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4 Reasons Email Marketing is the Cornerstone of Healthcare Marketing

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The impact of traditional marketing campaigns, like direct mail or broadcast marketing, is hard to measure because it’s difficult to track their effectiveness. In this regard, email marketing in healthcare has changed the marketing playing field. 

Experts estimate that the number of email users around the world will reach over 4.48 billion in 2024. Email marketing also allows you to reach large groups of people with very little effort. 

You can develop customized content that addresses the needs of your audience and gather important information about your current and prospective customers.

By combining traditional marketing methods with email marketing, you’re able to distribute valuable content while tracking the success of your campaigns. This not only helps you improve your marketing effectiveness. It also helps you better understand your readers, improving audience retention and lead generation. 

While numerous marketing tactics are effective, email marketing is the cornerstone of healthcare marketing. 

Why Email Marketing is Invaluable for Healthcare Marketing

With the advent of smartphones and mobile applications, email can be accessed from anywhere. More than 60% of emails are opened on a phone. This means you’re able to connect with your audience in real time from anywhere. Because email is accessible to so many people, email marketing is a powerful tool when executed well. 

Here are four reasons email marketing is invaluable for the healthcare industry.

1. Email Provides Useful Data

Print ads may drive people to your business, but it’s difficult to know for certain. Maybe people found you through your advertisements, or maybe they just saw your building from the street. 

Email marketing provides useful information to help you identify potential business and determine what changes you should make to your marketing campaign.

Email marketing reveals bounce rates, which emails were opened, and which people unsubscribed from your mailing list. You’ll also be able to see how long recipients spent reading your messages and what steps they took afterward. 

All this information is useful data that helps you create customer profiles and optimize future campaigns for lead generation and increased ROI.

2. Email is Highly Targetable 

While developing your email list, you’ve been gathering important information about your audience. These details can be used to categorize contacts into groups that share commonalities. 

Email allows you to create content for a specific audience based on similarities like:

  • Demographics: Age, job title, gender, and area of medicine can help to narrow your audience. 
  • User journey: Understanding where your customers are in their purchasing journey can impact the content you create for them. You can target new customers with introductory offers while current customers receive information about product changes or company policy updates.
  • Previous history: Email allows you to assess open rates and engagement of previous email marketing campaigns. This information can help you plan future emails.

Through audience segmentation, you can pinpoint contacts for carefully developed custom content that resonates. Email marketing, therefore, enables you to provide targeted, meaningful information that increases engagement and boosts conversion rates. 

3. Email Builds Brand Awareness and Customer Loyalty

When people register to receive your emails, they are revealing an interest in your business. Through email marketing, you can capitalize on that interest to stay top of mind and increase your brand awareness. Email allows you to deliver informative and helpful content that benefits your audience.

You can minimize confusion about one of your products with an educational email. Invite healthcare suppliers to a special event with a guest speaker discussing a topic of concern. Or simply send an update about a current order. 

Email makes it easy to stay in front of your audience and continue building a relationship with them. By delivering useful content, you make your audience feel valued and important. This helps to build brand awareness and solidify customer loyalty.

4. Email is Affordable 

American healthcare advertising spend is projected to reach $80 billion by 2024. Paid advertising can be expensive, but email marketing is extremely cost-effective. On average, for every dollar spent, email returns $38. 

Because email is so targetable, you’re able to deliver concentrated content that’s likely to engage. This helps strengthen your relationship with your readers, thus leading to higher conversion rates. By increasing your conversions, you decrease the cost per conversion. 

In this way, email marketing can be adjusted to meet the needs of any budget. Therefore, it’s a highly cost-effective marketing channel for small and large healthcare businesses alike.

Rely on Share Moving Media for Your Email Marketing Needs

Email marketing is an effective and beneficial tool for the healthcare industry. Through careful strategy and audience segmentation, you can maintain your current audience while attracting new business. 

Ready to develop an email marketing campaign that solidifies your market-share in the healthcare industry? Contact Share Moving Media today.

