Okay, so you’ve figured out that e-mail is an extremely cost-effective way of getting your message out to your patient base. Your e-mail system is set up and ready to go, and you’ve even collected a few e-mail addresses.
So what are you going to write about? Many of us who commit to e-mail newsletters as part of our overall eyecare marketing strategy get hung up on which matters more, frequency or content. Well, it depends, but the answer is easier than you think. The key is to give patients what they want—useful information about their eyes.
Write About Their Topics in Your Style Whatever topic you focus on, it must be about them, for them, with them in mind. But of course, it should also be written by you, from you, and with some semblance of your voice included. The style should represent you, the practice, the doctor, or the eyecare owner. The value is whatever topic promises to help people.
So, you create an e-mail broadcast and send it. To your surprise, it gets lots of opens. A few patients even write back to you, and, if you are truly on the ball, more than a few decide it is time to see you. They click your online appointment link, and the result is that now you’ve paid for the hosting, e-mail service, and the time it took you to put the e-mail together.
Are you now ready to send the next one? How about next week? What will patients think about another one so soon? The answer, again, depends. Great content always takes people on a bit of a journey. Everyone likes a story, so it’s natural to cover a topic and mention that in the future there will be more about this. In fact, I’m in the process of getting my next series of e-mails out to my patients about our upcoming trunk show.
Deliver Good Content The point is this, if you are delivering good content—information that does not sound corporate, smell of sales and marketing, or look like the last three messages in their inbox—then you can send them out as much as you want. That is, especially if you told them what to expect as part of your story.
Maybe you’re not convinced and worried about turning off patients by sending too many marketing messages. Most eyecare professionals tend to discount the power of e-mail in their overall eyecare marketing strategy. The one thing I do know is that it works for me, and I am confident that it will work for you too.
