Do you want to save thousands of your money that you are spending on the online social media marketing of your professional health practice?

Do you not only want to spend less but also to reach more clients than before?

In this article, we will be discussing one of the easiest tools that will help every health professional to increase their connectivity and outreach. This online tool is as easy as using your Gmail.

This mode of outreach is known and cold e-mail marketing. It is one of the tools that is widely used in the corporate world. But it can also be used by health professionals to great benefits. 

Before we start this article, let us answer this question – Who is a health professional?

Health professional is a wide term and it covers many aspects and branches related to human body and health. Anyone who is either running a professional health set up or working in some capacity in a corporate health sector can be termed as a health professional. So, a health professional can be a doctor, dental surgeon, physiotherapist, nurse or an MBA who is in charge of managing the affairs of a professional health set up.

Irrespective whether you are a single doctor running your own private health set up or a doctor/manager working in a corporate health sector the end goal remains the same – to provide a good quality treatment to patients/clients and to establish a connection with them even after the treatment is over.

In this era of the internet, there are a lot of tools to create connectivity, for example, websites & various social media outlets. But among all these new social tools there is one old tool, which is still the most powerful way for outreach and connectivity.

That tool is your good old E-mail.

Everyone has an e-mail account and in this post, we will see how you can use the e-mails to increase the reach and connectivity with the patient/clients for your professional health practice.

Why is E-mail still the powerhouse of connectivity?

compared to social media (facebook, twitter etc).

There is no doubt that social medias are still one of the major tools of connectivity. But of late, most of the social media platforms have pushed forward to advertising to generate revenue. To put it in short and simple, all the major social medias, are restricting the extent of your reach when you post anything related to your business.

For example, if you have a Facebook page or Twitter profile with 1000 fans, then when you post, your post will reach organically only to 5 % i.e. 50 people. To reach more people in the social media you will need to purchase promoted posts. So you might end up spending 5 $ to 20$ minimum (per day) to reach 1000 people.

Other than the requirement to spend 5 $ or more every day, another issue is the actual response to your social ad or in technical terms Return on Investment (ROI). The actual reach in not definite. Suppose you are paying to reach 1000 people, then you might reach a little less in actual terms.

Many of my corporate friends working in the marketing section of health establishments have told that the actual CTR (Click Through Rate) of social media advertising is not as good as they had hoped for.

Social media promotion are not very personal in nature. In comparison, email outreach establishes a personal contact with your client as the email is directly referred to him/her.

They also complained that planning for a social media advertising camoaign is like planning for a war. It takes a lot of time and has a lot of variables to consider. One of my friends who is a part of the advertising section in a private dental setup said that it takes her nearly 4 to 5 hours to plan and execute a paid social media promotion. Even after that, she is worried about the performance of the advertising. Some of the major publishing and corporate houses have also stated that social media & social media advertising are getting too complicated and time-consuming.

This is why e-mail is still the evergreen, the simplest and the most successful connectivity tool.

So, let us have a look at one such online tool that is going to turn your e-mail into a marketing & outreach powerhouse.

This online tool is known as Mailshake and using it you can utilize your Gmail account to send multiple personal emails and follow ups to connect with your old & new patients.

What is Mailshake & What do you require to use it?

Mailshake is a simple and cost effective way for cold emails for promotional outreach. To use Mailshake all you need to have is a Gmail account or email id.

What types of Gmail account do you need to have?

You can either have a standard Gmail account (yourname@gmail.com) or a Google suite account (info@yourcompany.com). A regular Gmail account lets you send 500 emails per day & a Google suite account lets you send 2000 emails per day.

So using Mailshake you can send close to 60,000 emails per month – which is more than adequate for any Professional Health Service. Not only that you can also create automated follow up and replies to the contats you have sent the mail. *You can know more about the Gmail mail sending limits here.

Now let us see how you can use Mailshake in the promotional and outreach campaigns for your private health practice or establishment.

Let us assume that you have a Multispeciality Dental Professional set up (providing various types of dental treatment services to patients).

Let us name the set up as 32 Pearls. 

For the convenience of explanation, let us assume that your setup has been functioning for some time. You have a base of old patients and you also want to connect to new prospective people without being too intrusive.

Lets us continue with our assumption that you have with you a total of 20,000 emails of your old and new patients. You want to stay in contact with them effectively via email (which is very nonintrusive in nature).

You want to wish the patients on special occasions like birthdays, festivals, send them regular health updates and also inform them about the additions to your health set up. 

The basic goal is to stay in direct touch with the patients without being too intrusive.

Enter, MailShake …..

See the official overview of mail shake

Let us create a campaign and see all the benefits of using Mailshake

As we were discussing, you have a list of email contacts of fellow doctors/patients and you want to connect with them. You want to inform them about the new additions to your private practice.

Sign up at Mailshake using your Gmail id. Once you log in, you will be greeted with a welcome dashboard.

When you signup using your Gmail account, Mailshake starts working in tandem with your email id. Though Mailshake does not run inside your Gmail interface, it is completely powered by Gmail. As we mentioned above you can have two types of Gmail accounts – a simple Gmail account or a Gmail professional account.