Email Marketing for Healthcare: Reaching the Right Audience

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For the healthcare industry, email marketing is an effective way to communicate information about your services to current and prospective customers. From manufacturing processes and new product introductions to policy changes and event announcements, email marketing for healthcare is a convenient way to reach a large number of people with minimal effort and expense.

When used correctly, email is an extremely powerful marketing tool. Not only is it a leading method of communication (3.9 billion people worldwide used email last year), but it also allows you to target a specific audience,  reaching the right person at the right time. The key to improving open rates and increasing ROI is personalization. 82% of marketers who used email personalization saw an increase in open rates. 

Many people have difficulty navigating the healthcare supply chain. With so many products and services available to the industry, making decisions for hospital purchasing can be confusing. That’s why digital marketing in healthcare is important. Your customers appreciate receiving information to inform, educate, and help them make the best decisions to benefit their business and their end users. 

Email marketing is only effective if you reach the right audience. Through custom content and careful planning, your email marketing campaign can engage your readers, generate new leads, and increase your healthcare manufacturing business.

5 Steps to Reaching the Right Audience with Email Marketing for Healthcare

Today’s consumers have come to expect a certain level of personalization. Without customized content, recipients are more likely to delete unread messages – or worse, mark them as spam. 

Though highly effective, email personalization only works if you understand your target audience. Here are 5 steps to creating personalized content and reaching the right audience with your email marketing campaigns.

1. Gather the Right Data 

Any successful email campaign begins by gathering user data. 

Carefully consider the information you want to collect from your audience. After all, your contact list will only be as strong as the information you put into it. 

What details about your audience would help you personalize a message for them? Identify those qualifiers and be sure to capture that information in your registration forms.

2. Familiarize Yourself with Your Audience 

Take some time to explore your contact list. Note things like company, gender, end users, and manufacturing needs. 

Identify which people share commonalities and determine whether you can group them together. Use that information to create personas for your most frequent customers. Use quantitative categories like age and employment as well as qualitative data like behaviors and interests.

3. Use Audience Segmentation

Categorize your audience into like groups. Develop and test messages to them based on their common traits.

Whether you use information you’ve deduced yourself or data you’ve collected through surveys or questionnaires, consider segments like:

  • Demographics: Narrow your audience by commonalities such as age, gender, job title, and medical field.
  • Consumer cycle: People have different needs based on where they are in their journey with your business. Current customers might like emails about updates to your shipping policies while new customers would rather hear about introductory offers. 
  • Prior campaign history: Determine how people responded to previous email marketing campaigns. Look at open rates, engagement, and testing, and use that data to develop effective follow-up emails.

Audience segmentation can help you create tailored email content that your readers will find meaningful. Customize your emails for each segment so you touch on what’s important to them. This will boost engagement and increase conversions.

4. Employ Audience Mirroring 

Email marketing for healthcare is effective in maintaining your existing following as well as attracting prospective customers. 

By gaining a complete understanding of your current audience, you can create segments that mirror those groups. Create content that has been successful with your primary audience and simply use that to target new groups. 

Audience mirroring not only allows you to increase your marketing channels. It also helps you generate like-minded leads with minimal effort.

5. Personalize All Content 

Consider every aspect of your email message, from the subject line to the body text to the images supporting your text. 

Emails are full of opportunities for personalization. Use readers’ first names in subject lines or to begin the body text. Avoid stock images and instead, incorporate images of the readers’ location. This can increase click-through rates by 29%. 

You can even customize the From field in your campaign. All these details provide a tailored message that resonates with readers and makes them feel valued.

Develop Targeted Email Marketing Campaigns with Share Moving Media

For the healthcare industry, email personalization is key to reaching the right audience. Leave email marketing to a full-service media company like Share Moving Media so you can focus on running your business. 

Share Moving Media develops and distributes compelling, quality content that prospects want to read. Let us help you raise your market share in the healthcare industry with an email marketing campaign that gains new followers faster. 

Contact Share Moving Media today for help with your next email marketing campaign.

4 Women Leaders in Healthcare Who are Changing the Face of the Industry

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Historically, healthcare has been a male-dominated industry. 

Decades ago, women had limited educational opportunities, couldn’t work outside the home as it wasn’t socially acceptable, and openly discussing women’s health was considered taboo.

