As a clinic, you should already know the benefits that email marketing provides for your clinic but, after setting up your mailing services and building your mailing list with patients and interested people, you might be running out of ideas on what kinds of content you can actually send to your recipients.

If you’re looking for a form of continuous content that you could produce daily, weekly, or even monthly, allowing you to maintain a steady stream of content, then a clinic newsletter could be exactly what you’re looking for.

This is a great way to connect and stay in contact with your mailing list while providing them with valuable information that your patients will care about, but only if it’s written and sent out in the right way.

Today, we’re going to take a detailed look into the ins and outs of writing a newsletter for your clinic, so you can be sure that you’re maximising your opportunities and using your mailing list to its full potential.

Setting Up Your Service/Mailing Platform & Getting Yourself Ready
health Newsletter

If you haven’t already thought about how you’re actually going to manage and send out your email newsletters, this is the first thing you’ll want to consider. Of course, you could start by sending them out from your own inbox, but this is risky business since you’ll be restricted to what your emails look and read like, and you can even end up becoming blocked by spam filters.

Instead, it’s highly recommended that you use a dedicated email marketing service, such as MailChimp. This is considered one of the easiest email providers to use, thanks to its simple drag-and-drop functionality and it’s free to send up to 12,000 emails per month to 2,000 subscribers, perfect for your clinic.

If you’re still looking to grow your mailing list, so your newsletter is worthwhile, think about offering a free incentive for people to sign up. This could be anything you want but needs to be something that your patients will be interested in, such as a free e-book, a discount at your clinic or even something like a free consultation. It solely depends on the nature of your clinic and what you’ve got to offer.

After all, this is set up and ready, you’ll be ready to start thinking about your newsletter itself.

Defining the Purpose of Your Newsletter

There’s no point in starting to write a newsletter if you don’t have a specific purpose in mind. You might feel that this is a piece of content where you can simply provide updates on your clinic and what’s going on, but this is a trap where you’ll find that you’re only talking about yourself, and no one will want to sit and just read that.

Of course, that doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t talk about your business updates, but rather convey these updates in a way that benefits your readers.

For example, if you have a new hygienist start at your clinic, instead of just introducing them to your mailing list, talk about the level of experience they’ll be bringing to your clinic and how these new services will benefit your patients.

As for the main body content of your newsletter, you can break it down into three different kinds of newsletter; educational, promotional and nurturing patients.

“As a rule of thumb, make sure that you follow the 80/20 rule for maximum engagement rates. This where your newsletters are made from 80% valuable information that provides the reader with real benefits. The other 20% can be promotional material for your clinic. Of course, it goes without saying that nobody wants to read just promotional content for any kind of business,” explains Samuel Docherty, a newsletter writer for SimpleGrad.

Using Email Segmentation for Optimised Content

Consider the types of demographic that your mailing list is full of. You may have both men and women from all kinds of age ranges, geographical locations and job roles. Of course, some people will be interested in different subjects and topics than other demographic, so it’s important that you bear this in mind.

“Using your mailing client, made easy with tools and clients like MailChimp, you can divide up your lists into these demographics, allowing you to re-write you newsletter multiple times to suit the needs of the individual patients. This will allow you to create custom newsletters that are far more suited to your readers, rather than generalising your mailing list as a whole,” exclaims Peter Turner, an email marketer for Assignment Help.

For example, if you have a group of young women, between the ages of 18-30, you can write a newsletter using a tone of voice that they’ll relate to, as well as describing the benefits of your services in a way that appeals to them.

You can then rewrite your newsletter into a different tone of voice with different benefits for males who fall into the 65+ category, ensuring your content is far more relevant to them and therefore more beneficial.

Considering the Length of Your Newsletter

When it comes to how much content you’re writing in your newsletter, there are many factors to consider. Firstly, you’ll want to consider how long your patients have to read your content. For this, consider how long you would have to read a newsletter.

If people are sitting at home watching TV, you may be able to hold their interest for several minutes, perhaps ten at the most. However, if people are reading your content while they’re at work, they may have only a few minutes. You’ll want to make sure that your content falls around the 5-minute mark to cover all the bases.

Also think about the fact that many people, possibly the majority of people, will be reading your newsletter from their mobile phones and tablets, and won’t want to sit and endlessly scroll. Phone users want information, in short, easily-digestible chunks that they can skim read and stop to indulge in the parts they find interesting.

