If you aren’t using email promotions, your pharmacy is missing out on one of the best marketing tools you have at your disposal.
Email promotion can help you reach the 91 percent of consumers who report checking their emails at least once a day. Email works across devices and 74 percent of consumers actually prefer to receive commercial communication via email. And, email promotions are cost effective and inexpensive. Depending on your needs, you can even find a free email mailing service.
When patients see your email, it will put your pharmacy top-of-mind, but you have to make sure your pharmacy’s email doesn’t get buried in patients’ inboxes and never opened. Follow these steps to start—or improve your pharmacy’s email promotions.
1. Establish your goals
When deciding what to feature in your email promotion, here’s an easy starting point. Look for areas in your pharmacy with growth potential. Perhaps you want to sell more vitamins or enroll more patients in a counseling service. These topics are great to promote by email.
Once you know what you want to promote, set clear and measureable goals, such as enrolling 25 new patients in your weight loss program. Record your goals so you can see how well your promotion worked. (Learn more about goal setting for your pharmacy.)
2. Create a list
In order to do email promotions, you need to have your patients’ email addresses. If you haven’t been asking for—and recording—your patients’ email addresses, now’s the time to start a list.
Once you have a list of emails, it’s important to decide who is the appropriate audience for your email campaign. If you want to promote a product or service that would potentially benefit all your patients, such as your wellness program, then it’s fine to send the email to everyone on your list.
However, if you set a more specific goal, like increasing the number of enrollees in your diabetes education classes, it would be better to only send the email to your patients with diabetes.
One way to create a targeted list is to allow your patients to opt into your email promotion. For example, when your patients pick up their prescriptions, ask them to sign up if they are interested in learning more about the service or program you plan to promote. Then, use this information to create your targeted email list.
3. Map out a calendar
Use a calendar to plan when you’ll send out your emails. For some promotions, like a coupon for vitamins, you might only need to send one email. For more complicated promotions, like a push to get people to enroll in your pharmacy’s diabetes education class, you might want to send multiple emails.
Decide how many emails your promotion needs, and schedule when you want to send them. Then, work with your staff to inform them about the promotion. For example, if you’re sending out a vitamin coupon, make sure your staff knows about the discount.
Be sure to schedule time to talk to your staff, and restock your shelves with the product you’re advertising before you send the promotional email. You don’t want a confused staff or a lack of inventory to spoil your email promotion.
4. Get a service
There are many companies that offer services to help you run your pharmacy’s email promotion. They can help you design, organize and send your emails. You can choose a template from their selection of preset formats; create and save mailing lists of your customers for future use; and even schedule when you want your emails sent. These services also adapt your emails so they are easily readable across different devices.
Check out the different email services available, such as MailChimp, Constant Contact, iContact, Benchmark Email and more, to see which one has the capabilities that best meet your needs.
5. Create the email
Now, you can start crafting the content of the emails.
Keep these points in mind when creating your email:
- Keep text short: Attention spans are short, so don’t be wordy.
- Use images: Pictures draw attention and engage patients.
- Provide links: Your email shouldn’t be long enough to contain every detail about your pharmacy, so share a link to your pharmacy’s website.
- Call to action: Ask patients to take action, whether that’s signing up for the class or coming into the pharmacy check out your selection of supplements.
- Follow a format: An email service will help you keep a consistent format.
(Learn how to avoid common email pitfalls.)
6. Check and recheck
Finally, carefully edit your email. Typos, spelling errors and inaccurate information can make your email promotion do more harm than good.
Have a trusted staff member read it over. Look for big errors, like missing important information, as well as small details, like links that don’t work or spelling errors.
Once your email is edited and perfected, you’re ready to send your promotion to your patients.
