Using Email in Your Hospital’s Marketing Mix

Posted on February 8, 2012 by m.sherman

Social media and mobile devices are getting a lot of attention. But don’t forget about the email component of your hospital’s marketing mix – email isn’t dead yet. In fact, according to Forrester Market Research, 88 percent of B2C firms currently use email marketing and only 16 percent say they don’t plan to continue to use it in the next 12 months. It’s still a great tool for hospitals to communicate with existing and new potential patients. Here are a few ways you can use email to benefit your hospital: email

  • Stay in frequent touch with patients. Keep them up to date on new procedures, events, promotions and other developments in your hospital. Patients who are satisfied with previous services are more inclined to consider other services you offer.
  • Promote content that can be shared. By including “like” buttons and sharing capabilities, people on your email list can share your email communication easily with friends and family who may not be on your email list.
  • Promote your social media channels. Get more fans and followers on social networks such as Facebook, Twitter and Google+ to tap into their huge viral potential, which can lead to even a bigger audience getting your message.

There are many best practices for email to make sure that viewers actually see it. Keep subject lines short. Don’t use sales words like “free,” “amazing” and “act now” because email client spam filters are trained to stop those type emails from getting into recipient inboxes. You also want to build your own email list by creating offline and online forms in your hospital and on your website. For example, you may have a form in the waiting room that lets the hospital collect email addresses from patients or families in return for a discount in the hospital gift store. Hospitals can feature a form on its website capturing email addresses of customers and potential patients in return for getting the hospital’s e-newsletter.

For help with messaging, and designing and distributing rich email blasts, and to find out more about getting a higher deliverability, call Wax Custom Communications at 305-350-5700 or visit http://www.waxcom.com.

 

 

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The Power of the Pin

Posted on February 3, 2012 by m.sherman

According to a new study, Pinterest.com, the social networking website that lets people collect and share photos on a virtual bulletin board, is now driving more referral traffic than YouTube, Reddit and Linkedin combined. In December 2011, Pinterest received 11 million visits in a week, a 400 percent growth in just six months. Pinterest

Popular categories for Pinterest users include home décor, food and wedding dresses. It even has an iPhone app to allow you to save things that you see online and offline, and explore and repin images your friends collect.

So how can you use Pinterest in the healthcare space? Well, Pinterest has the potential to aggregate diverse content from different parts of the web to help advance education and patient engagement. For example, if you have a center for Parkinson’s patients, you may offer e-books on your website and physical therapy videos on YouTube. These could be pinned on a board called “Various Treatments for Parkinson’s Disease.”

You may also want to create some pins to promote your hospital. Have a pin board showcasing all your physicians, their CVs and departments. You might show various photos of your hospital’s facility and your capabilities.

When you pin your services, you have an opportunity to maximize SEO and drive traffic back to your site. You create quality backlinks whenever you or other users link to your services. When you write descriptions, you can use your targeted keywords, which will attract your target customers and patients and encourage them to visit your site. You can share your pins on other social networks like Facebook and Twitter, encouraging more links to your services and, ultimately, your hospital. All of these efforts will help to drive more traffic to your site and to increase your search-engine ranking.

To learn more about how to best use Pinterest, visit http://www.waxcom.com or call 305-350-5700.

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Another Way to Get Your Hospital Noticed Online

Posted on January 23, 2012 by m.sherman

Every hospital is trying to attract new patients to their facility. They use direct mail, print ads, billboards, television spots, you name it. In this very competitive area, you need to think outside the box to find ways to get in front of new eyeballs.

The first place more people go to when looking at a hospital is online. You can promote your services via pay-per-click (PPC) social media and online banner ads, but your competitors are doing the same things. Here’s one unique way to stand out from the crowd: develop an e-book. ebooks

An e-book, or electronic book, is simply a book-length or shortened version of a publication/document in a digital form, consisting of text, images, or both, and readable on computers and other elective devices like tablets and e-readers.

