Assemble an email newsletter for your patients in 7 easy steps.
Have you ever thought about integrating a newsletter into your marketing strategy? If you haven’t, you should! Newsletters aren’t just a tool of the past and can still provide plenty of marketing benefits to your practice, including,
- The ability to connect with more patients
- An opportunity to increase your practice’s credibility and your expertise
- A low-risk and high-reward investment
- A boost to your marketing strategy
- A unique, and customizable patient engagement experience
- The ability to develop long-term, out-of-office patient engagement
Gone are the days of the paper newsletter people received in the mail. You can create and send an awesome, informative newsletter to your patient’s inbox and we’re going to show you how. Just follow these simple steps.
1. Determine your newsletter’s objectives.
You should define the goals of your newsletter before you begin to type one word. You should also determine how it aligns with the rest of your marketing strategy. Ask yourself the following questions:
- Who is my audience and what are their needs?
- Are my goals to generate website traffic, build better patient relationships, create a loyal following, etc.?
- What content should go into my newsletter? (practice updates, blog articles, etc.)
- How frequently should I send my newsletter? (weekly, monthly, or quarterly)
- What value will my customers receive from my newsletter?
Once you figure out your goal, allow the rest of your decisions to come to the answers. Keep in mind your goal should be connected to your overall practice goals. Your email’s open rate (how many people actually open your email) can give you an indication of the newsletter’s performance, but it shouldn’t be the only number you care about each month.
Clarifying your goals will also ensure your newsletter doesn’t wind up as just another email in your patients’ inboxes.
2. Decide on your content.
Once you know your goals, it’s time to gather your content. Content will be the determining factor in the success of your newsletter. When considering your content remember to:
- Put together your best ideas and most compelling information
- Figure out your tone, voice and design theme
- Use your content to differentiate yourself from your competitors
Make sure your content is engaging and useful. Don’t over bloat your writing and do add graphics and photos. Graphics provide visual texture and make the newsletter fun to look at. A few well-placed images will only complement your articles.
3. Choose and design your template.
After you have created the content and selected the photos and graphics that will appear in your newsletter, you’ll need to pick a template for your newsletter. Your template doesn’t have to be glitzy. Your design just needs to make it easy to read and it should be mobile-friendly.
You can find free customizable, professional templates on graphic design platforms like Canva.com. Or you can also use a newsletter template from an automated email marketing platform like Mailchimp, EmailOctopus, AWeber, and ActiveCampaign to create and distribute your newsletter.
4. Add your content into your selected template.
Select where your articles, photos, and graphics will go. Don’t forget to proofread and edit your email thoroughly. Also add your social media profiles to your newsletter and encourage your patients to follow you. Make sure you add a call to action that encourages your patients to take an action, for example, visit your website.
5. Choose a subject line.
Subject lines can be tricky. It’s the first thing that your patients will see in their inbox – it’s your introduction. A good subject line will entice a reader to click and read more; a boring subject line might result in your newsletter not being clicked, or even worse, in the trash. When thinking of the subject line for your newsletter, remember to use subject line best practices as a jumping-off point. There are plenty of methods you can choose to put together a click-worthy subject line, including brevity and an immediately actionable value proposition.
6. Test your newsletters in different browsers and email providers
The way your newsletters might look in Gmail may look quite different in Outlook. The reason is because email providers don’t read email code the same way. Simply send a test email before sending the email to your entire audience.
7. Analyze.
A few days have past and the data on how well your newsletter has performed is in. If you chose an email marketing tool such as Mailchimp to send your email newsletter, then the final step is to check to see how you did. Which sections of your newsletter got the most clicks? Which sections of the newsletter contributed most to achieving your overall marketing objectives? The data you receive will provide a roadmap for the batches of newsletters that you send and only serve to improve your newsletter.
Newsletters are useful and can extend the reach of your practice, as well as educate readers. These steps show you how you create and send a newsletter with no technical skills. So, compose a newsletter and show your expertise to the world with a fantastic campaign.