5 Highly Effective Healthcare Direct Mail Best Practices

It’s hard to put into words how nerve wracking trying out new marketing strategies can be. But the medical offices and providers who leverage the potential of healthcare direct mail marketing campaigns reap massive rewards in comparison to those who don’t. So if you aren’t aware of all of the different ways that your medical office can leverage direct mail, continue reading below. You’ll find all of the insights you’ll need to create a winning healthcare direct mail strategy that makes a lasting impact.

What is Healthcare Direct Mail Marketing?

Healthcare direct mail marketing entails using one of the most reliable methods, print mail, for getting important messaging across to patients and community members. An effective healthcare direct mail marketing strategy involves sending postcards, flyers, brochures or other types of mailers to a select audience with the goal of getting recipients to take action. When leveraged properly, healthcare direct mail can be essential to building trust, increasing foot traffic and improving your marketing ROI altogether.

Use Your Healthcare Direct Mail Materials to Showcase Your Patient Experience

It’s important to remember that direct mail campaigns are essential to developing and increasing brand recognition. One way to do that is by including artwork in your direct mail campaigns that makes skeptical recipients at ease with visiting you. Your direct mail materials are a prime opportunity to show off and differentiate yourself from the pack. With the right design elements, you’ll easily be able to make future patients eager to book an appointment with you. Here’s everything you need to make sure you include in your direct mail campaign designs:

• • Third Party Ratings & Reviews: If you collect reviews on Google or Yelp, don’t let those 5-star ratings go to waste by failing to include them in your mailers. Since most people don’t make decisions without reading reviews first nowadays, make life easy on your recipients by including them in your direct mail.
    
    
  • Patient Photos: You know the old saying, “a photo is worth a thousand words”. This couldn’t be more true than it is when it comes to healthcare direct mail. That’s because recipients may need a little extra push to be motivated to book an appointment. Including photos of happy visitors in your direct mail, could make it easier for prospective patients to forget about the nightmare experience they had at their last doctor’s visit. 
  • Testimonials: If you have patients who are willing to sing your praises, that places you in elite company. Including patient testimonials in your direct mail materials could play a pivotal role in building trust. Think about it this way, of course doctors want their community members to book appointments. But hearing reasons why recipients should book appointments with you from other patients could be exactly what it takes to get skeptical recipients to move forward and schedule an appointment.

If you’re new to direct mail, designing your first campaign on your own may seem like a heavy lift. If that’s the boat you’re in, let the award-winning creative team at GrowMail handle the design for you.

Send Direct Mail Materials to Keep Your Patients Informed Regarding Important Dates and Information

Direct mail campaigns are full of golden opportunities to build trust with your community. One of the best ways to use direct mail to increase trust is to use it to share vital information that most people are unaware of. Take Flu Season for example. Is there a particularly nasty strain going around? If so, sending a postcard informing your community about symptoms to be aware of with a call to action of “Schedule Your Flu Shot Today!” might do wonders for getting new patients through your doors.

Keeping your community informed about important dates is another way to use direct mail to build trust. Sending a postcard reminding recipients that the open enrollment period ends soon could be exactly what it takes to get people thinking about their health, leading them to book an appointment. Messaging regarding the importance of signing up for open enrollment before it ends could be instrumental in building trust with new potential patients, too.

Make The Process of Scheduling an Appointment By Adding QR Codes to Your Healthcare Direct Mail Pieces

Getting recipients of your direct mail to hang onto what you’ve sent is one of the biggest challenges marketers encounter. But there’s a simple trick to making your direct mail materials last. And it’s to make your direct mail material a fixture of your booking process. One of the best ways of doing so is by adding a QR code onto your direct mail piece. Here’s how it works:

Recipients will receive your vibrant, well-designed postcard with a reminder to book an appointment before summer vacation. And by adding a QR code onto your direct mail piece, recipients can easily open up the camera on their smartphones, scan it and navigate to your booking site to schedule their next visit. Since most people are busy and may not book right away, adding a QR code is a great way to get recipients to save your mailer for later – when they ARE ready to book an appointment.

Use Targeted Direct Mail to Connect With Your Ideal Patients

If your practice is aiming to attract a specific type of patient, targeted direct mail campaigns are ideal. That’s because GrowMail’s targeted direct mail software allows you to reach specific segments of your audience that are nearly impossible to reach using other marketing methods. Here are a few examples of the segments you can target:

• Married couples over the age of 60
• Married couples with at least 1 child (perfect for pediatricians!)
• Single women ages 18-40
• Married couples or single adults making $40,000 or less (Ideal for free clinics)

The amount of segments you can target using Growmail’s targeted direct mail technology may shock you. Getting started is easier than you think, too. To start your next targeted direct mail campaign, you can build your order here.

Track The Results of Your Direct Mail Campaigns

It’s hard to overstate how important it is to track the results of your direct mail campaign. One of the main benefits of direct mail marketing is that it provides a variety of ways to track success. Some of the ways you can measure the performance of your campaigns include:

• Use a Tracking Phone Number: 

By including a specific phone number different from the one you’d ordinarily use to book appointments in your direct mail materials, whenever recipients call and book using that number, it’ll track who and when they called. The attribution source will also be tracked, which in this case would be your postcard.

• Include a Unique Landing Page URL: 

Including a website link specific to recipients in your direct mail campaign can be effective for numerous reasons. Since the link will be specific to people that received your direct mail piece, you know that all the visitors will be sourced from your campaign. If they book an appointment using the unique landing page, you’ll be able to easily see how much revenue your direct mail campaign has generated.

• Manual Tracking: 

Tracking the results of your direct mail campaign is simple. Let’s say you execute a direct mail campaign at the beginning of the month. Once you begin getting phone calls from patients asking to book appointments, if they’re a new patient, ask how they heard of your office. If they say it was from your postcard, voila! Simply log the patient’s name and appointment date into a spreadsheet and you’re done. It’s important to ask for every single patient if you choose to track manually though. This makes manually tracking your campaign a bit more involved than the others.

Start Your Healthcare Direct Mail Journey Today With GrowMail!

If you’re eager to begin your direct mail journey, there’s no time like the present to get started. The marketing specialists at GrowMail have more than 20 years of experience helping marketers like you make the most of healthcare direct mail campaigns. To find out why so many medical providers continue to rely on GrowMail for their campaigns, contact GrowMail today.

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