Email has upended traditional media-buying practices by presenting a new medium with unique purchasing considerations. Office-based physicians are busy and typically inaccessible, so it's crucial that the elements of email communication, including physician email addresses, composition, design and timing, are carefully considered to maximize results.
Selecting and Purchasing Your Physician Email Addresses
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Unlike other forms of media such as print and television, email has the ability to narrowly target all types of physicians in any quantity. Some considerations to address when purchasing physician lists are:
o Narrow Your Audience. Email marketing has the advantage of directly targeting specific physician audiences with no unwanted contacts included. You can target physicians very narrowly-by specialty, practice size, hospital affiliation, patient volume, geography or gender. For example, if you only want to market to physician offices with a daily patient volume of 20 or less, you can select and purchase that specific audience.
o Name Quality. The quality of the actual email addresses must also be considered. Are they business-domain emails with doctor's names like jsmith at docoffice dot com or generic emails like info at docoffice dot com? Reaching an actual practitioner is ideal so general mailbox addresses won't be as effective or valuable as those with names. Non-business-domain emails, such as Yahoo, Hotmail and Gmail addresses, are also available. Depending on your service, you may or may not consider using these addresses. They are generally ineffective.
o List Licensing. You should also organize your email campaign to determine what level of usage you will need. Data-provider companies simply do not hand over their physician databases. You must select from options like one-time use, a specific licensing timeframe or unlimited use. This means that you can select what types of physician contacts you want to reach and how many times you'd like to do so. Usually, you will never be allowed to see on the contacts you're purchasing. You find out how many email addresses exist in the database you want, and you "buy," or more accurately, "rent," them. Once you provide the creative and deployment specifications, your data provider will usually have a third-party service broadcast and track your campaign.
o Pricing. You'll need to determine the scope of your audience by choosing a quantity of physician email addresses. Most often, they are purchased by the thousand or per "M." A list rental will usually cost from 0 to 0 per thousand. If the rental does not include deployment, set up, test runs, transmission and a summary of results, there will be an extra fee. If you're planning to deploy multiple emails, it may be wise to purchase a two- or three-time deployment rental. These run approximately ,000 per thousand and will save you money. Order minimums are typically in the low thousands. Extra options like image hosting, personalization and URL tracking will price between and 0 in most cases. File suppression, HTML design analyses and HTML spam analyses can be pricier, but are valuable services and can be added on to most orders. Most providers only sell business domains with names, so if you do come across any non-business domains, they are likely to cost less. Many providers will guarantee their lists or will only have you pay for delivered emails.
Getting Your Foot in the Door: Creating a Message That Will Achieve Results
Phase One: Grabbing Physicians' Attention
The 'From' field, subject line and the first sentence of the message will make or break the entire email. Simply put, physicians need good reasons to open emails. Usually, familiarity or an incentive to open will do the trick. When an email is reviewed by a physician, you only have 15 seconds max to make an impression. That's not much time to explain a product or service, so the challenge is to carefully plan each element of the email to increase its chances of escaping the 'Deleted' folder. Read on to find out how to beat the dreaded 'Delete.'
o 'From' Line. Most recipients judge an email by the sender. It's your job to determine who or what will urge physicians to open emails. It may be the company name, if you have a strong reputation in the healthcare field, which urges them to open the email.
o Subject Line. The subject line is the most important and time-consuming task when crafting an email. According to Jupiter Research, 35% of recipients open emails based solely on the subject lines. Also, according to a study by the Email Sender and Provider Coalition, 69% of recipients report emails as spam based solely on the subject lines. The subject line has to be short (usually 40 characters or less, but be mindful that handheld devices only display the first 14 characters at first glance), catchy and free of spam-targeted words. It should also incorporate the brand or product name.
o Beginning of the Email. Email-client windows usually show recipients a portion (only the first sentence or so) of the email before they open it. Like the subject line and the 'From' field, this first sentence can be a deciding factor in the email's fate. The first sentence should sum up the email. What is the purpose; why are you sending this message to the physician? Use the inverted pyramid structure that journalists use when organizing your email. This means sharing the most important information at the beginning and tapering off to less-vital information as the message continues. The first one to three sentences should fully explain the reason for the email.
Phase Two: Winning Their Interest
o Be Sincere. With the cultivation of email came scammers and hackers who abuse it by sending junk and virus messages. The public has caught on to this, which has damaged email marketing's credibility. This is why it's important to impart an authentic message to readers. Maintain the truth about your product or service and empathize with readers by using straightforward language.
o Call to Action. It is crucial to communicate a "call to action" within the email. Every email should be formulated to lead the reader to a call to action such as a link that says, "Visit our website to find out more about this product and receive 20% off your first order." It's more effective to use web-directional calls to action because the reader is already online. Calls to action that require using the phone create another step for the reader. If there is not a call to action, recipients will just read the email and move on to others. Make sure every step the reader needs to take is crystal clear and easy to follow. It's also helpful to create urgency by setting relevant deadlines for promotions.
