Email and healthcare marketing: pros and cons

I found these interesting statistics that illustrate what businesses are spending on email marketing.

According to Econsultancy, 32% of firms spent less than £5,000 annually on email marketing. Yet, on the other end of the scale, a further 34% are spending at more than £25,000 per year.

Econsultancy says that £292 million was spent on email marketing in 2009. While this is only a little bit over 12% of the amount of money spent on UK paid search in 2009 (£2.4 billion), the numbers are large and growing.

Email marketing in 2011

Here are some highlights from the E-consultancy recent report entitled Email Marketing Census 2011:

• Just over half of companies (51%) are now using an application service provider or a hosted service (email marketing software)
• Significantly more companies are now using automated campaigns compared to last year.
• The proportion of companies sending more than 50,000 emails each month has gradually increased in the last four years.
• The vast majority of responding companies (72%) rate email as ‘excellent’ or ‘good’ for return on investment.
• Email and social media activity are managed as two separate channels by almost half of companies (45%).

E-mail marketing pros

As I meet more and more owners of healthcare companies, I notice that many are not taking advantage of the significant benefits afforded by direct email marketing. Opt in email marketing is

• extremely cost effective
• highly targeted
• customisable on a mass scale
• highly measurable

Over half of all internet users check or send e-mail from their inbox on a typical day. Not many websites, except for Google itself, can every hope to claim that kind of reach. An email database is highly segmentable, so smart healthcare marketers can personalise their messaging in a considerably more sophisticated ways than they ever could on a website.

E-mail marketing cons

• With the more and more businesses using it, bulk email marketing recipients are getting fatigued, requiring e-mail marketers to ensure their content is valuable and relevant
• Database administration can be hard work
• The definition of spam is entirely in the eyes of the recipient. This means that even if you have people on your list of recipients that have opted to receive your e-mail, they still may tag your targeted e-mail marketing as unsolicited
• it can be hard at first to build an email marketing list

These days, email marketing is within reach of almost any healthcare business. But as the saying goes: “with great power comes great responsibility”. Those who get it right, however, have an excellent opportunity to not only nurture their leads so they can eventually sell to them, but also can use email marketing services for consistent and cost-effective customer service.