There are 4 billion daily email users, yet just 64% of small businesses use email to reach their customers. Let’s dive deeper into why email marketing is important and how you can optimize your pharmacies email marketing.
Benefits of Optimizing Your Pharmacy’s Email Marketing
Email marketing is a great way for independent pharmacies to grow and connect with their patient base. Keeping up with every patient across the web can be challenging. However, email marketing provides a platform for you to communicate directly with a large audience.
Here are a few other benefits of email marketing for pharmacies:
Improves pharmacy and brand awareness
According to a 2019 report by Lucidpress, presenting a consistent brand can increase revenue by up to 33%. Email marketing helps maintain brand recognition by ensuring that your pharmacy’s name and logo reaches patients’ inboxes regularly. The better a customer remembers your business name or logo, the more likely they are to work with you.
Builds trust and loyalty with patients
Email newsletters don’t just keep your logo in front of patients, they also help you to develop relationships with patients over time.
Some of your patients may only come into the pharmacy once every few months for prescription pickups or other health needs. E-newsletters can help you stay connected and remind them that you’re there. Sharing pharmacy updates or health news keeps your pharmacy fresh in patients mind. This is especially important in these times where in-person interactions are at a minimum.
Creates more revenue opportunities through promotion
Brand recognition is an important part of the sales process, and so is the ability to promote your services to patients online. Every week or month, you can share new services summaries, seasonal offers, or upcoming sales. You can even offer exclusive coupons to existing customers on your email list.
Hosting an online event, health awareness fair, or vaccine clinic? You can announce it in your next newsletter and encourage people to sign up by sending them to a website sign-up sheet.
Drives traffic to your website and door
Last but not least, email marketing strategies like E-newsletters can draw more potential patients to your website. Linking to services and product pages in your emails encourages patients on your email list to click through. Similarly, offering coupons or sharing upcoming events and sales can help increase foot traffic.
Creating & Optimizing Your Pharmacy’s Email Marketing
Ready to get your email marketing off the ground? Here’s a quick breakdown of the major steps to optimize your pharmacy emails before hitting send.
- Set an email marketing goal: Start with what you’d like to accomplish. Maybe that is monthly newsletters or an increase in email subscribers? Make sure each goal is SMART and ties back to larger business goals, like increased revenue, patients, or prescriptions.
- Write your copy: Decide what your email will contain. Will it be all text or are you adding multimedia? What action do you want your readers to take? Keep the word count light and spend some time gathering useful, informative content like health articles, or the latest COVID-19 updates.
- Create and fill template: No matter what platform you use, you’ll still have to make some decisions about your email template. Make sure everything is sized so it’s easy-to-read and any multimedia doesn’t overwhelm the text. Also, don’t forget to personalize it with your pharmacy branding.
- Prepare to send: Here’s where it gets technical. You want a subject line that captures reader interests, so don’t be afraid of trial and error. Customize your sender name, add alt text for any images, and be sure your content is in compliance before you send.
- Track your results: Finally, the results! Look for open and click-through rates to determine how subscribers are responding to your emails. Remember to keep track of those extraneous results like sales and prescriptions. Did you meet your goals?
Need more tips? Try this post.
Choosing The Right Email Marketing Partner
Creating an email newsletter from scratch can be a daunting task. This is why a lot of businesses prefer to work with an email service.
Platforms like Mailchimp, Stripo, MailUp, Constant Contact, and Moosend make it easy to craft and send emails. Pre-set templates and easy customization take care of most of the set up and filling in, so pharmacies can essentially plug in their content and send. Many offer advanced features like A/B testing, smart content, and analytics. The only challenge is that your pharmacy will still need to take care of content creation, management, and workflows.
Another option is working with a company or agency that can do it all for you. At Digital Pharmacist, we offer branded weekly E-newsletters for all our pharmacy clients.
This done-for-you service includes updated health education and news curated by our in-house pharmacist sent to all subscribers from your pharmacy website. You can even manage E-newsletters yourself through our pharmacy dashboard by adding custom cards and promotions, viewing or searching subscribers, and checking your send history.
Digital Pharmacist packages include a custom healthsite and branded mobile app, secure communications platform, and scheduled E-newsletters with curated health updates. Learn more about how our digital product suite can transform your pharmacy by getting in touch with us today.
