Email Marketing for Pharmacy - The Ultimate Guide
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Email Marketing for Pharmacies – The Complete Guide

Attention is an opportunity for relationship building, identifying problems, and presenting solutions. A well-planned email campaign gets you regular attention and the results that follow.

 

Sending emails requires email addresses to send them to. It also requires permission to comply with GDPR. We covered this in our article on Data Collection for Pharmacies, so we won’t include it here. But it’s definitely worth checking out if you’re serious about emails for your pharmacy.

 

 

Email Marketing for Pharmacies – Where to start

 

Probably the first thing to establish in your own head is that email has replaced post for most people. Mail used to be the primary form of communication to people. But the world has changed. If I wrote someone a letter nowadays, I wouldn’t expect a response within a week at least. There’s no interaction or functionality with a letter. I can’t touch it and visit a website. I don’t have to store it safely in my house if I want to refer back to it later. It’s expensive and time-consuming and it just can’t do what emails can.

That doesn’t mean there’s no room for letters in a marketing campaign, but if you sent letters as regularly as you sent emails, it would cost you a fortune and you’d probably get complaints. It’s a lot easier to delete an email than it is to throw away a letter.

 

digital button for email marketing for pharmacies

Email Marketing for Pharmacies by Pharmacy Mentor

 

The benefits of Email Marketing for Pharmacies

Email marketing isn’t flash or showy, and that’s generally why it’s underused. It’s private, so it never really gets the publicity of a popular social media post, or a glamorous TV ad. Out of sight, out of mind. But here’s why it should be on your mind and on your to-do list…

Inexpensive

Even if you value time and have us do it, our admin fee and your email software are the only costs. There’s no additional budget necessary. Compared to paid marketing, another fantastic customer acquisition tool, email marketing is inexpensive and generally performs better than any other form of marketing for the investment.

Targeted

Splitting your customer base up to personalise and tailor your emails.

For instance, customers who come in for clinical services may not have prescriptions. If you’re sending them emails about prescriptions, they may unsubscribe. The same is true for any irrelevant communications. There’s only so much attention people pay to things that aren’t relevant to their interests.

Trackable

With most email software, you can track the number of opens, link clicks, and unsubscribes. All these help analyse the effectiveness of the emails. So if something isn’t working, you know about it and adapt. And if it is working, you continue doing what works. Combine this with Google Analytics on your website, and you can track where your website traffic comes from. Since marketing effectiveness varies for a whole host of reasons, tracking and analysis are massive.

Convenient for mobile and desktop users

Your market consists of both older and younger generations, each with their own preference for devices and software. Almost everyone has an email address and when people check their emails, they often have more time on their hands. (Checking emails replaces the time that less mail through the door has saved, which people only did when they have time to read full letters.)

Regular + Relevant = Revenue

For memory’s sake, you can break down the three key things you want from an email campaign into 3 R’s. Here’s why.

regular add relevant equals revenue

Regular

This doesn’t mean every day. Regular means predictable, and as you’d expect. I might expect to hear from a pharmacy once every two weeks. But if I signed up for a holiday deals bulletin, I expect a daily roundup of any deals. The right amount of emails for one person might be too many for another. Like anything in marketing, it’s worth testing to see where the sweet spot is in your audience.

Of course, you could have a great one-off email you send out and then not send another one all year. This isn’t a failure, but it’s not maximising success.

Relevant

In other words, not spam. Spam targets everyone and hopes it’s relevant for some people. You want your marketing lists as relevant as possible. You can segment your mailing list to maximise relevance. People engage more when they feel an email is really speaking to them as an individual. Targeting women for a period delay service? If you segment your mailing list, you can talk in a way women respond to, but men wouldn’t.

Revenue

If you’re not getting revenue, you might as well not show up. It’s last because you need the first two before you get it. But ultimately, revenue is the main reason you’re marketing in any form. Using call-to-actions is key here. Fortunately, people are familiar with taking action after reading an email, so you’re playing into an already existing mindset.

As with all aspects of your marketing, you want to be proactively pushing the right services at the right time. It’s no good promoting flu jabs in July. We have a Pharmacy Marketing Calendar which we use to develop strategies for your pharmacy if you need help structuring your campaigns.

