Email Marketing is alive and well in the world of medical aesthetics. The fact remains: email communication is crucial for ensuring recurring and new visits from your patients. 

An effective med spa email marketing strategy keeps your practice at the forefront of your patients' minds. The aesthetics industry is very competitive, so you will need to keep your practice accessible and keep building connections with your new and existing patients. Email marketing can help increase patient loyalty while keeping your practice visible.

Emails need to have an impact. Crafting good emails can be challenging, but with a few fundamentals in mind, you will be well on your way to a great email marketing strategy. Read our top 10 tips below:

• A killer subject line: Your emails don’t matter unless they are opened—so well-written subject lines that make your audience want to click “open” are a fundamental element to email marketing success. Great subject lines make the receiver want to read more and peak their interest—this is your chance to let them know there is a deal, a new service, or remind them to come back without telling them too much.
• Great design: Design emails that keep your audience reading. Your emails should contain lots of eye-catching images that show off your practice, your treatments, and your specials.
• Clickable Content: Your content should draw users to your site. Make sure the content within your email is linked to relevant pages on your site that can give patients more information and increase the likelihood of them booking. The header of your email should lead users to your site and there should be a clickable call button towards the top of your email.
• Sending at the right time: Sending your emails at the wrong time can be detrimental to your marketing efforts. Even if you have a great email with a catchy subject line, it can get lost in patients’ crammed inboxes if it’s sent in the middle of the workday when they’re unlikely to read it. Send your emails when your users are most likely to open them right away and structure your emails around times when people are looking for promotions, such as holidays.
• Mobile optimized design: Many, if not most, patients are going to be opening and reading your emails from their smartphones—so it is essential that your emails are optimized for a mobile inbox. Email automation tools allow you to preview how your email will appear both on a desktop and mobile view.
• A call-to-action: All of your emails should encourage your readers to book right away. Make sure your emails include both your phone number and a link to a booking page.
• Send emails with a variety of information: The key to staying in your patients’ inboxes is by sending emails with purpose that cover a variety of topics. This means that if you send an email about specials or a specific promotion, your next email should cover something like information about your medical spa, testimonials, or education about a treatment. Make your emails consistent but engaging.
• Strong headlines for strong open rates: Even the best emails never get opened due to a poorly crafted headline. Write a great headline that compels the subscriber to open your email
• Images matter: Choose images that jump off the page and look great paired with content. Make sure the images are relevant. Also, don't forget the men. Most medical spas tend to forget to utilize images of men.
• Location, Hours and The Basics: Your email should have a footer or header that includes all of the basic information such as the hours, location and phone number of your medical spa.

You might be wondering if you should keep reading now that we've covered how to craft an effective email...but don't stop there! Beyond crafting individual emails, your practice should consider automating your email communications.

Why? As you set up  processes to send out emails in a systematic way, you will be able to nurture your generated leads into patients on a much larger scale.

But where to begin? Our leading marketing specialist, Becca Sudgen, goes into the process of converting to email automation below. Read on to learn our top 5 suggestions for amplifying and automating your spa email marketing.

The first step to email automation is to determine what information you already have. Begin by asking these questions of your marketing practice:
‍
1. What information do we have on current patients?
2. What information do we have on leads?
3. Where is the data being stored?
4. Where are our form entries being sent?

If you haven't been collecting this data, we suggest starting right away! Set up your forms to automatically send form submissions to a CRM, Email Provider, or an Excel/Google sheet. You will also need to be collecting patients’ emails, genders, dates of birth, and treatment interests to better segment your data.

Once you have collected your patient’s information, begin segmenting your data into different lists. As you study your segmented data, you will be able to target your marketing efforts more strategically. 

For example, pretend this was your medical spa's data segmented in the charts below. You can see that 40% of your practice’s visitors have received zero treatments. You could now strategically determine that emailing an amazing “discounted entry offer” might effectively engage this demographic that hasn’t yet committed to treatment. By segmenting your data, you can make informed, strategic marketing decisions that directly appeal to your individual patients.

Knowledge (of your patients) is power when it comes to strategic marketing. Collect and segment your data to know where to direct your efforts to convert the most leads.
‍

A prospective patient’s initial visit to your practice, whether in person or online, is a BIG DEAL.

Each new patient has the potential to generate a lifetime of interactions, and their influence can spread even further as they recommend your practice to their social circles.  Take the time to show them your appreciation for visiting, begin to build a relationship of trust, and encourage them to return to your practice by executing a targeted Welcome Series Email campaign. 

