Welcome to part three of our “marketing magic” series–a crash course in marketing for your ophthalmology or optometry practice. If you missed the first two posts, you can read them here and here.
Email marketing is a great way to boost both your patient retention and new patient recruitment. Sure, you can outsource this task to a professional digital marketer, but it’s not necessary to shell out big bucks. Easy-to-use online platforms make the task simple enough for a marketing-minded staff member If done correctly, it can be a valuable addition to your overall marketing plan.
But how do you know if you—or your hired help–are doing it correctly?These are the things that a good email marketer should measure, according to Eye Care Leaders’ own digital wizard, Jasaswi Mishra:
Open Rate
According to data culled from hundreds of millions of emails sent by email marketing firm MailChimp, the average open rate for medical, dental, and healthcare businesses is 22.6 percent.
Click-Thru Rate (CTR)
This is the number of recipients who click on one or more links in an email. The same MailChimp data showed a CTR of 2.5 percent.
Conversion Rate
What is a conversion? Well, what do you want patients to do after seeing your email content? Call for an appointment? Visit your website? Download an e-book about contact lens technology? Whatever your conversion is, don’t forget to measure it. The conversion rate can help you determine which email tactics are working, and which aren’t.
Hard Bounce Rate
The more emails that bounce back, the poorer the quality of your email list. A good email marketer will recommend ways your practice can improve list quality.
Soft Bounce Rate
The email address is valid, but the email couldn’t be delivered for temporary reasons, like a full inbox or downed server.
Unsubscribe Rate
To calculate, take the number of people who unsubscribed from one of your emails and divide it by the number of people who received the email.
Email Forwarding/Share Rate
This number is significant because it helps you generate new contacts—individuals who aren’t already on your email list. Track this rate to discover what email content gets shared the most, HubSpot says.
Contribution Margin
How much money do you spend to produce the emails and how much patient traffic do you get in return?