Online Payments

If you’re not already set up to take online payments – you should be. Not accepting payments online nowadays is the equivalent of not having a card machine. You lose out on so much customer spend because you can’t take their money the way they want to give it.

 

Ready to adopt email marketing for your pharmacy?

 

Get in touch! We can help with everything you need to get started, including which software works best for pharmacies.

We don’t just preach this stuff, we practice it! Subscribe to our newsletter for regular updates, including articles like this one and see how we run our own emails. Be sure to check your email for confirmation and always check our Privacy Policy before signing up. 

 

 

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Data Collection for Pharmacy
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Data Collection for Pharmacies – An Unexplored Goldmine

Sometimes the path of improvement for your pharmacy is obvious. Struggling with too many phone calls? Let people communicate with you online instead. Need to increase your revenue? Start offering private clinical services. But sometimes there are things that can drastically improve your fortunes that don’t immediately spring to mind.

Communicating with people when they’re not in your physical location was, once upon a time, a tricky accomplishment. Often costing hundreds of pounds every time you did with ads on TV, Radio or in the newspaper, or physically sending someone letters, which costs P&P. Data collection for pharmacies and squeezing the value out of the data with technology has changed the game.

Data collection for pharmacies

How to collect data in a pharmacy

An Unexplored Goldmine

This is the usual scenario in a pharmacy…

  1. A person walks into the pharmacy
  2. That person comes and collects a prescription or buys something over the counter
  3. The person walks out of the pharmacy

If that person experienced great customer service, it’s likely that they will come back again. But who knows? They’ve got the Amazon app and it might just be a bit more convenient for them to do what they needed to do online. This issue is once they have left your pharmacy, how are you going to make sure you can continue communicating with them so that they continue using your services?

Of course, social media helps massively and making sure you’re services are plastered over Google, but these are not direct or personal forms of communication. This is where intervening in the above scenario is key and represents a gold mine for pharmacy.

How many people have walked into your pharmacy in the last 10 years? 10,000’s. That’s 10,000’s of opportunities to intervene and collect the data from a customer/patient to communicate with them digitally and directly thereafter.

But what data do you collect?

In an ideal scenario, you want to collect:

  • Name
  • Email
  • Telephone
  • Address
  • Gender
  • DOB
  • Weight
  • Height
  • Services they are interested in

As you can imagine, this information for your pharmacy is extremely useful when targeting certain demographics with the various services you provide and the products you sell.

But how do you go about collecting people’s data?

Data & Permission

You can’t email someone without their contact details, or their permission to contact them in line with GDPR. So how do you get both?

Easy. Ask for it. Saam, Pharmacy Mentor’s CEO, used to have a simple script he’d use every single time when working as a pharmacist.

“Hey Mr. Smith, we’re trying to improve communication at the Pharmacy, would you mind filling in this form whilst you wait?”

No one ever said no. That form can be a paper form or you can have a pre-populated form on Mailchimp or a similar subscription tool. With that one simple form, you can get their details and permission to contact them directly and build up an email list over the years that can have a direct impact on patient retention and business revenue.

But that seems a bit slow to grow?

How many people come in to collect their prescriptions every day? Conservatively speaking, collecting 20 sets of contact details every day gives you a list of 400/month. That’s a lot of attention. You’re in a unique position as a community pharmacy that people aren’t skeptical of leaving you their details.

Hotel Chocolat, Hugo Boss, they offer discounts on their products just to get their hands on the customer emails. That’s how valuable contact details are for big brands. And why do they do it? Because targeting customers with special offers around Valentine’s Day and Christmas, or letting them know when there is a sale on, makes them money.

Next week we’ll be releasing an article on making the most out of email marketing for pharmacies. But for now, start growing your mailing list!

Websites and Email Opt-ins…

Data collection doesn’t stop in your physical pharmacy either. Your website can host more visitors than your physical pharmacy. The same concept applies to any visitor. How are you making sure they come back?

Email opt-in forms on your website capture visitors’ information whilst they’re on your site. Utilising pop-up windows to capture visitor information works well, especially when paired with an incentive to sign-up. Pairing a Pharmacy Mentor website with our email marketing campaigns is a great way to get an email list up and running quickly.