o Personalization. Remember who you're talking to by addressing physicians as professionals of their industry sectors. Make reference to the characteristics that make them unique in the healthcare industry, whether it's practice area, geography or experience level. The more personalized you make the message without going over the top, the better. For example, this might work for an opening sentence:
"Dear Dr. Anderson,
As a seasoned cardiologist who has been in practice for more than 20 years, you know a thing or two about keeping your office current on the latest medical equipment."
o Visual Appeal. Physicians spend a short time reading marketing emails, so it's essential to prepare carefully and make every word count. The length of an email should not exceed 300 words or a screen's-worth of text. Make the email easier to scan over by including bullets, an easy-to-read font and eye-pleasing colors on a white background. It's also wise to steer clear of elaborate graphics. Email services such as Outlook, Gmail and Hotmail do not automatically display images, leaving an unsightly, white box with a red "X." Not a good first impression for your message to have.
Timing is Everything: Maximizing Results by Sending Messages at Effective Times
o Delivery Timeframe. Timing is another crucial component of any campaign. Before you start deployment, define what day and time are best-suited for your audience. Think about when your physician audience would most likely see patients and when it might make time to check email. Depending on the type of data you have on your audience, you may need to track a series of deployments to get timing accurate.
According to a 2008 survey by Smith-Harmon, Monday and Tuesday are the best days to send emails, as they yield more open rates. Coming in second and third place were Thursday and Friday.
o Frequency. It's also important to consider the frequency of the emails. How often do you plan to email these physicians? If this email is the first of a series of emails, how does it fit into the set and how will it progress? When emailing potential or current customers, you must be strategic in how often you communicate via email. Contacting someone on a daily basis might be less effective, depending on what value you offer, than a campaign that's deployed weekly or monthly. There are different ways to approach timing, and this will depend on your objective and the route you're willing to take to get results.
Measuring Your Results
Through hosted applications, your provider can measure your campaign results once the emails are deployed. The provider will send you a summary report that includes the number of delivered emails, open rates, opt-outs, and hard and soft bounces. Delivered means the email reached the physician's inbox. The open rate will show you how many physicians opened the email. The opt-outs will show how many physicians do not wish to be on your doctor mailing list. The hard-bounce rate shows how many emails were invalid, and as a result, were bounced back. Soft bounces reflect emails that made it to physicians' mail servers but were bounced back because the inboxes were full or other errors occurred. The turnaround time for this report will vary by provider, but regardless, the timing is much faster than other marketing channels.
An Email Marketer's Arch Enemy: The Spam Filter
When email encounters your inbox, it is scanned by a spam filter to define whether it's junk or not. As a result, many times, legit marketing emails get marked as spam and thrown out because of a few fatal flaws.
Experts say that 20% of legitimate permission-based emails never reach intended recipients' inboxes because of stringent spam filters. Although your whole message will be scanned, it's most vital for the subject line to avoid spam-triggers. In late 2008, Barracuda Networks Inc. predicted that spam volumes will rise slightly higher than 95% in 2009 as growing use of botnets continue to proliferate.
Some spam-triggering elements, which you should avoid, are:
o Suspicious words or phrases.
Spam-triggering words to avoid:
Free Act Now Pharmacy Sample Offer Expires Medication Urgent Special Offer Weight Loss
Guarantee Order Now Sleeping Online Opportunity Xanax Loan Credit Viagra
Though some language is impossible to avoid, the key is to get creative with the thesaurus to convey your message without sounding like a used-car salesman. Also, there are spam-checking websites available for you to test your emails.
o Fancy graphics, attachments or large files. Keep it simple. Elaborate photos and colored text within the email body are key characteristics of spam. Large files can also look suspicious because they usually contain computer viruses.
o Excessive capitalizations and symbols. Even one exclamation point in the subject line can be doom. Using percentage signs, dollar signs and dashes can also be detrimental. Capitalizations should be minimal; don't even use title case in the subject line and never capitalize whole words.
Email marketers also must be aware of the CAN-SPAM Act, which is a set of requirements for commercial emails and the companies that send them out. This law was passed in 2004 and makes marketers accountable for the emails they send to businesses and consumers. Failure to comply with the act can result in fines of up to ,000 per offense. The act requires senders to:
o Refrain from sending "false or misleading header information." The 'From' section should identify exactly who is sending email, and the subject line should not be misleading as to the message's content.
o Provide an option to opt-out of future emails from the sender. At the foot of each email should be an email address or mechanism that allows readers to opt-out of receiving any additional messages from the sender, and by the law, the sender must comply. The reader must have at least 30 days to make an opt-out request, and the sender must remove the recipient from the contact list within 10 business days of the request. It is also illegal to sell or give out those opted-out email addresses to any other entity.
o Identify the email as an advertisement and display the sender's accurate postal address. Somewhere within the email, the sender must identify that the message is a promotional message that the reader may opt-out of. The sender's physical address should also be listed at the end of the email.
Reaching Physicians Via Email - A Media Buyer's Guide
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