Now, as social norms have changed, more women are seeking a career in the healthcare industry. In fact, women currently make up 65% of the healthcare workforce.  

There are numerous ways women contribute to the healthcare industry. Whether practicing medicine, conducting research for scientific studies, or developing technology to benefit healthcare workers and patients, women are changing the face of the healthcare industry.

Four Women Leaders Impacting the Healthcare Industry

As medical doctors, scientists, and professors, women are making significant contributions to the healthcare industry. 

1. Emmanuelle Charpentier

Professor Charpentier is a renowned researcher in microbiology, biochemistry, and genetics. She has completed lab work studying how pneumonia-causing bacteria use mobile genetic elements to adapt its genome. Dr. Charpentier also worked in a skin cell biologist’s lab to study gene manipulation in mammals.

Her experience as Research Associate at the St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital and Skirball Institute of Biomolecular Medicine in New York helped project her career as a lab head and guest faculty at the Laboratory for Molecular Infection Medicine in Sweden. From there, she transferred to Germany, where she became an Alexander von Humboldt professor.

Dr. Charpentier’s experience in molecular studies led her to identify the molecular mechanisms of CRISPR/Cas9 – a bacterial immune system – and repurposing it for genome editing. This discovery has enabled scientists to successfully change the DNA of animals and plants. Charpentier and her research partner, Jennifer Doudna, won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for this discovery. This is the first scientific Nobel Prize ever awarded to two women. 

2. Maliha Hashmi 

Dr. Hashmi is an expert in strategic planning and healthcare. 

A graduate of Harvard and MIT, she is a leader on many boards and programs for countless corporations, foundations, non-profit organizations, hospitals, and research centers. 

Her outside-the-box strategies bring creative solutions to the healthcare industry. 

Hashmi partnered with the Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society at Harvard Law School to develop the United Nations World Food Program’s Freerice initiative. This multiple-choice quiz game is a free website and mobile app that lets players donate rice to people in need.

Additionally, Dr. Hashmi has:

  • Engaged in strategic partnership with scholars and world leaders in four continents
  • Served as CEO of an educational consultancy firm in Bahrain
  • Authored several publications for research, corporate, and academic sectors
  • Held executive roles in high-level organizations worldwide and is known globally for her contributions to the health industry

She is currently the Executive Director and Deputy Sector Head for the Health, Wellbeing and Biotech Sector at NEOM. She is also the Deputy Chair of the NEOM COVID-19 Leadership Taskforce, working to find solutions to the global pandemic.

3. Frances H. Arnold 

Dr. Arnold is a chemical engineer and the current Linus Pauling Professor of Chemical Engineering, Bioengineering, and Biochemistry at California Technical Institute. 

Among many awards and honors, she received the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for developing the use of directed evolution to create enzymes. 

Typically, evolution by natural selection leads to proteins that can complete biological duties. These genetic mutations take place over time. Arnold’s directed evolution introduces mutations early in the process. She can use research and data to determine which mutations to apply for a more efficient progression. If it yields positive results, she can optimize it further for even more promising outcomes.

Not only does Arnold’s work benefit people but also the environment. Her directed evolution contributions have helped produce renewable fuels and pharmaceutical products that are more ecologically friendly. 

4. Nancy Howell Agee

As president and CEO, Agee oversees the Carilion Clinic – a $2 billion not-for-profit healthcare organization in Virginia. Under her leadership, the Carilion Clinic went from a group of hospitals to a physician-led integrated clinic. As a result, Virginia Tech partnered with the clinic to develop an allopathic medical school and research institute.

The Carilion Clinic employs over 1,000 physicians and consists of seven hospitals, ranging from small rural to the third largest in the state. The organization also provides the following free services to more than one million citizens across Virginia and West Virginia:

  • Home health services
  • Imaging technologies
  • Pharmacies
  • Surgical clinics

Agee is nationally renowned as an innovative healthcare leader. She’s chair of the American Hospital Association and has been named one of Modern Healthcare’s most influential people.

Create Quality Content with Share Moving Media

From medical sales and hospital purchasing to healthcare supplies procurement and hospital distribution, more women are taking an interest in advancing in the healthcare industry. 

