom:

‍

Notice how the content of this email is not really all that content-heavy. Our largest paragraph is our announcement, one of our main headers is the problem we are solving, and our opener is efficiently working to create urgency. 

Make sure your buttons and all major components of the email link back to the appropriate spots. When you have the opportunity to convert a patient, you want to make the most of it. 

“A broken link is revenue lost.” — Confucious, probably.

And we aren’t in the business of losing revenue. 

Develop Your Calls to Action

While there are dozens of potential links per email, your main call to action will usually be some kind of button in your email. Contrary to popular belief, this button does not need to be at the end of the content with the “conclusion,” even though that is the way our email for Awakened Med Spa worked out. 

You should put a CTA button whenever you want to prompt your audience into action. The earlier you give the option, the better — the last thing you want to do is lose any potential leads simply because you didn’t give them the opportunity to contact you or sign up for a service early enough.

Take a look at the following example that is about as simple as it comes from Codeacademy:

They hit all the important elements: announcement, problem solving, and urgency. But because of the design, it fits snugly into one screen and has a bright yellow button just begging to be pushing.

Here is another example of effective CTAs capturing the sale as quickly as possible.

You can trust that this was an effective approach because, well…

I bought it. I’m a sucker for matte black stationary. 

Keep in mind that there is also a place for CTAs to be textual hyperlinks when the messaging is a little more intimate. 

Here is a very simple, personal email from someone at Copy.ai:

You get a short gist of what Jacalyn is pitching in the very first sentence, and, shortly after, she gives us a textual hyperlink to take you where she wants you to go. 

A button here wouldn’t have felt as personal or as authentic. (Note that she also provides two links — two conversion opportunities — even though they direct to the same place.)

Persuasiveness vs. Authenticity

In all things digital marketing, these two concepts are difficult for marketers and nonmarketers alike to reconcile. If you are persuasive about something, then you are trying to make a sale. 

If you are trying to make a sale, then many potential patients will spot it from a mile away because it feels less authentic. 

This is especially true for medical marketing, where most patients believe that a doctor looking to sell products and services is somehow bad. 

It’s an unrealistic and untenable standard, but this is how many people view calls to action that try to overtly convince them to do something. The harder you solicit the sale with persuasiveness, the less authentic you appear to be. 

‍It’s an inverse relationship that requires a constant balancing act. 

To combat it, we always recommend focusing on education and information first and strategically placing the CTAs throughout your content that promise additional value. 

The focus should always be on what is best for the patient — buyers have enough purchasing intelligence to sort through good and bad intentions. 

Ask and answer questions like: Why is this particular laser resurfacing product better than the other options? How does it benefit this specific group of people? What can you, the provider, give the patient through this treatment that they could not achieve elsewhere?

This is called a Unique Value Proposition in marketing, and it is as important to communicate in your email marketing as it is anywhere else in the digital ecosystem. 

Awakened Med Spa chose to focus on the power of combination treatments, the removal of fine lines, and the expedient procedure time, but your UVP could be anything that only you (or only a select few) can provide.

The Journey Isn’t Over

Alright, deep breath. We just covered a ton of information. But I think we effectively rediscovered the lost art of email marketing, as we set out to do. If we were looking to be average Joes, we could stop here.

But we both know you don’t want to be average. So, in Part 2, you’ll learn all the advanced email tactics — the things that set Indiana Jones apart from all the other basic-ass archeologists out there. 

‍(Unfortunately, whips and adventuring fedoras are not included.)