Mailshake will work with both types of accounts and turn your email to an outreach powerhouse.

Click on the NEW CAMPAIGN button to start your email campaign.

Give a name to your e-mail campaign for example “Patient Outreach Email”.

Then press next to go to the next step. In the next step, you will be required to enter the email addresses that you have with you.

You can upload the e-mail addresses in the form of a CSV file or enter them separately. But when you are about to send the mail to a lot of addresses then it always easy to have all the addresses in a single CSV file and uploading it in a single click.

Once you have added the contacts then it is time to compose the mail. There are many preloaded email templates to make the process quicker for you. Just choose one of the templates and edit it to add relevant information that you want to share with your subscribers. Below we have composed a demo mail addressed to doctors on how to manage the finances and provide a better service to patients.

Add Automated Reply & Follow Ups

One of the best features of Mailshake is to add automated follow-ups and replies related to the primary mail you have sent. You can create and schedule these automated replies and follow-up while composing the primary mail. You can decide when the follow-up replies will be triggered.

For that, you will need to click the button “Add Reply” in the above pic. Once you click on it you will get the editor interface to add and schedule an automated follow-up.

This means that the recipient will receive an automated follow-up reply in 2 days (you can set the number of days as per your convenience). Mailshake gives you the option to add multiple follow ups. Once you complete the step then click the next button which will take you to the preview page.

In this preview stage, you can check for personalizing the mail for each of the recipients. If all is fine then you are ready to send the mail. In the above demo pic, you can see that I am sending the mail to 36 contacts.

The final step before you send the mail is to set up the mail tracking system.

In the above screenshot of Mailshake, you can see the buttons for tracking the mail openings and also the option to track the clicks on the links you that you have included in the mail.

There is also the option to schedule the mail at a future date (say 3 days from today). Press Next and you will reach the final summary page of your campaign before you actually send the campaign.

Now, it is the time to send the campaign. Click the send button and your mail will be sent to all the email contacts in the list which you had uploaded. Each of the mail will be sent addressing to the individual recipients. So, each of your recipients will get a personalized email addressed only to them.

Hence with a single click, you can send a campaign email to 2000 people max (per day) directly into their Gmail inboxes. For example, if you mail to 30,000 e-mail contacts via Mailshake, then the emails will be drip sent automatically to all the contacts gradually over a period of 2 weeks. 

This drip feed of the email campaign spreads your promotion over few days, thereby increasing the reach and also making it easy for you to track the responses to your email promotion.

We saw previously that we had sent a limited email outreach campaign to 36 contacts. Mailshake tracking system will track the responses to your emails. Mailshake system will track the number of emails that were opened and also the links in the mail that were clicked (if you have switched on click tracking).

Mailshake system also provides you a complete list of the people who have opened your mail as seen in the picture above.

How Mailshake is different from other email promotional campaign systems like  Mailchimp?

There are some major online (the most famous being Mailchimp & Aweber) companies that provide online mass email promotional campaigns. But in the current scenario, there are two major issues that many have faced (including me) while using the services of  MailChimp & Aweber.

You as a health professional or manager must look at various options that are easier and more cost effective to use.

1. The price of Email Campaign Services

Price is one big factor. If you are managing a big to moderate e-commerce company with millions of potential customers then it is worth paying the high price of email promotional companies.

Let’s compare the pricing of 3 most famous e-mail campaign companies with the cost of the Mailshake subscription.

Pricing of MailChimp

So, for 10000 e-mails you need to pay $ 75 per month (Source: https://mailchimp.com/pricing/all/)

Pricing of Aweber

For 10,000 e-mails you need to pay $ 69 per month.

Pricing of Get Response 

Pricing of Mailshake is 9 $ per month.

For a monthly price of $9 only, you can send 60,000 emails every month and create a highly targeted and effective e-mail marketing campaign about your professional health care system. That is almost 10 times lesser price than what other promotional e-mail campaign services are charging right now.

Email deliverability to Inbox

Due to recent modifications in Gmail, most of the emails being sent as mass email campaigns are landing in the promotional tab of the recipient’s mailbox. (NOT in the PRIMARY INBOX Tab).

How, many times have you actively checked the “promotions” tab in your mail inbox?

But the system at Mailshake is completely based on top of Gmail. So, all the email outreach via Mailshake is completely compliant with Google policies. Gmail recognizes the mail sent via Mailshake as trustworthy (since the emails are being sent by Gmail servers). Hence almost 95 % of the emails sent via Mailshake land up in the Primary tab in the recipient’s inbox. This makes the chances of the email being read by the recipients much higher. (of course, you need to be careful in composing mails by not adding any unreliable links or attachments)

At DentalOrg.com we always try to inform health professionals & doctors about technologies/services that can help them in their professional career. The power of marketing is not only restricted to the corporate world. A successful professional career in health science also requires a planned use of marketing.  

Email is perhaps the simplest and the most powerful marketing tool to use.

With Mailshake you can start with your email outreach and promotion as simply as with your Gmail id.