Direct Mail Marketing Tips For Healthcare and Hospitals
Hospitals and other healthcare organizations are looking for ways to engage patients, influence care takers, improve outcomes and promote an elevated quality of life through better health and one of the most effective ways to do this is through the use of direct mail marketing.
Recent surveys show that patients prefer direct mail (80% reported opening and reading their physical mail), are actively blocking digital ads (47% reported using ad blockers) and respond well to personalization (adding a name to a direct mail piece increases response rates by 135%).
Let’s look at a few specific tips that will help you get the most out of those campaigns.
How Hospitals Can Use Direct Mail
Whether it’s to better the patient experience, improve patient outcomes, engage a community or influence and direct caretakers you can focus your direct mail campaigns with specificity and extreme relevance to get the best ROI.
Here are some ideas of how your healthcare organization or hospital can utilize direct mail:
- Share Your Medical Expertise
This will establish you as a trustworthy authority as a medical provider as well as generate brand awareness and recall which will lead to patients choosing you over other providers either directly or from word of mouth.
- Calm Fears
This could involve communication to an entire community, for example COVID-19 treatment, a targeted group of individuals, for example Glaucoma patients, or a single individual, for example a surgery reminder with a hopeful message. Doing this puts you again into a position of trust and authority with the intended audience.
- Give Clear Directions
We literally mean to give them directions using direct mail by sharing a map to your nearest location in the form of a magnet or calendar, including a map to your facility on an event promotion or appointment reminder.
- Share Treatment Protocols & Options
An effective way to improve patient outcomes is to send them reminders of protocols unique to their treatment and if there are options that the patient has for that treatment ensuring they are aware of those options empowers them to take control of their health.
Create Personalized and Targeted Healthcare Direct Mail
Personalizing direct mail has been proven again and again to produce better results by a large margin. Previously we mentioned that simply adding a name to a direct mail piece can increase the response rate by 135%, but another survey reported that 70% of recipients feel that direct mail on its’ own feels more personal to them. Combine the intimate and personal nature of the physical printed direct mail marketing piece mixed with personalized variables on that piece and you have a combination destined to succeed.
In addition to personalization, you can target prospective patients with great accuracy using direct mail specific consumer level data. Here are the top considerations when creating a target profile for patients:
- Demographic: Age, gender, occupation, and family situation
- Behavior: Needs, wants, and attitude
- Geographic: State, city, zip code
- Psychographic: Lifestyle characteristics and interests
Measuring the Results of Your Healthcare Direct Mail Marketing
Today, direct mail has the capability to be measured with extreme accuracy that can include the use of cloud based software, CRM integration and API’s which makes this medium trackable and measurable in a similar way to how you’d track digital marketing campaigns.
By combining all of these tactics, personalization, targeting and tracking you can effectively deliver high performing direct mail that engages patients, improves patient outcomes, attracts new patients and develops a positive awareness for your healthcare organization.
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