“When writing your newsletter, it’s important to get straight the point of what you’re trying to say as quickly as possible. You can do this by simply asking yourself “what do my subscribers want to learn from my newsletter” and then making this clear in every single newsletter that you write,” explains Jennifer Lovett, a newsletter writer for Bestbritishessays.com.

However, while your mind may be overflowing with ideas on what to include in your newsletter, especially once you reach the end of this article, it’s important to remember not to overwhelm your reader with content. Too much information can become confusing and misleading to your reader so make sure that you’re keeping everything concise and direct.

Writing to Connect with Your Readers

When you’re writing your newsletter, it’s not as though your readers want to be reading a bland list of points and topics that you want to talk about. You need to make sure you’re talking directly to each reader and making them feel as though they are a valued part of your email community.

While most of the information that you’ll be providing will be about your clinic, you need to focus on using words like ‘you’ and ‘your’, to make it seem like you’re talking to that reader individually, not just writing in the form of an email.

This is a great way to connect with your readers and to make them feel included in what you have to say. This will also make your readers much more likely to engage and connect with what you have to say, therefore, making it far more likely that they’ll invest in your clinical services.

Including a Call to Action

Of course, regardless of whether you’re trying to educate your readers, promote to them or nurturing patients to book a service, you’ll want to include a call to action in every single newsletter that you write.

This will typically go at the end of your newsletter, but you’ll want to make sure that it’s clear and stands out, making it easy for your patient to follow your ‘customer journey’ on what to do next.

A call to action could be to call up your clinic to book an appointment, to head over to your website to see what services you offer or for more information, or even link to your online booking service if you have one. You can change the direction of CTA with every newsletter; you just need to make sure it’s there and obvious. Every call to action needs to be logical and relevant to the content you’ve just spoken about in your newsletter for maximum effectiveness and ROI.

Thinking About Your Timings

Humans thrive when it comes to routine, and your email newsletter is no exception. Once you’ve chosen your timings, it’s imperative that you stick to it, so your readers can fall into a habit of knowing when you’re going to send and, therefore, can sub-consciously plan time to read your newsletter into their daily routine.

For example, if you’re sending your emails our every second Tuesday of the month, then this is what you’ll have to stick to, unless you notify your readers several months in advance in every newsletter that you’ll be changing your times, giving them time to adapt.

Consider how many emails you receive every day; the same can be said for your mailing list. With this in mind, failure to send your newsletter on a routine basis means that your recipients will, over time, forget who you are, which often results in your emails becoming quickly deleted or even registered as spam.

Writing Accurate Newsletters

Imagine you were reading a newsletter that you had signed up for, only to open the email and realise that the content is full of mistakes, such as spelling errors, typos, poor grammar and misplaced punctuation. This will dramatically affect the readability of your newsletter, damaging the reputation and credibility of your clinic.

This means checking your content before you send it several times to clear it from errors and to make sure that it reads well. For this, you may want to take a break of several hours or days from writing your first draft as well as getting a second pair of eyes to read through your content.

Thankfully, there is also a range of online tools you can use to guarantee accuracy in your content to ensure that your newsletter is the highest quality possible. Here are some tools to get you started;

These blogs are full of professional writing guides to help you improve your general writing skills.

An online copywriting service that can help you write your entire newsletter.

These are two free online blogs that are full of advice to help you improve your grammar skills.

These are two professional editing tools to help you ensure your newsletter has optimised readability levels.

Taking Your Newsletter to the Next Level

If you’re looking to make your newsletters have a real impact on your patients, there are several things you can do to enhance the quality and to take things to the next level.

One of the most common ways of doing this is to embed videos, bringing a whole new perspective to your content.  This can be done easily using your newsletter creating platform and allows you to talk about subjects and topics that may have before been impossible.

For example, you may be talking about a certain procedure or service, where you can then link a YouTube explaining everything in a much easier format than it would be to write out the information. As a rule of thumb, you’ll make to make sure that you include images in your newsletter anyway.

The Takeaway

It’s important you realise just how important it is when a patient hands you their email address. They obviously think the content that you’ll provide them is worthwhile, so you need to be making sure you deliver.

Not only will you be able to connect with your patients in a whole new, and overall unique, way, you can promote your clinic like never before, bringing a new level of success to your business.

Author Bio:

Grace Carter is a writer at Queensland assignment service and Revieweal, where she manages content team and support agents. Also, she helps with content management at UK Writing Services Reviews, website that reviews online writing services.