Loyalty Schemes

This is a slightly separate tactic, though it’s related to Data Collection. It’s all about capturing the person who’s walked into your pharmacy and making sure they come back to you. That way you grow your revenue and stay in business. Sell a man some Bonjela, you’ll remove his toothache for a day. Sign him up to your loyalty card whilst you’re doing it, and you’ll remove his toothache for life. Because now he’ll come back when you target him with your special offers on Bonjela.

There’s only one word required to convince you of the power of a loyalty scheme in pharmacy…Boots. Their Advantage card lives in the memory as one of the first. Since 1997, it’s offered customers money off for returning to their stores. It’s one of the biggest loyalty schemes in the UK. So why wouldn’t you want to copy that?

Upfront costs of loyalty schemes

Boots invested £30million into their Advantage scheme. There’s a small chance you think that’s too much? But there are solutions for small businesses.

Swipii is a loyalty card app for local businesses, without the upfront cost. Instead, you get charged a percentage when people take advantage of the cashback offers. As always, a smaller profit on a sale is better than no profit on no sale. There are multiple options out there offering similar solutions, some may suit your pharmacy more than others.

As the title of this article suggests, these are just the sparkling nuggets sticking out of the rock in the goldmine that is Data Collection for pharmacies.

Want to stay up-to-date on the latest and greatest ways of growing your pharmacy business? Subscribe to our newsletter for regular updates, including articles like this one. Be sure to check your email for confirmation and always check our Privacy Policy before signing up. 

 

 

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nextdoor social media app on pharmacy mentor phone
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3 indisputable reasons you should use Nextdoor for your Pharmacy

You might think Nextdoor is just another social media app, and too much like hard work to adopt. Here’s why you should reconsider using Nextdoor for your pharmacy…

Why use Nextdoor for your Pharmacy? So much of the internet is engineered for remote, geographically neutral business. You buy without ever meeting anyone or even leaving your home. Most social media & online apps are focus on connecting you to communities based on interest, rather than proximity.

This works in the mainstream because there is more that connects us than living in the same area.

But living in the same area does connect us. If living through a lockdown has taught us anything, it’s to appreciate the things on our doorstep.

Nextdoor specialises in local community

Harnessesing the power of local in a simple way that most other apps don’t, Nextdoor specialises in connecting local people and takes it to the next level. They’ve recognised how popular those local neighbourhood groups you get on Facebook are, and based their entire app on making that experience as good as it could be. Instead of one page where everyone is talking about everything, you’ve got local interest groups, events, and Local Deals – all of which you can take advantage of as a pharmacy.

nextdoor features you can use as a pharmacy

The range of features on Nextdoor.

1. It’s for Local People & Local Businesses

The challenge for small businesses with big social media platforms like Facebook & Instagram is how over-populated and commercialised they are. Nextdoor isn’t overcrowded. There isn’t so much noise that it’s hard for anyone to get heard. Nextdoor is about connecting local communities with local events and news.

This is what attracts the attention of so many users. Look at this local community facebook page and see how active it is (and this is just a village). Nextdoor plays on this popularity. When you want to advertise your services, you want attention from a relevant target audience. A Community Pharmacy should be at the heart of every neighbourhood on Nextdoor, because Nextdoor gives you both.

The competition and standard on Nextdoor from businesses is…practically zero, especially compared to Facebook. In fact, in my neighbourhood, the only actual business set up and using it in the right way is a local pharmacist.

As an added bonus, to sign up for Nextdoor, users must enter their address and verify their mobile phone number. This means Nextdoor doesn’t suffer from anonymous, spam, or abusive accounts, so you won’t get the type of negative comments you sometimes see on Facebook or Twitter.

2. It’s Word of Mouth, Online

Word of mouth – often touted by business owners as the best form of marketing. There’s certainly nothing like other people recommending your business. You can shout about how great you are, but coming from an independent source means twice as much.

People in the community are constantly asking for recommendations. Whilst you can be recommended regardless of whether or not you’re on Nextdoor, people can link your profile when recommending you. Your profile keeps all your recommendations, so people see how trusted you are in the community. This separates you and the competition when you’re both receiving recommendations.

These community pages are often untapped for the targets that matter most, like EPS & delivery sign-ups. You can advertise this as well as waiting for recommendations.

