How to Create a Behavioral Email Marketing Strategy for Healthcare

by Camille Moore, Guest Contributor

Behavioral targeting for email campaigns is thought to have the greatest impact for businesses. It allows organizations to convert website visitors into loyal customers.

Personalization has been shown to increase sales 18 times more than regular emails.

Behavioral email marketing strategies can enhance the impact of a healthcare campaign.

When it comes to healthcare, behavioral email marketing strategies can enhance the impact of a campaign. After an organization uses an email checker to verify the emails on their lists, a behavior-triggered email campaign can also help care providers better understand patient needs and their thought processes and trigger points. This in turn will produce better results from their marketing efforts. So how should you go about setting up a behavioral marketing strategy for healthcare?

What is Behavioral Email Marketing?
Simply put, behavioral email marketing strategies are about gathering information on all individuals that come into contact with your organization and then sending specific, personalized emails to your contacts based on their actions and behaviors. Their actions create, or trigger, your reactions.

If done right you will be able to deliver messages and services at the right time and positively change behaviors. This can include reminding them to attend appointments, helping them to live healthier lives, and to purchase healthcare items or to be proactive in their own health care.

It sounds simple, but there isn’t a huge amount of information out there for healthcare professionals in setting up their own behavioral email strategy. we’ve put together a few basic steps to get you started on implementing this for your healthcare service.

Step 1 - Behavioral Email Marketing
Track how people interact with your service and then determine which activities your company can not only listen to, but also interpret and act upon. You must know your target audience’s behaviors so that you can effectively act upon them. They help you decide which activities should be used as triggers for your behavioral email marketing campaign.

Your website, social media channels, email, and other activities such as webinars and surveys can help enormously with this. Each platform provides a chance to listen and learn about your target demographic and gather the basics of starting a conversation. To do this, you’ll need a system that tracks, records, and categorizes information about your site visitors and social media followers.

This database and analytics center is the core of your behavioral strategizing and all inbound marketing efforts. It will listen, interpret the data received, and help you decide how to react to achieve the outcome you want.

The system will observe and store information about people such as:

• Email engagement
• Social media activity
• Website activity
• Form submissions
• Conversion information
• Data from other integrated software (e.g. an appointments database)

Then, and only then, can emails be sent to people based on their activities and effectively nurture them into leads. You can also motivate them towards a positive change in their health care.

Step 2 – Determine the Important Actions a Prospect May Take
Personalized behavioral emails are effective because they are triggered by a prospect’s actions. As such these emails are usually not a surprise to the receiver, and therefore have higher open and click-thru rates.

The key here is that they are triggered by the patient/prospect, not the marketer. The marketer simply decides which actions will trigger a reaction from their email system.

You may already be sending behavioral emails to some extent without knowing it, here are some examples:

• An email confirming an appointment booked by the patient, reminding them of the details and any additional information or materials they need to bring with them.
• After viewing specific pages of your website, follow-up content is delivered via email to their inbox. For example, if someone views a case study on your page, you send them treatment options for that case.
• An email after active engagement on your social media channels. Perhaps a prospect shares news from your page of a development to a particular medication and you follow up with further information about the disease that this medication eases or prevents.

Other behavioral emails that can be triggered by patient behavior could be engagement/lack of engagement emails. A missed appointment could be followed up with a call to action (CTA) to reschedule their appointment or with an alternate CTA.

Once you have a grasp of what your system is tracking, you are only limited by your own creativity. As today’s healthcare consumer becomes more savvy with the internet and have come to see healthcare differently, marketers can take advantage of the additional information provided by these actions. 72% of internet users say they looked online for health information last year, and 38% of internet users search for information about hospitals and other medical facilities.

Step 3- Start Your Conversation
Once you’ve gathered the intelligence and determined the key actions that will spark an email reaction, the final step is to write the convincing email that starts a conversation with the individual.

If done well, it should be perceived by the consumer as a conversation. Your aim is to engage the healthcare customer and deliver content and an experience that garners their loyalty and increase purchase intent. Accomplishing this is based on timing (think automation at the action points), personalization (thanks to the data gathered), and behavior so that it engages them.

The advantage of behavioral email is that it creates a highly personal experience. It is one that you can create time and again by tapping into the information you gathered and setting the triggers carefully in your automation process across channels.

Use software that allows you to automate the emails sent. The data gathered helps you to make the emails personal, and the content you write will engage the prospect and urge them to action.

In 2016, United Healthcare’s We Dare You Campaign used all the basics above to create an engaging campaign that built customer loyalty, motivated people to start healthy habits, and also led to more interaction between the public and United Healthcare. With a little creativity, you could be launching the best behavioral email marketing campaign of 2018.
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