The Complete Guide to Email Marketing for Veterinary Practices
Why Your Veterinary Practice Needs Email Marketing?
Are you struggling to drive revenue from your marketing efforts? Have you tried everything from running ads on Facebook to posting regularly on social media, but nothing seems to be working for your practice. At DVMelite our goal is to help practice owners succeed with different marketing strategies that can take their veterinary practice to the next level. Today, we will help you understand why and how to add email marketing to your marketing mix.
Before we dive into the important steps for setting up email marketing campaigns, here are some promising stats: According to HubSpot, 40 percent of B2B marketers say email newsletters are critical to their content marketing success, and 73% of millennials prefer communications from businesses via email. Additionally, as per WebFX, the average ROI for every dollar spent on email is $44.
Here’s a short video from Neil Patel on why email marketing is the key to success
Email marketing isn’t just about sending out a few random messages to your clients and hoping for the best. It’s a strategy that requires planning and understanding of automation tools. Think for a second all the marketing messages you receive in your email. Most of them try to sell or engage you with services without understanding your needs. That is where most companies go wrong. If your campaigns lack segmentation, you are using a hit and trial approach, and that does not work.
For example, imagine sending a pet owner who has a dog and is a regular client at your clinic an email campaign about a first-time consultation discount or discounts on cat food. Does that sound right? Of course not. In a crowded market and competitive niche like veterinary care, only proven strategies can put you ahead of the competition.
Let’s get started with our discussion today
Build Your Email Lists
The first step is to ensure that you have a clear strategy for generating email lists. If you don’t have your prospects email addresses, you can’t really get started with email campaigns. Here are a few ideas:
During Appointments: Once your clients walk into your clinic, ensure that the practice manager or anyone attending them shares an appointment form for them to fill in their details, such as name, email, phone, and communication preferences. This will ensure you not only have the required details but also information about their communications preferences.
Website: Identify your top landing pages using Google Analytics or Search Console, and make sure to add CTAs based on the content of the website. One of the best ways to ensure more signups and that the email list is qualified is by having a form on the website that clearly mentions, “Sign up for our newsletter.” This will ensure that you will be communicating with the leads who are most likely interested in your content or services.
Social Media: Social media is a powerful tool to connect with your audience and showcase your services. In the veterinary niche, where pet owners are continuously looking for information to take care of their beloved pets, you can create educational content that also promotes your “newsletter.” You can also set up forms on Facebook or Instagram to drive users to sign up for your newsletter or communication.
Create Engaging Email Content and Automate
Once you have the email lists of your clients. The next task is to ensure that you are able to segment the lists based on the interest of your audience. As an example, if the audience recently bought the monthly grooming package, add a tag “monthly grooming” and in your next email try to upsell annual grooming packages, the idea here to ensure that the audience is getting the emails based on their interest. Below are a few more general examples about how you need to create the content based on audience interest.
Welcome Emails: These emails are sent to your new clients. As soon as clients book an appointment at your clinic, ensure to send them a welcome email confirming the appointment details and introducing the doctor with whom they have booked the appointment, along with your team and services offered.
Educational Emails: These will be part of your campaigns where you send educational emails to the list of contacts who signed up on your website for the monthly newsletter and promotional emails. These emails will focus on sharing seasonal tips, advice on pet care, and updates about health trends.
Promotional Emails: These are part of the transactional emails where you send discounts or share offers with the goal of driving sales via email.
Appointment Reminders: These will be tied to the list of clients who have booked appointments. Basically, you will send them a reminder 2 days in advance and another 3-4 hours before the scheduled time.
The next step for you is to ensure that you are setting up the correct email automations. This will not only help in driving, engaging, and closing more sales, but it will also ensure efficiency. You and everyone on your team should have a clear understanding of how automation works and how to ensure the right messages are being sent to the audience. Why is this important? According to OptinMonster, automated emails generate 320% more revenue than non-automated emails.
Here’s a video to help you understand why email automation is essential and how to set up different workflows.
Before we move ahead and discuss the next steps, if you’d like to explore growth plans for your veterinary practice, you can book a free consulting session today. One of our team members will connect with you to discuss custom strategies and email marketing plans designed to drive results for your veterinary practice.
Analyze and Optimize Your Campaigns
While Step 1 and Step 2 ensure that you have a qualified list of prospects and can send them emails tailored to their interests and pain points, Step 3 focuses on tracking and improving your overall email marketing performance. Remember, If you’re not able to track, you can’t predict what worked for your campaigns and how exactly you can improve the campaigns. If you are using any automation tools like HubSpot, GHL, or similar platforms, they come with built-in analytics to provide insights about:
Open Rate - This is a very important metric for email marketers. If the emails are not opened by the recipients, it means that they have not checked the offer or services you were trying to promote. If your open rates are low, the first thing you should review is the subject lines. For example, if your subject line says “20% OFF ON PET grooming services,” try to split the test with personalization like “[First Name] - 20% Off on Pet Grooming Services.” The plan is to ensure that the subject line feels connected to the audience’s interest and is personalized; otherwise, it will get lost in the crowded inbox.
Click-Through Rate
CTR is an important metric to track and this will give you insights about how many people opened your email but have not clicked on any link. Does that mean they are not interested in learning more about your offers or product? The answer if you have to be creative and smart with the CTA’s. Use direct CTAs like “Book Now,” or “Save 20%,” and add FOMO (Fear of Missing Out), such as “Only for the next 3 hours.”
Conversion Rate
The idea is to understand if the audience is opening and clicking the emails, are they buying or booking appointments via emails? You can use UTMs to track how many people came from the recent email campaigns. This will help you understand the success and ROI of the campaigns.
Unsubscribe Rate
While metrics like open rates, clicks, and conversions are important from a business point of view, from an email marketing perspective, you really need to dig deep and understand why the audience is unsubscribing. Are there any mismatches between the email offer and the needs of the audience? You can review the segmented list and see how many people are not interested. Maybe it’s just the time of day or the day itself when you sent the email.
A/B Testing
The plan is to see what’s working and what’s not and as an email marketer your goal is to regularly have split tests in place. You will need to ensure that you test different subject lines, email layouts, or CTAs to find what resonates most with your audience. The idea is to improve, improvise and grow your engagement and sales with email marketing.
Closing Thoughts
Email marketing can completely transform the way your veterinary practice connects with clients and drives growth. Be it building your email list to creating engaging content and using email automation, every step contributes to stronger client relationships and helps you drive qualified leads. You will need to ensure that your emails are helpful and answering the pet owners questions and providing them value. You can start small and keep measuring your results and make informed decisions to do changes whenever required. Do remember that the content should be aligned with the regular challenges of the pet owners.
At DVMelite, over the years, we have helped practice owners like you take care of all aspects of marketing while ensuring success. Hear from some of our clients. If you are looking for a partner who is not only striving for your success but is also present to answer all your questions and concerns and create a custom growth plan for you, DVMelite is your partner. We have helped multiple practice owners on this success journey. If you need more information, just fill out the consulting form below, and one of our experts will set up an appointment with you according to your availability.
