HCP Advertising, Part 4: Healthcare Email Marketing to Target HCPs
This is part 4 of our 5-part series about HCP advertising and marketing. Part 1 covers healthcare marketing segmentation for your target audiences. Part 2 explains how to create good content. That is followed by part 3, which discusses the best platforms to use to promote said content. Finally, we round out the series with this part, which explains the ideal nurture strategy, and end with part 5, about measuring, optimizing, and replicating results.
Creating great content is hard. Getting your target audience to notice that content is also hard. So, when you achieve both of those things, it’s a big deal! But you can’t stop to celebrate quite yet.
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Healthcare Email Marketing Nurture
For high-consideration solutions like yours, prospects need time to learn about the offer and consider how it can help them. Making a decision will typically involve more than reading one eBook (even if it’s a stellar eBook).
The HCPs who have interacted with a piece of content are your top-of-the-funnel leads. Once you have those leads, then you need to utilize targeted healthcare email marketing to nurture them through the rest of the funnel.
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Healthcare Email Marketing Content
For us, this typically consists of sending a series of emails that offer a variety of assets. (This is where slicing and dicing all that content from part 2 comes in handy). Every prospect is different, so you’ll want to include things like quick product overview videos as well as denser pieces of content like solution sheets. When gathering these assets for nurture, we typically consider the series of emails as moving prospects down the funnel going from less salesy to more salesy. However, there is one very important thing to keep in mind: you can never assume that a prospect reads your emails.
Yes, we know that sounds harsh – but it’s the reality. Think about how many emails you receive from different companies all the time, and how many of them do you actually read? Every single one? Nurture supports other marketing and sales efforts to get prospects ready for that sales call.
Never assume that a prospect is reading all of your emails.
Timing
Another question we often get asked is, “When should I send emails.” When you’re dealing with HCPs, there is no one answer. Now, that’s not to say you shouldn’t do testing for your own email list to see what works best – but there is no single golden standard. Some doctors check emails during their commute, others between appointments or in the break room. Since many don’t follow a standard 9-5 schedule, breaks could come at 1 pm or 1 am.
For ongoing nurture streams, the time between emails largely depends on your sales cycle. The only rule of thumb we use here is to not set the cadence in any multiple of seven. This ensures that your emails always go out on different days of the week – which could be better for any single prospect’s schedule.
There’s no single “best” time to email HCPs – just make sure if you’re sending regular emails, it’s not on a 7, 14, 28, etc. day cadence.
Sales-Marketing Handoff
Some of the work of nurturing leads can be scaled. You can create personalized emails for leads based on the content they’ve interacted with and set up retargeting campaigns to keep your brand top of mind while they’re in the consideration stage. But some of it requires the more personal, direct touch that falls to the sales team.
Each company needs to define when a lead should be handed off to sales. Clarify internally what your sales funnel looks like and at what point in the process a lead is qualified enough for sales to take over. The goal is to ensure that none of your valuable leads are neglected, while also protecting the sales team from spending time on leads that are irrelevant or aren’t ready for the direct sale.
Whatever you do, don’t neglect the nurturing process. This stage is where investing the hard work and money into getting to know your audience, creating amazing content for them, and promoting that content all comes to fruition.
The machine is up and running – anything else?
Of course! Now that it is running, you have to make sure it is a well-oiled machine that is running well. This means ongoing review and optimization – but don’t worry, we can help with that too.
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Rich founded glassCanopy in 2001.