This means your publication’s target audience is shifting. Ensure brand recognition by developing content that resonates with female readers. Share Moving Media is a full-service media company that creates and distributes quality content to increase your market share in the healthcare industry. 

Contact Share Moving Media today for more information about developing your content strategy.

The Proof is in the Pudding: Who is Talking About Your Product?

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As a medical supplier, you may cater to everything from integrated delivery networks to private physician practices. Whether you’re selling ultrasound diagnostics or personal protective equipment, you want to ensure your product branding in healthcare is effectively reaching your target audience.

How can you know you’re succeeding? You need to identify exactly who is talking about your product and just what they are saying – or if they’re saying anything at all. As I’ve said before, if you aren’t visible, you’re irrelevant.

Why What People Say Matters

Keeping up with consumers’ expectations and better meeting their needs is more critical in healthcare than ever before. The COVID-19 pandemic has left end-users in the medical sector holding brands to a higher standard. Knowing who is talking about your product and what they are saying allows you to focus your branding efforts better.

It can also help you save money. To raise awareness about your products, you likely engage in various marketing and advertising techniques. For example, your company may participate in healthcare conferences or leverage a corporate blog and social media to support a content strategy for healthcare.

Such initiatives cost money. You want to ensure you are investing wisely and that these efforts are effectively building brand recognition. Towards this end, you can gather quantitative data (e.g., number of product mentions in medical journals) and qualitative data (e.g., physician reviews).

As an added benefit, you may also be able to pinpoint new audience segments worth targeting, allowing you to grow your market share. Consumer feedback can even give you insights into unexpected product benefits. Remember, the blockbuster drug Viagra was initially developed to treat hypertension!

Finally, knowing what people are saying about your company and products can drive smarter brand messaging in healthcare. There’s an old saying that “perception is reality.” You may craft messages that seem to address your target audience’s needs and wants. However, that’s your perception. Real-world feedback confirms whether or not this is the case. As they say, the proof is in the pudding.

How to Find Out Who is Talking About Your Product

Ready to find out what “the word on the streets” is about your products? Use these techniques to gather the data you need to improve your product branding in healthcare.

Set Up Google Alerts

Start simple. Put essential keywords like your product and company name into Google and see what comes up. If there are recent news reports about adverse events related to your product, for example, you want to know about this so you can practice reparative public relations.

To stay abreast of updates in the future, set a Google search engine alert. You input keywords (like your product name), and Google then delivers automatic updates when these keywords appear online.

Scan Google Scholar

Reputation and trust are critical in the healthcare sector, where products directly impact patient lives. New research about products, drugs, and interventions is continuously published in medical journals and healthcare magazines, which can guide industry trends.

Instead of the basic Google search engine, input your product name into Google Scholar. If there is a mention of your supplies in medical or scientific journals, this will help you discover them.

Practice “Social Listening”

Social media is a powerful platform, and you want to know if people are talking about your products on these forums. These days, everyone has an account: physicians, patients, patient advocacy groups, hospitals, insurers, and more.

Practice “social listening” to see what they’re saying. Hootsuite is a great way to monitor social media mentions in real time.

Scan Industry Website RSS Feeds

Use If This Then That to monitor industry websites in your healthcare niche. You can use the IFTTT tool to scan the RSS feeds of multiple industry websites at once and set it up to send you emails alerting you if your brand has been mentioned.

Pay for Media Monitoring Services

Don’t have the time or energy to deal with the above steps? Media monitoring services like Cision can provide daily reports compiling the latest headlines, news, and mentions about your product. You provide specific keywords (such as your company and product name) to guide their reports.

Product Branding in Healthcare: How We Can Help

If you want to improve your product branding, Share Moving Media can help. We are a full-service media company creating everything from webinars to blog posts, e-books, infographics, and more. Our high-quality healthcare marketing tools will help your brand grow and boost your bottom line. Sign up for our newsletter for the latest news on product branding in healthcare. Ready to revamp your branding strategy? Contact us now!

