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Email marketing is a strategy in which counseling or treatment centers can collect the emails of leads or customers with their consent in an attempt to reach out to them later with an offering for their services, sharing of a resource, or simply keeping in touch. Email marketing is one of the more traditional forms of marketing when compared to other digital marketing efforts and it has been a staple in marketing campaigns for decades because of it’s amazing ability to stay in direct contact with your audience.
Many companies lean on email marketing efforts because they are highly trackable and can help them measure the interest in certain service or topic. For example, if your practice sends an email to potential clients about an event or conference that you’re attending and only 1% of the people open that email, there’s a good chance that most of your leads aren’t interested or haven’t been groomed to care about your attendance at that event. It’s important to gradually warm up your subscribers to the idea of opening your emails, so you want to make sure that whatever you’re emailing has a significant importance to your readers.
Oftentimes, companies will email their subscribers incessantly, causing them to unsubscribe from receiving emails altogether. Although you want to maintain a relationship with your users, you don’t want to harass them by sending an email to them every day. There is a fine line between frequent helpful updates and unwanted annoyances, and finding that line will be the key to success in your email marketing efforts!
So, how do you know when something should be emailed to your subscriber list? Is what you’re sharing important enough that users should receive a notification that you’ve sent this to them? Well, there are a few things that many companies use email marketing for, and we’ve listed them below for you to get an idea of what kinds of content should be shared with your subscribers.
Welcome emails do just as they sound. They welcome your subscribers to the family of users who follow your brand, and thank them for taking the time to listen to what you have to say. Although this may seem unimportant or trivial, it’s actually the first step in letting users know that you’ll be communicating with them on a regular basis from now on.
Make sure to give readers a quick introduction to your counseling or treatment center, as well as yourself, along with a general statement about what types of content you’ll be sharing via email. Users like when they know what they’re getting, rather than waiting to see what you eventually start sending them later on. Most importantly, don’t forget to thank your subscribers for allowing you to send them emails with updates and information!
Newsletters are typically scheduled on a weekly or monthly basis and include happenings and updates from the current time period. Newsletters typically include significant events, company updates, upcoming dates of importance in the industry, and other topics that give your readers a “heads up” about what’s to come in the following week or month.
We recommend that newsletters be on a monthly basis to allow you to send emails in between them, rather than sending your subscribers an update about the previous week every Monday. This strategy allows you to blend newsletters into a plethora of emails and avoids harassing your readers to the point of unsubscribing from your future emails.
Informational emails are simple and to the point. They provide users information about your company, your services, and other popular topics in the recovery or therapy world. These emails can either include educational materials about counseling and treatment, or they can include information specific to your practice that lets readers know why they should be interested in your services over another practice’s.
We recommend sending at least one informational email a month and rotating the topic to keep the content fresh. One month, you may want to email subscribers about counseling services for couples, while emailing them the following month about the strides you’ve made with clients in drug and alcohol counseling sessions. Frequently changing the topic allows you to share an array of information without boring your readers with the same content they’ve already seen!
Promotional emails are intended to update subscribers about a discount or special that your practice may have going on. An example of a promotional email for a practice could be that you’re now offering a new type of counseling or treatment. It’s possible that you’ve noticed a need for couple’s counseling in your existing clients, and they’ve mentioned that they would like if you began to offer that service to them as well. Once you’ve recognized the need for this and made the applicable adjustments, you can tell your subscribers that you now offer that service as well. This method can improve results because some of your subscribers may have already been considering that service from another practice because you didn’t offer it previously.
You can also use promotional emails to highlight your most popular service and tell your readers that you specialize in one topic over another. Establishing that you’re an expert in that service can help to give you an edge over a practice that doesn’t claim any one service is a specialty!
The power of email is often underestimated by many practices and centers. Now that you have an understanding of what email marketing can do, you can use that knowledge to leverage emails to your advantage and create promising results. If you’re in need of a team of marketing and counseling experts to help you execute your strategy, you can contact our team for more information! The team at Theory About That can provide the guidance you need to take your email marketing efforts to the next level!
