Unleash the Potential of E-Newsletters for Your Practice or Business

First, segment your target audiences to ensure your messaging and subject matter is of interest to them. For example, a physician’s practice might want to produce two separate e-newsletters – one for patients and the other for doctors.

 

The root word of “newsletter” is NEWS. You must always respect your readers and give them news of interest to them – along with interesting visuals, human interest stories, new procedures or maybe the results of a recent clinical study. 

Clearly, you would speak differently to patients and doctors. If you clog up everyone’s inbox with shameless self-promotion, they will click UNSUBSCRIBE in a heartbeat.

 

Step 1. Prepare your segmented databases from your Outlook, billing software and referring physician databases.

 

Step 2. Select a good e-newsletter platform and distribution service such as Constant Contact or MailChimp. Both are relatively easy to use and will help you follow industry best practices so you won’t get labeled as a spammer and become blacklisted. Then, download your contacts to an Excel spreadsheet and upload to the service you selected.

 

Step 3. Name your newsletter(s) and design an attractive template and masthead. It’s always a good idea to include your primary brand name in the title.

 

Step 4. Think of some interesting stories to write about. Offer the reader an interesting mix of news they can use and a little on your practice or company and maybe an employee, physician, patient or customer spotlight. Great photos, videos and well-written stories work best. Short is better. In today’s iPhone and social media age, nobody is looking to read lengthy articles. Also, make good use of catchy headlines. One tip is to repurpose some of your better social media or blog posts. Repurposing posts saves time and gives you more material to work with.

 

Step 5. Utilize a catchy email subject line. That can be the difference in having your newsletter opened – or not.

 

Step 6. Once the newsletter is written, designed and proofread, do a couple of test emails internally, just to make sure everything is working correctly.

 

Step 7. Click send and monitor your analytics to learn about the quality of your database, open rate, click-throughs to your website, comments, which articles are being read and the number of unsubscribes.

 

Step 8. Set up a calendar reminder so you can consistently reach those most important to your company or practice.

 

Step 9. Adjust your strategy based on the analytics and feedback you receive.

 

Step 10. One last thing, many marketers today believe it is a good idea to change up the strategy and occasionally alternate to the old-fashioned hardcopy newsletter you receive in the good ole U.S. mailbox.

 

Today, people are consuming their news in so many different ways and places. The key is to catch them at just the right time. That’s why it is so important to cover your bases with traditional media relations, social media, field a great website, blog, and industry and community outreach.