How To Leverage Email For Your Veterinary Clinic
Reading Time: 3 minutes
When you have important news or updates to share with your clients or referring veterinary clinics, how do you get the word out? Fax, email, text, social media, or use an app?
Several digital tools can help your specialty or referral practice instantly communicate with your pet parents and the veterinary community. But what is the best mode to communicate with your audiences? Well, it depends on your resources (time, budget, talent to develop copy/design) and your audience – are your clients tech-savvy enough to know how to download and use an app? Does your staff have the bandwidth to monitor online messages? Are your referring practices still in the dark ages and using fax? (Please say no!)
Here at BluePrints, we strongly encourage our clients to send out coordinated and frequent emails to their pet parent and referring veterinarian audiences. Why? Because most adults consistently check email daily, and yes, that includes millennials. So, go where your audience is – in their inbox!
What is an E-blast?
An e-blast or e-newsletter is the same email sent to a group of individuals from a company, designed through an email marketing tool like MyEmma, MailChimp, or Constant Contact. You might be reading this because you received BluePrint’s monthly e-blast, Marketecture Digest.
What Type of Information Should We Share?
E-blasts are different than appointment reminders or follow-ups but serve more as a digital newsletter. They can be brief or robust.
For pet parents, the content can include highlighting a particular service or doctor, feature testimonials, pet parent education, administrative changes, etc.
Click here for a pet owner e-blast example.
For referring veterinarians, the content can include case-studies, upcoming CE events, new specialist/veterinarian/services, etc.
Click here for an e-blast for referring veterinarians.
Also, e-blasts are a great tool to share immediate or breaking news. During the COVID-19 era, we suggest sending weekly updates to your communities to inform them that your practice is still open and offering curbside services, offering telehealth, or has resumed to in-person clinic visits, etc.
Click to view the e-blast from our client, Burlington Emergency Veterinary Specialists.
How Often Should We Send Emails?
The e-blast schedule is dependent on your clinic’s bandwidth and content. First, we recommend developing an e-blast calendar with the list of topics for each month/quarter (whichever schedule you prefer). Planning allows your team to gather the content needed for each e-blast.
Schedules can either be weekly, monthly or quarterly but whatever you choose, make sure it is consistent.
Who Receives an E-blast?
Email marketing tools not only allow you to design the e-blast (photos, illustrations, copy, links to your website) but create different audience lists. For example, you can have a list for clients, referring veterinarians, and even categorized by department.
Most practice management tools allow you to download/export your client lists, and then you can import them into your preferred email marketing tool. We recommend to carefully update those lists each month to remove former or unhappy clients. And be mindful of removing clients who have had pets that have passed, unless you know for sure that they have other pets at home.
For referring veterinarians, you can add the emails from your referral clinics, but make sure it’s to a veterinarian and/or someone in leadership instead of info@ABChospital.com. We strongly encourage you to always update your email lists in your preferred email marketing tool before you schedule or send out the e-blast.
E-blasts can be an excellent and efficient method to communicate with your targeted audiences. If you need assistance in developing an e-blast calendar, email campaign, or general help with messaging to your community, contact us!