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7 Reasons Why Your Pharma Brand Needs a Kickass Email Marketing Strategy

Some things are best done the old-school way, and email marketing is one of them.

I know you probably don’t agree with me.

I often hear pharma marketers say things like,

“Hey, I tried it, but email marketing didn’t work. I don’t think it’s for me.”

“Who uses email now? Everyone’s on Twitter and Facebook.”

Although I agree that social media is great, and you should, by all means, use it as a part of your digital marketing campaign, you should also understand that there’s no substitute for email marketing.

Social media is an informative medium, while email is a transactional medium. You can’t trade their places as each one has its own unique value proposition.

One of the foremost reasons why email marketing has been so effective over the years is that it helps you build relationships. It’s like someone sending you a personalized invitation. It makes you feel special and important.

In this post, I’m going to annotate all the reasons why email marketing still works, and why it’s still the most effective way of growing your pharma business online.

1. The Numbers Speak the Story

Did you know that there are almost three times as many email accounts in this world as all the social networks combined? Yes, a whopping 3.3 billion.

Why does it matter? Well, the numbers prove the fact that just like almost everyone has a postal address in the real world, everyone has an email address in the digital world.

Email is everyone’s digital footprint.

You may find a healthcare professional who’s not using social media or is unaware of digital advancements, but can you find anyone who’s not using an email account? It’s impossible.

2. No one Quits on Emails

Yes, no one quits on emails.

The popularity of social media may change with time; the readership of your blogs may subside; the search engine algorithms might get modified; but, emails are here to stay.

It’s the most simplified mode of communication. And I can bet my life on the fact that the digital world would cease to exist without it (Consider this stat: 185 billion emails are sent every day across the world).

Healthcare professionals rely on emails to solicit any product-related information. Patients use emails to subscribe to healthcare mailers and to stay connected with the online community.

The important factor, however, is not that people rely heavily on it, but the fact that there’s no substitute for email. It’s the most primal means of communication in the digital world and I cannot even think of quitting it. Can you?

3. Gives a Personalized Touch

Now, there’s a reason why email works so well here. It allows you to have one-to-one conversations with healthcare professionals.

When someone sends you an email, you know that you’ve been approached, and you like that fact. It makes you feel important. And if the email contains any information that you like reading, you’re more easily engaged.

With the help of email marketing, you can send personalized information instead of generic information.

If a healthcare professional likes watching videos over text content, you can put up some video links. If he likes doing extensive research, you can send an email with research papers.

Emails let you categorize a large set of audiences based on their personal preferences, and that I think is one of its greatest advantages.

4. Show that You Mean Business

You can have deep and engaging conversations over social media, but they’d mostly be informal. With email, you will take things to the next level, and score some extra brownie points!

Emails are the transactional medium for businesses. Hands down.

There’s no other alternative.

When you transact through emails, you’re building credibility for your actions. You give your audience a medium for direct and personal communication. You tell them that you’re just a mail away from everything they possibly want to know.

5. It’s Inexpensive and Saves Time

Unlike traditional marketing, where printing posters, manuals, and pamphlets for your marketing campaign can create actual costs, sending mailers and other product information through emails is rather inexpensive.

In fact, according to a recent study, it turns out that email marketing campaigns deliver the highest return on investment (Amount in sales v/s Amount spent on email marketing).

Apart from cutting down promotional expenses, they even help you save time. With the help of some of the email marketing tools, you can also automate responses and schedule emails.

 6.  Reach Mobile Customers Easily

According to a recent benchmark study, more than half of the email messages being delivered around the world are accessed through mobile devices. That’s not all. A recent survey also estimated the growth of the smartphone market that will go beyond 23,6 % and that there will be nearly 1.9 billion devices on the market.

Needless to say, healthcare professionals will now access the digital world through their mobile devices, and there’s no simpler way of communication than email. You can deliver engaging content and get instant responses, which makes it a powerful medium for pharma marketing.

7. Analyze Trends

One of the biggest advantages of email marketing that traditional pharma marketers can only dream of is the ability to see how a customer interacts with the content.

You now have a quantifiable way of understanding your audience’s preferences.

“Did your end-user open that mail?”, “If yes, which links did he click on? “, ”Which product did he buy?”, “Did he find the embedded content engaging enough? “What content made him unsubscribe? “

Every behavior and trend can be analyzed through solid email marketing metrics like Growth, Open Rate, Click rate, Unsubscribes, and many other analytical parameters.

When you understand what your audience prefers, you can create content that reverberates with your audience’s expectations.

Trend tracking gives you the power to orient your marketing efforts in the right direction and use relevant promotional and marketing strategies.

I think email marketing is the only mode of communication that’s private, personal, and promotional. It allows you to have one-to-one interactions with your customers and lets you understand your audience’s preferences without being too pushy.

I can’t think of any reason why you should not make it a part of your digital marketing strategy.

Did email marketing work for you? Or, do you think it’s dead?

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