Using E-Mail for Effective Eyecare Marketing

If you’re using e-mail to connect with your patients and grow your optometry practice, congratulations! E-mail is an essential piece of contemporary eyecare marketing, and using it effectively can help you maintain the patients you’ve had for years and also acquire new ones.

Remember, though, that some uses of e-mail are better than others. Read the following examples, and, in each case, consider whether e-mail is being utilized properly.

• One optometry practice uses e-mail to send regular reminders for annual exams. These e-mails include links back to the practice’s main website for real-time scheduling.

• Another optometry practice uses e-mail to send a weekly newsletter to patients.

• This optometry practice uses e-mail to track clicks over to its website from e-mails that offer special deals on products and services.

• Our final optometry practice uses e-mail to solicit potential new customers, sending communication to a large number of unfamiliar addresses.

Can you tell which practices are using e-mail effectively? How about which ones aren’t? Of the four examples shown above, the first and third represent intelligent eyecare marketing. The second and fourth, conversely, represent approaches that should be avoided.

As with all business endeavors, eyecare marketing clearly has its own list of do’s and don’ts. If you use e-mail judiciously, though, you’ll build trust and loyalty among your patients, and greatly increase the chances of return visits.

Eyecare Marketing and Email: What Do Your Patients Want to Know About?

Whether you’ve been broadcasting to your patient base for years or just getting started, figuring out what information to share with your patients can pose an interesting challenge.

As professionals, we spend a lot of energy on describing conditions and treatment plans in layman’s terms – for a live audience who generally need to know what we have to say – in the moment.
But what do you talk with your patient about when they are away? In other words, what do they want to hear?

Here are a few ways of ‘re-focusing’ on what people want to hear about from you…

1. Forums – Do a google search on ‘eye care forums’ and see what comes up. (Warning: Try not to get caught up in the debates you’ll invariably find regarding fees, policies, etc.)

2. Do a general google search on ‘eye problems’ – the most popular are a reflection of the most traffic…

3. Brainstorm/Reflect on the most common general questions people have for you or ask your staff what they often hear people ask…

4. Try the google ‘adwords’ tool below. Type in the name of a condition or simply, type ‘eye problems’ and see what comes up. Pay special to average monthly search volume.

Here’s the link:

https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal (Estimates total searches and AdWords clicks & CPC)

Once you’ve found a topic that you like, remember that effective eye care marketing and email starts with the ‘conversation’.