A good marketing strategy is absolutely essential for the success of your Home Healthcare business. Your marketing campaigns will ultimately generate leads for you and drive clients to your business.
While there are a few marketing channels that you can explore and we recommend that you explore all of them before homing in on the ones that work best for you, marketing through emails has been one of the most efficient and cost-effective methods of promoting your business.
Email marketing campaigns are used by businesses of all shapes and sizes – fighting to get that space within your inbox and your attention.
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What is Email Marketing and Why is it so Popular?
Emails have almost become synonymous with work – it is estimated that the total number of business and consumer emails sent per day exceeded 293 billion in 2019, while the number of email users is expected to increase to 4.3 billion by 2023.
Email marketing is therefore the most popular channel of marketing, which allows you to reach a wider audience with very little cost.
An email marketing campaign refers to an email (or a series of emails) that is sent by a prospecting business to potential customers, promoting the business, and encouraging the potential users to engage with the product or service that the business is offering.
Things to Think About Before Initiating an Email Marketing Campaign
When you build a Home Health Care Business or buy an existing business, most of your customers come from the immediate catchment area of your business – the locality in which your business operates.
It is a physically intensive area of work – your home health care staff needs to personally visit and work with your clients. Therefore, when you are targeting your customers through an email marketing campaign, or for that matter any marketing channel, your target segment should comprise of local potential customers.
Apart from this, you can automate your marketing campaign along with your other admin task by using a home health care business software.
Create Your Own Target Mailer List
Creating a targeted mailer list comprising of local potential customers is the first thing that you should look to do, before initiating your email marketing campaign. Below we will cover a few ways of successfully creating and growing a highly effective mailer list.
For now, you must know that it is estimated that you can achieve up to a 760% increase in your email marketing effectiveness by building a well-segmented mailing list.
It is often not very effective to buy email lists from external sources as these lists are likely to contain significant impurities in terms of non-relevant email addresses.
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Set Your Goals and Corresponding Email Types
It is important to understand and pre-determine the goals of your email marketing campaign. Not only should you try and acquire new customers through email marketing, but it is also important to keep your existing customers engaged and hooked on to your business though emails that inform them about the latest in your business and their area of interest.
It is more likely that your customers stick with you when you consistently provide good service and otherwise keep them engaged with customized, targeted, and useful content.
The major types of emails that you would be sending your clients would be promotional (with offers and discounts), relationship building (like newsletters), and transactional (like informing about upcoming payments or sign up confirmations).
It is a best practice to let the user know which type of email it is through the subject line itself.
What are the Characteristics of a Good Email Marketing System?
An effective email marketing system must have the below characteristics for maximum impact. Gone are the days of sending the same mass mailer to everybody in your mailing list without any customization. Technology also has played its due part in making it particularly easy to customize your content as per your audience.
Personalize the Content
Incorporate as much customization as possible in your email marketing material. At the bare minimum, this will include the name of the person you are sending the email to.
But do not stop at that, by all means! It is also a good idea to include a name that they can relate to within your company – for example, ‘Hi John, this is Matt from HelpandWellness.com’.
It is important to make it as close as possible to a conversation between two individuals rather than a company. It is also important to include customizations related to the individual’s activity on your website – for example, ‘Hi John, from the time you had subscribed to our fortnightly digest, we have come out with the following additions to our website…’.
It helps to continue the relationship from where you had left it the last time.
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Short and Simple
An important part of email marketing etiquette is to come straight to the point and be as succinct as possible.
Your customers, existing or potential, will definitely like your emails to be short and compact and conveying the message as quickly as possible, sometimes even through a descriptive subject line.
For example, for a promotional emailer campaign, you will likely want to make the subject line as catchy and attractive as possible, so as to increase the chances of reader engagement.
Gather as Much Feedback as Possible
The most effective means of improving your email marketing content or campaign is through user feedback and you should be prepared to gather lots of it – at the same time making it most convenient for your users, as this is an activity which is almost always considered by the user as a non-value adding activity.
It is important that you embed the feedback questions or marking scale within the email itself vis-à-vis a link which the customer must open, to increase the chances of a response.
Moreover, it is unlikely that you can expect the customer to type, therefore, it is advisable that you ask the customer to click on a few choices, one of which will be the likely answer to your feedback question.
Questions that you can ask your customers include ‘How do you rate the home care services that you have received?’. Depending on the rating of this question, you can provide a few options to the customer which she just needs to click to indicate which aspects of the service were exemplary or which required improvement.
While you can include open-ended questions (one or two at the maximum!), you should not make them mandatory to answer and you should be prepared to see over 90 percent blank responses for them.
Having said that, the responses to open-ended questions often provide the most insights into where you have to improve. Open-ended questions may include ‘If given the option, what is one thing that you would like to improve in our home healthcare service?’
Tracking User Behavior
It is given that you will have to gradually improve in this game and tracking user behavior and level of engagement with your email marketing campaign is a great way to do it – and, hopefully, this will help you improve your user engagement level in your next campaign.
You can use Google Analytics for tracking email opening rates, clickthrough rates, time spent on your website, thereby understanding user traffic brought to your website via the email route.
Also, it is a great way to promote your website when your readers are sharing your website content on social media – you should track such activity and identify these users who may be your hot leads.
Unsubscribe Option
Finally, it is important to recognize that however much you try to make your content interesting, some customers may find it pesky after they have subscribed to your emailers.
It is important to make it easy for them to unsubscribe from your email feed through a conveniently placed link on the email footer so that it does not affect your business’s goodwill.
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How to Target Your Email Marketing Campaign?
Once you have your campaign set up, your continuing endeavor should be to reach as wide an audience as possible with your emailers. And there are a few ways of achieving this, as set out below.
You should be looking to always find new ways of doing this – the longer your list of relevant users the better the chances of developing an effective lead generating system, through your emailers.
Encourage Subscription to Newsletter
Once you have traffic to your website, you should ensure to do everything that may make the user subscribe to your email newsletter. This is the most economical way of getting truly relevant and leads with a high probability of conversion.
HR of Local Companies for Home Healthcare of Parents of Employees
Partnerships with local companies or local offices of larger companies are a good idea. It may be effective if you can establish a relationship with the HR personnel at these offices and through them can reach out to the employees (through internal emails or the company noticeboards).
The value proposition will be to provide home healthcare services to the parents of the employees. Always make it a point to highlight your website address and your contact information explicitly in such communications.
Community Centres
Community centers are a great place to promote your business – the footfall is mostly local and a lot of people visiting are looking for this kind of information. Again, make sure to prominently feature your website and contact information – an email or a phone number.
Informational Content on Website
Make sure your website is well sorted but has a lot of information for your target audience – that is, the elderly – regarding mobility aids, activities, life hacks, etc.
Always remember, that it is likely that an individual will subscribe to your newsletter if she finds a lot of relevant and useful information on your website. We recommend you make this initial investment on your website and load it up with information – that will give you rich dividends in the medium to long term.
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Conclusion
An effective email marketing system is the cornerstone of a great marketing strategy. While local marketing strategies may often be successful as well – no channel can match the email marketing campaign’s cost-effectiveness and the wide reach at that cost.
It is important to have the email marketing system set up in the right way so that you have a gradually expanding emailing list and improving user engagement metrics. Once your mailer list has crossed a minimum threshold, you will quickly start seeing the benefits of the email marketing system.
If you want to venture into the business world of healthcare services such as residential care facilities, non-medical home care, transportation business, a daycare center for the elderly, then may I suggest you read our other guides.
For anyone looking for consultants, you should read best home healthcare business consultants.
