More Email Marketing Ideas For Doctors

By Justin Premick June 21, 2007

Most of us think of the doctor as someone who we go to when we’re sick.

The trouble with that is that we don’t address our health proactively/preventatively, and we treat our doctors more like “problem fixers” than health and wellness professionals.

As a practitioner, you have the opportunity (obligation?) to build trust with us through education. And a great way to deliver that education is with opt in email marketing.

We’ve already looked at some email content ideas for doctors, but we’ve got a couple more…

Idea: Help Us Make Good Health Decisions On Our Own

This one might seem counterintuitive – after all, if you want us to come see you, wouldn’t telling us how we can improve our own health result in us feeling like we can take care of ourselves and don’t need to check in with you?

But here’s the thing: whatever you can do to:

	Establish yourself as the expert
	Demonstrate that you have our best interest – and not your income – at heart

is going to go over well with us. After all, the better health we’re in when we come to see you, the less we’re (probably) going to have to spend on prescriptions, specialists and other medical costs. Compared to those, the cost of seeing you and taking care of ourselves is nominal.

Write up a series of practical, actionable tips for how we can best take care of ourselves if we don’t have a lot of time to exercise properly, or to cook healthy meals. Or, talk about how we can take care of our whole body, including eyes, ears, teeth and any other areas where we typically see a specialist.

The idea here isn’t to try and replace dentists or ophthalmologists. You can’t specialize in everything. What you can do is partner with local specialists to jointly advise us on keeping our entire body & mind healthy. Let them guest-author for you (write an article that you include in your newsletter) – in exchange, you can do the same for them, or at the very least they get their name & contact information in front of your subscribers.

Idea: Help Us Prioritize Our Health Needs

A shooting pain in our upper arm is more serious than a skinned knee.

There are all sorts of different ailments that might befall us, and they’re not created equal. Likewise, there are many medical tests and treatments that might benefit us, but they’re not all equally important (and some may really be superfluous).

So who’s to say what’s worth addressing quickly and what’s not a big deal?

You are.

Show us you’re focused on helping us, and not on padding your revenue, by talking frankly about what we should and shouldn’t focus on when trying to live a healthy lifestyle. If there are unnecessary medicines that less scrupulous doctors prescribe or tests that they often run, tell us!

We’re only willing/able to devote so much time and attention (and yes, money) to our health, and anything you can do to help us make better decisions about where those should go is going to endear you to us and make us more likely to come to you when we need further medical advice.

What’s Worked For You?

These are just a few examples of how physicians can use email to address patient concerns (and get them to actually come visit you!). They’re certainly not the only possible ways you can grow your practice with email.

Have you found success marketing your practice? If so, share your tips below!