3. An Active, Engaged Audience

Nextdoor doesn’t have anywhere near as many active users as Facebook, but Facebook is a diverse crowd. Some people Facebook to post pictures, others to catch up with friends. In fact, very few people go on Facebook to keep up with the businesses on there! It just happens you can attract their attention whilst they’re there. Nextdoor is about what’s going on in the local community. It’s about finding the best places to go in the area. Showing up to people on Nextdoor has a higher chance of converting into paying business, because that’s often why people are there in the first place.

The Local Deals is the PERFECT place to promote any clinical services you offer. It’s basically like Groupon, but for local businesses. Just by discounting your service slightly, you’ll get free exposure and advertising in the Local Deals section and attract markets that wouldn’t otherwise find you.

nextdoor local deals section

The Local Deals section on Nextdoor – criminally underused by businesses. This is an opportunity for instant visibility to people with purchasing intent.

There’s also a functionality where you can create a local interest group. Because you register as a person before you register your business, you could start a “Health & Wellbeing” focus group in there for people interested in staying healthy. As a trusted pharmacist, you can use your personal brand to enhance your pharmacy’s reputation by offering relevant advice and products to your community when they’re asking questions about it.

The time is now to use Nextdoor for your Pharmacy

Nextdoor #4 Top Free Apps in Social right now, with over 10 million downloads. The app is absolutely on people’s radar right now. How long it remains so is the question always asked of any new popular app. But that doesn’t matter. Opportunities don’t have to last forever to be opportunities. Right now, people in your community are on Nextdoor. It’s so under-utilised by businesses right now, that Ad-spend and organic reach are through the roof value for money.

If Nextdoor is only hot right now, then now is exactly when you want to be utilising the attention. If Nextdoor rises in popularity, then now is the perfect time to establish yourself before there’s any competition. Either way, now is the right time to sign up to Nextdoor.

Unsure of how you’d use the app?

Speak to our support team today about our Nextdoor management. We’ll employ the same tactics we generate results for other pharmacies with, giving you the best representation possible in your community.

TIP: When signing up for your Nextdoor account, visit the email notifications. You don’t want an email every time Mary from Manchester Road thinks her cat is missing.

Get all the latest and greatest ways of growing your pharmacy business by subscribing to our newsletter. Be sure to check your email for confirmation and always check our Privacy Policy before signing up.

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the pharmacy mentor team working from home
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Pharmacy Mentor, Uninterrupted. Our service during COVID-19 – How we’re working for you

Our level of personal service hasn’t changed, but we’ve improved our processes. And they’re here to stay.

We avoided most of the disruption caused by COVID-19 globally. Pharmacy Mentor was already set up in a way that lends itself to remote, digital working. Most changes we made are more a result of growth than the pandemic.

Though we’re fully remote until we can get back to the office, the work ethic of our team remains strong. We use Slack for immediate internal communications, meaning issues are still solved promptly and efficiently. The only thing we miss is interacting with each other at the office.

Our Improved Customer Service Process

Pharmacy Mentor focuses on providing an excellent standard of customer care. Previously we’ve managed this through direct support channels like Telegram & WhatsApp. where every client gets a dedicated channel upon signing up for a service with us.

With our team and client base growing, however, this needed streamlining.

Our new Support Portal guarantees your request is logged and follows a rigid protocol of action and double-checks. meaning your request is efficiently and accurately dealt with.

  • Sales & Upgrades
  • Technical Support
  • General Enquiries

Getting in touch with us hasn’t changed

If you aren’t already a client, then you can get in touch through either Contact Us or the LiveChat on our website.

If you are a client, you can still get in touch with us in all the usual ways: Email, Whatsapp/Telegram, or booking a call through Calendly with the team member you need.

Transparency in how we work on your projects

We’ve shored up other internal processes so they’re manageable remotely. This actually works better because everyone in the company has visibility over exactly which stage a project is in. For clients, this means if they want to know timescales or where their project is up to, we can give answers with a high degree of detail, even if the person working on the project isn’t available to discuss it.

Want to stay up-to-date on the latest and greatest ways of growing your pharmacy business? Subscribe to our newsletter for regular updates, including articles like this one. Be sure to check your email for confirmation and always check our Privacy Policy before signing up. 

 

 

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