‍Before you send out the first email, make sure that your email subscribers have opted in and given consent to receive email marketing communication from your practice. Specifically, for medical and aesthetic practices that use an EMR, you should not begin sending emails to those patients unless they have given consent to receive email marketing communication. Train your receptionists to naturally ask for patient's emails and permission over patient phone calls.
‍
When this permission has been granted, we suggest sending out a series of welcome emails in this order after their initial visit:
‍
Thank you Email
2. Welcome Offer
3. “Who You Are” Email
4. Introduction of Your Team
5. Treatment Specialties
6. Patient Reviews

These Welcome Emails will help create a 5-star experience for your patients from the start. Make sure these initial emails showcase your key differentiators- the amazing aspects that set your practice apart from other practices. 

As your practice grows, you add new team members, and your menu of treatments expands, your welcome emails should be updated as well. 

*Expert tip: Schedule reminders to revisit your Welcome Series Emails every 6-12 months to keep them up to date!

Previous customers will always be the best demographic for acquiring new bookings. Timely emails, targeting the treatments they are most interested in, can put your practice back in the forefront of their minds and lead to rebookings.

Consider including a one-time promotion to encourage immediate bookings. A tempting discount value will often re-capture your patients’ attention and break through barriers to rebooking.
‍
You can either manually send out emails, or set up email marketing automation to send out reminders. For both routes, we suggest setting a recurring task every month to send out reminder emails. Then you will either need to manually pull patients’ emails, or set a workflow to trigger an email when patients’ last appointment was over 90 days previous with no future appointment on schedule. As your practice grows, we highly suggest cutting out time-intensive manual processes and switching to email automation.
Win back your dormant patients! Sometimes all it takes is a timely reminder email.

Does it ever feel like you are answering the same questions about treatments over and over? Reduce repetitive calls and increase bookings by including your leads in the workflow early on, supplying them with the helpful and informative emails they need.

The first step is deciding which contacts to enter into the workflow.  You can feel confident prospective patients would be interested if they filled out forms for a specific treatment on your website, expressed interest on in-office paperwork, or clicked one of your PPC Google ads for a treatment.
Make sure to provide specialized interest forms in a variety of different mediums to build your email list.

Once you have your email list, your workflow automation can begin to send out specialized emails for each interest group.

What should you include in these emails? Your emails can provide education on individual treatments, detail the procedure steps, address frequently asked questions, etc. Patients also appreciate quality before and after pictures to illustrate the benefits of a treatment. Always include an option to book an appointment at the end of the email.

It might feel overwhelming to create a series of educational emails for each treatment your practice offers. Start by creating workflows for 1 or 2 high-volume treatments, gauge the performance of these emails, and then add more as you grow.

Make sure that your patients are not included in multiple workflows. Your patients should not be receiving more than 1-2 emails a day.  Keep emails welcome and relevant to your patient’s interests by including them in the right workflow.

Do yourself and your patients a favor by educating them on the treatments and quality experience they will find in your medical or aesthetics practice.
‍
See this sample series of educational emails.

You’ve spent time and money acquiring your patients and leads--don’t let your contacts go without a fight, but also know when enough is enough. Put together workflow automation to try and re-engage your patients, before deciding to move on to more qualified prospects.
 
Create a series of 3-4 emails to try and re-engage your unengaged contacts. We suggest sending your first email with an incredible deal that expires soon. A limited-time deal will often prompt them to re-book. If there are no bites, we suggest waiting two days and then sending out an email to ask contacts to review their email preferences. Still nothing? After two more days, ask them for feedback before they go. Finally, we suggest a final goodbye email with an option to opt back in.
‍

It’s important to ultimately drop contacts off your list if they are no longer responding. Why? It’s all about protecting your “sending reputation.”

Understand that ISP’s (Internet Service Providers) are assigning your company a score largely based on the way your subscribers are responding to your emails. The higher your score, the more likely an ISP will deliver your emails; The lower your score, the more likely your emails will end up in SPAM. 
‍
When your database is clean, your emails will be better able to focus on your most qualified prospects. Do what you can to win your patients back, and then move on to greener pastures.

Take your practice to the next level with your email marketing campaign.

Commit to automating your emails to patients. Our email marketing specialist, Becca Sudgen, advises: “Start somewhere and grow from there. Your marketing automation can become more robust as you grow, and will continue to change depending on your goals!" Email automation, within a targeted campaign, will be worth any effort--and lead to less workload and higher returns in your practice's future.