I get it – you have a super-busy schedule and you just don’t have enough time to get things done. Even as you’re reading this sentence, your mind is probably racing through a million other things that are still pending on your to-do list. I understand that. Of course, you would not want to give up on it, because I’ve already explained in my previous blog post: “Why Your Pharma Brand Absolutely Needs a Kickass Email Marketing Strategy“.
But, then, there are some activities that take time — like drafting emails, responding proactively to customers, and running A/B tests. When you stack everything together, it becomes a little overwhelming, and you just wish there was a more simplified way to do it.
In this blog post, I’m going to explain how you can save hours of time by just following a handful of email marketing tips. They will help you to organize your email marketing campaign in a strategic way and will make your life a lot easier.
1. Plan it Out
When you start your email marketing campaign to promote your pharma brand, plan your content strategy for the whole year. But, be careful to not push yourself, here. Don’t make the mistake of over-committing and under-delivering.
Commit only to what you can achieve.
You should decide how frequently you’re going to continuously create, write and evaluate your email marketing campaign. And reserve enough time for it.
For instance, how frequently are you going to send newsletters?
As a rule of thumb, you should send at least one newsletter a month. But, not more than four. Your subscribers would either start losing interest or start unsubscribing.
The success of an email marketing campaign lies not in doing the right things, but in not overdoing the right things.
2. Design a reusable template
If you’re going to start with email marketing, you would want your email to look great and presentable all the time.
Your job would get much easier if you had a reusable template that you could integrate easily with each new content. It would save a lot of overhead that goes into designing and creating a new template for each new email. Apart from saving time, it would also allow you to have a consistent look-and-feel across all your emails.
For instance, if you have a consistent layout for all the emails that you send to healthcare professionals, they would instantly know where to find the actionable items, which would allow them to interact with the content in a better way.
3. Stick to a Schedule
I cannot emphasize this enough. A lot of pharma marketers start an email marketing strategy but fail to commit to their long-term plans.
Don’t do that.
Trust me, there’s nothing worse than not delivering what you promised.
Set deadlines upfront for your email marketing plan, and make sure to work enough to make it happen. Remember, don’t over-commit, but make sure to at least deliver what you commit.
I strongly believe that there’s no motivation like a deadline. So, create a monthly/weekly plan for all your emails, and make sure you’re sticking to it.
The easiest way to do this is, perhaps, to make it a habit.
Here’s what you can do:
Span out your email marketing activities across all days in a week. So, for example, every Monday, you write a draft version of an email. Every Thursday, you refine it and crunch it even further. Every Friday, you finally put the content in your template, and send it to your target audience.
Once you start sticking to a predefined schedule, you’ll automate your behavior and you should start getting things done with lesser effort.
4. Automate responses
Finally, I’m going to reveal my secret of saving tons of time with email marketing.
Use Autoresponders.
Autoresponders are a set of emails that you just set up once, and which get delivered automatically whenever a predefined event occurs– like a user subscribes to your blog, sends you an email, or asks for your contact information.
Any distinctly identifiable behavior can be configured to work with autoresponders.
The great thing about autoresponders is that they help you in building relationships by instantly acknowledging requests, and by taking that extra overhead of replying to your customers out of the equation. It can be a huge advantage, especially when your business starts growing and you start getting a lot of subscribers.
Wondering how to use autoresponders as a part of your email marketing strategy?
5. Measure Your Results
Sometimes, the worst thing you can do is not know where you’re going.
When it comes to email marketing, there’s no linear approach. You’ll have to figure out the right way only by making a lot of different choices, or as I call it through the trial-and-learn approach.
For instance, if you’re sending regular newsletters to healthcare professionals, but you’re not getting the desired feedback, you can analyze what you’re doing wrong by analyzing the key email metrics (Open Rate, Click Rate, etc.).
You can then switch to a different strategy, and see if that works.
I believe that if you spend less time doing the wrong things and more time doing the right things, you’ll end up at your destination sooner than you think. But in order to do that… you’ll have to constantly be in– what I call– the feedback loop.
You can use the tips mentioned above to streamline your email marketing strategy and use the time you save for more productive and creative aspects of your work.
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