Leveraging Email Marketing and CRM Software to Grow Your Occupational Medicine Practice
Email marketing is one of the most effective tools for businesses of all types and sizes. It can be used to communicate with clients, acquire new ones, and grow relationships. With email automation, you can send targeted messages that are relevant to your client’s needs at just the right time, in order to create a more personalized experience. CRM (Customer Relationship Management) software will help consolidate all of your data into a single place for easy communication and tracking purposes.
As an occupational medicine practice, there are many things you need to consider when choosing systems such as an email marketing platform or CRM. From the level of complexity that your practice needs, to know what does and doesn’t need to be HIPAA compliant, it is critical to think through the issues. For example, you may want to have a more basic email marketing system that is only for people who subscribe for updates and can’t be used for HIPAA compliance. Alternatively, there are advanced systems that can be HIPAA compliant, including automation features and an integrated CRM – these require an investment in staff training but offer the best way to help your practice leverage technology to support your growth.
How Can Email Marketing Be Used? Creating Awareness and Building Relationships
Create Awareness:
Email marketing is useful at many stages of the client relationship. At the beginning of the process, you can send prospecting emails to connect with potential clients. You can often acquire lists of potential clients from a local chamber of commerce or other business association, or you can purchase lists from online databases. The key is to make sure you are focused on businesses that are geographically relevant and large enough to be valuable. If you can get industry information to further segment your lists and the messages you send, even better. Ignoring these guidelines can lead to spam reports, which increases the chances that an email you send might land in someone’s spam box.
Build Relationships:
When people respond to a prospecting email, they may not be ready to do business with you. And even after they first use your services, they may not be using you to meet all of their employees’ healthcare needs.
By leveraging a consistent and attentive email marketing strategy, you can build relationships. Use email as part of your onboarding process, to educate prospects and new clients about the full range of your services, and to help them understand how your practice is better than their alternatives. For example, after someone responds to a prospecting email, you might send them a series of 4 or 5 emails that give an overview of your services.
By including case studies or testimonials from your best clients, you can show prospects what makes you great. Throughout the email sequence, you should encourage the prospect to schedule an appointment to learn more about how you can help them care for their employees. An onboarding sequence might include this series of emails:
1. Welcome and Overview of Services
2. Why We Started [NAME of Practice]
3. Our Occupational Medicine Practice vs. the ER for Worker Injury Care
4. How We Use Scheduling and Triage Protocols to Save You Time and Money
5. Frequently Asked Questions About Our Services
The onboarding sequence will generally be sent out over a few weeks. Then, the prospect can be subscribed to your monthly newsletter. Cumulatively, these emails provide regular touchpoints
that will help position your practice as an ideal occ med provider. The best occ med clients almost always take time to win over, and email is one of the most efficient means of building relationships
that lead to wins.
Basic Email Blasts vs. Emails with Automation
Email blasts are a common occ med marketing strategy. When your practice wants to reach out to a large group of people all at once, you can send an email blast through an email marketing or bulk mailer system. People have been sending email newsletters and individual blasts for decades, but over the past 10 years or so, we have seen an explosion in available options and advanced functionality when it comes to email marketing.
These tools allow you to segment your lists and use automation to get the right message to people at the right time. In a typical occ med onboarding sequence, you might have one email that provides an overview of your services. For each category, you can include a hyperlink that sends people to your website for more details.
Depending on which links someone clicks, you can use automation to send them additional information. For example, if a prospect clicks a link in your overview email about employee physicals, and then clicks through that page to read a sub-page with information specifically about asbestos physicals, you can tag them as someone who is “interested in asbestos”. That tag could be set up to trigger an extra email to be sent to that user, with a case study about one of your clients who needs asbestos physicals for their employees. Then, if there are future changes to regulations or your own practice’s policies around these exams, you can send a message specifically to anyone with the correct tag.
How Email Marketing Works in Conjunction with a CRM System
As you work to segment your email lists and build advanced automation, you will be collecting data on your contacts. By integrating a CRM system, you will have a place to collect and organize this info. This will allow you to further tailor your messages and automate follow-ups. There are two general categories of data that you can collect.
First, there is the technical information you can get from tracking scripts that tell you things like which emails someone has opened, what links they clicked on, and which pages they visited after clicking on your site. The other type of information is gathered by people – beginning with your sales team and then continuing with your operations team. The best CRMs will allow you to customize the setup in order to make collaboration with your team as easy as possible.
Finally, the big advantage of a CRM is that it will help you prioritize your time and resources. By knowing what kind of interaction each client prefers, you can be more responsive to their needs and spend less time on interactions they are not interested in. This also means using up-sells at an appropriate moment instead of overwhelming prospects with too much information at the wrong time.