5 Critical Factors that Impact the Medical Device Sales Cycle

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Medical device sales is a fast-paced industry with new trends and technology constantly emerging. To succeed, medical suppliers need to adopt a comprehensive sales strategy that allows them to utilize multiple platforms and channels to interact with customers.

In 2019, medical device sales increased 5.5% resulting in over 450 billion dollars in revenue. Due to increased health concerns in 2020, medical suppliers have a unique opportunity to provide healthcare facilities with the necessary tools to increase revenue. 

What’s the key to amplifying your bottom line next year? Building a sales cycle that drives results. Let’s take a look at what factors impact a medical device sales cycle and how you can optimize your process to increase your bottom line. 

How Do You Build a Medical Device Sales Cycle?

77% of healthcare buyers said their latest purchase was difficult and complex. For your sales cycle to be effective, you need to develop a comprehensive communication and marketing strategy at each stage to increase conversions. 

The first step is mapping out your ideal customer journey to understand your strengths and gaps. To get started, consider the following steps when developing your journey map:

  1. Identify your customer’s goals and where your value intersects as a solution
  2. Assess all your communication touchpoints throughout your customer’s pre-decision, purchase, and post-close phases (i.e., search ads, case studies, presentation, or follow-up call).
  3. Understand your customer’s needs and pain points
  4. Experience the full customer journey yourself by working through every stage
  5. Develop a visual customer journey map

5 Factors that Impact the Medical Device Sales Cycle

Even when you map out your ideal customer journey, it’s important to recognize that certain factors impact its overall effectiveness. Here are the elements you need to optimize your sales cycle: 

1.Right Audience Targeting

When it comes to your sales cycle, you need to attract the right qualifying target audience to ensure you’re not wasting time on leads who are unlikely to make a purchase. To narrow down your target audience, build robust buyer personas based on quantitative and qualitative data such as surveys, focus groups, and analytics data. Buyer personas will help you determine your most qualified prospects and prioritize your lead generation resources on those who will result in higher conversion rates and retention.

2.On-Point Messaging

Only 66% of marketers develop content that meets their audience’s needs. Your messaging throughout the sales cycle can have a large impact on whether or not a lead commits to a purchase decision. Throughout each stage, your messaging needs to be consistent, educational, and persuasive enough to land the sale. 

Develop unique messaging and content that supports your audience’s needs and pain points for the following actions points:

Your sales strategy is all about reaching your audience at the right time. If you’re too late, you could potentially miss the sale to a competitor. Too soon, and you might come off too pushy. By using marketing automation technology, you can deliver messaging based on when your leads take an action throughout the sales cycle. 

  • Lead prospecting
  • Cold calling
  • Setting up an appointment
  • Closing the sale
  • Asking for referrals

3.Quick Automated Technology

Tied to the customer relationship manager (CRM), create email triggers as welcome emails, follow-ups, consultation requests, and more. You can also send valuable incentives closer to closing to sweeten the deal.  

4.Comprehensive Sales Distributor Training

Distributors are a huge part of developing a successful buying cycle. You need to not only train new distributors with an effective onboarding program, but also empower them with best practices, resources, and knowledge so they can identify growth opportunities. Additionally, to keep your distributors engaged, consider incentivizing their sales and offering additional benefits when they meet your business goals. If you fail to educate your distributors, they’re unable to advocate your brand to their healthcare facilities.

5.Performance Analytics 

To build an agile sales cycle, it’s crucial to have your eyes on real-time performance at all times. Analytics will give you visibility into what’s working in your customer journey and what isn’t — allowing you to improve any underperforming stages. You’ll need to monitor the following features:

  • Form fills
  • Email open rates
  • Appointments made
  • In-person visits
  • Presentations given
  • Conversion rates
  • Dollars closed by each sales rep

Optimize Your Medical Device Sales Cycle to Increase Conversion Rates

If you’re looking to optimize your customer journey and increase conversion rates, it’s crucial to have a comprehensive understanding of your medical device sales cycle. By understanding and reacting to your customer needs, you’ll be able to effectively interact with them throughout every stage to build long-term loyalty. 

Contact Share Moving Media today to improve your sales cycle process with content development.