How To Get Your Patients Used to Reading Your Emails

“I send emails every so often but nobody seems to open them!”

That’s exactly what a good friend of mine said when I asked her about emailing her patients. She launched an email list about a year ago at my recommendation and while she had been collecting a lot of subscribers, she was struggling to get any ROI from the time invested in it.

If you’ve ever sent marketing emails to your patients, chances are you’ve experienced this too. Here’s what I told her to do:

Create an onboarding sequence

The single, most opened email you’ll ever send is the very first email you send to a new subscriber.

Which means you should have an onboarding sequence of at least 3 emails you send to every new subscriber.

“But… What should I write in these first emails?”

The goals of your onboarding sequence are to get your subscribers used to seeing your name in their inbox, and to get them excited for your emails.

This is what I recommend to my clients:

Email 1

Send this one as soon as they confirm their email.

Use this email to welcome them into your list. Let them know what they can expect, how to get in touch with you, when you send your newsletter and how to unsubscribe.

Tease what’s coming in the next email (Email 2) and ask them a question.

For example, if you’re a pediatrician, you can ask them to reply letting you know whether their kids are toddlers, preschoolers, teenagers, etc.

Email 2

This one can come the very next day (my recommendation), or skip one day after the first one.

I use this email to introduce myself in a way that is relevant to the reason why they signed up to my list. For example, in my stem cell clinic, I used this second email to let tell them a story about the first patient with autism I encountered and how he made realize how little I knew about autism and prompted me to seek additional training.

Email 3

Assuming you’re doing a short onboarding sequence, this is the last email you’ll send as part of that initial sequence.

Remind them what to expect from being on your list and also let them know what else you offer besides this free content. Introduce these services but don’t expect many people to sign up for them from this email.