The Beginner’s Guide to Starting a Successful Email Newsletter

Remember the days when healthcare practices sent out postcards and paper bulletins to patients to remind them it was time to schedule an appointment or inform them about upcoming events? This type of communication was effective then, but old school medical marketing services like snail mail has since gone out of fashion. Today, email newsletters are the modern way to deliver timely information and to stay on patients’ radar year-round.
Newsletters create loyalty, develop relationships and trust, build momentum with a core community, and introduce familiarity. But most importantly, they increase the chances of additional revenue for free and promote patient engagement.
Are you convinced that an email newsletter is the way to go if you want to grow your business? If you are, you’re on the right track. Here are five things you should consider when getting your first one ready:

1. Find your style and stick with it. The style and content of the newsletter should be consistent from one newsletter to another. You should also try to remain uniform as to how often you send the newsletter and what days it goes out to your patient base. Consistency builds credibility and repeat engagement.
2. Make sure your articles are interesting. Provide a teaser with a link to your website for the reader to visit and continue reading if they are interested. You don’t have to make the teaser a TMZ-style cliffhanger – nobody likes those. But you can provide some interesting information to get the reader hooked and wanting more.
3. Personalize the content where possible. There are many programs that allow you to add customized fields, such as a person’s name, into the body of an email. When an individual receives an email that addresses them personally, they feel more connected to the content.
4. Add the ‘Forward to Friend’ functionality. This is great for building subscriber bases. If one in five readers forwards your newsletter to a friend each month, and each of these people subscribe, that’s a snowball effect growth of 20 percent per month. Are these ambitious growth expectations? Maybe. But there’s no doubting the fact that increased circulation will bring new subscribers.
5. Include social media links. For maximum exposure, place these links in the newsletter’s header or footer. And be cool, use logos only. At this stage, everyone knows which social media icons belongs to which site.

Newsletters work well when made well. Keep yours fresh and consistent, informative and entertaining. If you do things right, your subscriber list will start to grow, and you’ll have the chance to get your message out to more and more people. Benefits like these are worth an hour of work per week, aren’t they?
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