Email marketing is a powerful and cost-effective digital marketing tool to help you reach your target audience. This is certainly the case in the life sciences and healthcare industries, where it’s proven to be essential for engaging with decision-makers. While marketing apps and platforms trend in and out, email marketing remains a steadfast approach to delivering tailored and targeted messaging. This blog takes you through our tips on building a watertight email marketing campaign, and how to create emailers that keep your audience engaged.

 

What is email marketing?

Email marketing is the art of delivering the right message to the right people at the right time. People use email marketing for a number of different purposes, from informing their audience about a new product launch or update to an existing device to highlighting a recently published application note, white paper or upcoming webinar. This can be highly effective if you’re looking to nurture leads or improve brand awareness.

 

Email marketing for life sciences and healthcare: why it’s important

When planning a campaign, email marketing is simply another way of engaging with your audience. It creates an additional touchpoint and allows you to encourage interaction with a CTA that, when shaped correctly, appeals to them and fosters trust. Ultimately, you are nurturing the relationship with your prospect or customer, building an emotional connection that brings them one step closer to making a purchase.

 

How does email marketing work?

For a strategic approach to email marketing, you need to make sure all your ducks are in a row. Here at kdm, we take the following steps:

1. Create a good list where all your recipients are well categorised, and ensure that they have opted in to remain GDPR compliant. It’s important to only send emails to people who genuinely want to hear from you. Otherwise, you can expect excessive bounce-backs and problems in the long run, particularly if you are using your main business domain to send them.
2. Craft an engaging, relevant email that resonates with your target audience.
3. Use software and marketing automation tools to schedule, personalise and manage your campaign.
4. Prevent your email landing in spam by using authentication measures – such as SPF, DKIM and DMARC – which verify that your emails are legitimate.
5. Track the performance of your campaign, which is discussed in more detail below.

 

How to do email marketing​ for life sciences and healthcare brands: our top tips

Your target audience is generally highly intelligent across the scientific and healthcare industries, so offer them something that is relevant and valuable, which will increase the chance of hearing back from them. Use marketing automation to a point, but don’t lose the human touch – especially when they are close to committing – and use your sales team to dovetail your efforts.

 

Craft engaging, ‘scannable’ and compliant email content

It goes without saying that the content is key, and emails should be succinct and make sense to the recipient. Be natural and conversational in your language, and make sure that the tone reflects both your brand and the subject matter. And send them from a real person, rather than from a no-reply email address. But as with all written content, avoid these pitfalls…

 

In the subject line:

• Don’t use ‘spammy’ words or those implying urgency and pressure, such as ‘act now’ or ‘exclusive deal’.
• Avoid excessive punctuation and SHOUTY CAPITAL LETTERS!
• Don’t over-promise with phrases such as ‘no risk’ or ‘guaranteed’.
• Don’t push discounts or use salesy-speak – buy now, order today, lowest price.
• Don’t use overly promotional language – winner, click below, special deal.

 

In the body copy:

• Remember that spam filters scan not only words, but also excessive formatting, such as unnecessary use of bold or capital letters, emojis and multiple hyperlinks.
• Again, avoid spammy words and pushy sales phrases.
• Don’t use misleading language – risk-free, act fast.
• Ensure you have a good text-to-image ratio. For example, don’t have an email with only an image and no text.

 

Segment your audience and personalise where possible for better engagement

Effective segmentation can significantly boost engagement rates, and should be tailored to your audiences geography, scientific area of interest, buying decision power, and previous engagement – considering their position in the sales funnel. It’s also worth considering renting email lists, giving you access to much wider audiences and extending the reach of your email marketing campaign. This is an area where we can certainly help, identifying specialist third-party providers that offer such services for your market. In addition, our well-established connections across the life sciences and healthcare industries mean that we have worked with leading publishers for many years, and can recommend the best platforms for reaching new prospects. If lead generation is your priority, this approach will make a significant difference. Whether you are using your own database, a third-party database or a combination of the two, email personalisation is important and very easily done with automated email platforms.

 

Measure your success – monitor and report on key email marketing metrics

Continuously tracking and analysing performance is essential, enabling you to refine your approach and improve the campaign’s outcomes. Key metrics to monitor include:

• Open rate: indicates the effectiveness of your subject line. Try split testing with a subset of your list at the start of a campaign, which allows you to ‘test’ a couple of different subject lines to see which one results in a better open rate.
• Click through rate: measures the audiences engagement with the content.
• Conversion rate: tracks how many recipients take the desired action.
• Bounce rate: helps you to look at the health of your list and its ‘deliverability’.
• Unsubscribe rate: tells you the number of recipients who opted out of future emails. If this is high, there is potentially a mismatch between your list and your content. Are you targeting the wrong people? Does your email lack relevance? Are you sending too many emails or is your tone too spammy?

 

The importance of partnering with an email marketing expert 

A well-executed series of email marketing campaigns is a cornerstone of life sciences marketing. However, we’ve often found that our clients, who are more than capable of developing a top-notch campaign, simply lack the time and resources to do so. Partnering with a specialist life sciences marketing agency – such as kdm – can provide those extra boots on the ground you need, ensuring that your email campaigns are well written, relevant, properly segmented and go out on time, seamlessly integrating with your other marketing efforts to reach your target audience.

 

Drop us an email today if you have a campaign in mind.