We’re sure one or more of your physicians have written a book or document on a specific topic. Perhaps it’s on an area of medicine they practice or a procedure they perform. They can turn that book into a marketing piece to market your hospital. If you or they turn their study or book into an e-book, it may have legs for both of you.

For example, Dr. Arvind Venkat, who practices emergency medicine at Allegheny General Hospital in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, recently wrote the book Challenging and Emerging Conditions in Emergency Medicine. That book is available in print and as an Amazon Kindle e-book. Same with Dr. Katrina S. Firlik, a neurosurgeon at Yale University School of Medicine who wrote the book Another Day in the Frontal Lobe: A Brain Surgeon Exposes Life on the Inside. Her book is available in print and online for Kindle and the Barnes & Noble NOOK e-reader. Both the Kindle and NOOK have versions of e-readers with Wi-Fi web browsing.

For the doctor, the obvious benefit is more exposure of their skills that they can now promote in online bookstores and e-book sites such as http://www.ebookauthoracademy.com and http://www.lulu.com/.

For the hospital, e-books can contain hyperlinks that direct people to the hospital’s website, which can lead to more online traffic and exposure of your facility. You can also put a link of the e-book on the hospital’s website as another way to get web traffic.

For more “Out of the Box” ideas to get your hospital noticed in cyberspace, contact Wax Custom Communications by calling 305-350-5700 or visiting http://www.waxcom.com.

 

 

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Need a Kidney? Visit Facebook!

Posted on January 14, 2012 by m.sherman

Social media has gotten so powerful that people are using it to save lives. A man in Seattle, Washington, set up a Facebook page, looking for a kidney donor.  A few weeks later, a complete stranger who was a good, healthy match offered to donate hers. Read the story here. fb-kidney-thumb

This type of networking is becoming very popular in the social media space for two reasons: it can work, and it can work quickly. In the past, when a person needed an organ, they would be added to a list and then they would wait. People still do this and they are still waiting. For a kidney, it can take up to four years to find a proper match. In this case, it took 24 hours to find a donor.

It is estimated that by August of this year, there will be 1 billion people with a Facebook account worldwide. Many are spending a good majority of the day (up to three hours in some cases) on this enormous and powerful social network. If something unusual, such as finding a kidney, is posted on Facebook, it will definitely get some attention and create huge viral capabilities.

Does your hospital or healthcare facility have a presence on the social web? For help in learning how to stand out and attract more potential patients by using social media, contact Wax Custom Communications at 305-350-5700 or visit http://www.WaxCom.com.

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Timing is everything for Twitter

Posted on January 12, 2012 by m.sherman

If you’re looking to grab as many Twitter followers as possible, the best solution is to tweet a lot! If your goal is to drive more traffic to your website or a landing page, you should show restraint when posting links to Twitter. Accounts that share two or more links in a hour drastically lower click-through rate compared to accounts that post a maximum of one link per hour. Twitter and timing

The trick to an effective social media strategy is to reach people when crowd noise dies down. You won’t stand out when everyone else is posting their messages at the same time. According to a recent Hubspot study, afternoons are the best time to get your message across because blog and news site activity is slower. Weekends are also ideal for using social media as news traffic can be close to dead. For example, on weekend mornings, when most news sites see substantial drops in page views, Twitter click-throughs spike!

The study also concluded that tweeting the same links two to three times a day is not only OK, but recommended. People are on Twitter at different hours a day. With time zone differences, you’re likely to get a different audience every time you tweet. For those who are big on retweeting, the highest retweet activity is late in the workday, between 2 and 5pm, with 4pm being the “tweetspot.”

Putting together a proper, timely social media and marketing schedule is critical to the business success of your facility. For more information on putting together a custom marketing and social media plan for your hospital, call Wax Custom Communications at 305-350-5700 or visit http://www.waxcom.com.

 

Posted in Healthcare Marketing, Integrated Marketing, Interactive, Marketing, Marketing Technology, Online marketing, Social Media | Tagged , , , , , | Leave a comment
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