With the wide array of marketing tactics to choose from today, you might ask yourself whether you even need an email newsletter. While more traditional forms of marketing, such as bag stuffers and radio ads, are still useful methods for reaching your customers, email newsletters provide a unique approach to letting your customers know what products and services you offer. Email newsletters allow you to easily reach your current customers and potential customers.

Here are four tips for reaching your customers through your email newsletter:

1. Use the 80/20 rule when it comes to marketing material. In general, make sure each newsletter you send contains about 80 percent educational material and 20 percent promotional material. Newsletters with a heavy focus on educating your patients will help earn their trust and open up the lines of communication for discussing their health conditions and medications. Providing up-to-date health news in your newsletter may also capture customers’ interest and make them more inclined to open the email in the future. You can use your newsletter to advertise any of your current promotions. Whether it’s a promotion on greeting cards or over-the-counter products like sunscreen, this is the opportunity to let your customers know you are the one-stop shop for their everyday needs.

2. Make it easy for your patients to subscribe. Making it easy for your patients to subscribe to your newsletter is a relatively intuitive idea, but it’s one that will surely decrease your readership if you overlook it. Give your customers the option to subscribe at the top of your homepage, front and center, as well as in any other high-traffic portions of your website. Simply put, patients can’t subscribe to something they can’t find. See below for a great example.

3. Make sure your email newsletter is optimized for mobile. If you just focus on optimizing emails for desktop and laptop, you are missing out on a huge portion of online readership. In fact, recent research has found that nearly 50 percent of emails are opened on a mobile device. A couple best practices to follow for optimization is to display small images and provide a distinct call to action. For more help on optimizing your newsletter, give us a call at 877-959-7550.

4. Do not break any spam laws. This means it’s important to make it easy for your patients to unsubscribe. It may seem odd to give your customers the option to stop receiving your newsletter, but making it difficult for them to unsubscribe provides no gain for your pharmacy and only results in frustrated customers who are likely not reading your content. Make sure the customers who are receiving your newsletter actually want to receive it. Allowing customers to unsubscribe easily also decreases the chances that your emails will be marked as spam; if readers mark your email newsletter as spam, that may make it more difficult to reach them via email for other purposes in the future. It should be just as easy to unsubscribe from your newsletter as it was to subscribe.

For help marketing to your patients through email, give us a call at 877-959-7550 or email connect@digitalpharmacist.com.