By understanding the world nurses live in, marketers can craft email campaigns that don’t just land in inboxes – they land with impact.
It would be hard to imagine a profession in the world that is busier than nurses. In addition to their long workdays, handover of patients, education updates, and stress of dealing with sick people, nurses rarely have time for something that is unrelated to what they are doing. Therefore, for marketers of the healthcare industry, the task of creating an email marketing nurture program for such an important yet unreachable audience is difficult.
The solution is not about sending more emails. It’s about sending better and more respectful ones.
Know Who You’re Actually Talking To
Not all nurses are the same. The travel nurse trying to balance multiple shifts between states faces different challenges from the experienced intensive care unit nurse manager working at a teaching facility or the school nurse handling multiple schools within a district. Even before writing a single email, successful nurture campaigns must begin with thorough audience segmentation.
Segmentation can include, at the very least, specialization (medical-surgical, oncology, pediatrics, emergency, perioperative); care environment (hospital, home health, long-term care, outpatient clinic); career life cycle (entry-level, mid-life, advanced practice); and professional function (registered nurse, nurse manager, educator, clinical nurse leader, nurse practitioner, chief nursing officer). Each category has its unique challenges, aspirations, and purchasing power – and your emails should address these differences explicitly.
A perioperative nurse will appreciate emails that highlight the stressors related to surgery scheduling and adherence to the sterile field. The novice nurse will connect with content that addresses the worries associated with the first year of nursing practice. Generic content will earn quick deletion into the wastebasket.
Lead With Value, Not With Asks
However, the key principle in any nurture strategy is to provide more value than what one takes from prospects. In this regard, every email sent to nurses as part of a sequence must contain information that would be useful and valuable to them whether they get insight about clinical practice or career development, learn how to save their time, gain knowledge about a specific issue, or learn some tricks that they will be able to use at work.
For example, when considering the questions asked by nurses through Google search after an exhausting workday at 11 pm, one could ask oneself: how can I avoid getting burned out while remaining a bedside nurse? What is the best way to deal with compassion fatigue? How can I handle difficult conversations with physicians? Are there any recent studies on the prevention of pressure injuries?
The answer to just one of those questions in an email format that is short and precise would build a degree of credibility that could serve as the basis for future engagement and, eventually, conversion. Therefore, in case you are promoting your healthcare staffing service, start with an article on negotiating travel nurse contracts.
Respect the Inbox and the Clock
It is crucial to know that timing is everything when it comes to nurses. While office employees check their emails at various times during the course of the workday, many nurses work opposite or even totally different hours than those followed by other professionals. The most probable time for nurses working night shifts to check emails would be late morning once they have rested.
The use of behavior metrics – opening, click times, device information can make the sending of emails happen precisely when individual recipients are most engaged. In case of general distribution, mornings on weekdays (between 10 a.m. and 11 a.m.) might yield acceptable results; however, this will depend on your particular Nurses Email list. Send time testing is vital.
A good subject line has to perform exceptionally in an already busy inbox. Nurses will get messages from organizations, labor unions, scheduling services, and personal contacts all fighting for their attention simultaneously. The best way to write a subject line is to make it specific, intriguing, or useful to the recipient. For example, “3 Ways to Document Faster Without Compromising Accuracy” will beat out “Our New Documentation Method” hands down.
Keep your emails brief. Nurses simply don’t have the luxury of spending half their day on one email message in the morning or when they’re waiting on lab results. Make sure you keep your emails concise, stating your premise, value, and call to action clearly.
Build a Sequence That Mirrors a Real Relationship
Nurturing campaigns cannot be reduced to a single email. They are conversations conducted over time, which establish connections and build trust. The structure of the emails plays a critical role.
The following could be a structure of a campaign targeting nurses:
- The first email should introduce a valuable resource to start a conversation. For example, a relevant book or course.
- The second one may include some peer-generated content – a case study, an article, or a nurse’s story.
- The third email will further engage the nurse by introducing additional useful material or inviting to a webinar.
- The fourth message would involve a gentle promotion – an advertisement mentioning some product but from the perspective of the nurse’s interest in it.
- And finally, the fifth email should include a call to action offering something for free or at a very low cost.
It should be noted that when engaging nurses, the use of corporate language is inappropriate. Nurses expect authenticity, which means that the emails should be written using a conversational tone without too much formality.
Measure What Matters
Open rates are your indication of subject line success. Click rates are your measure of relevancy. However, with nurture programs targeting nurses, it’s worthwhile to investigate further: What specialty groups have the most interaction? What content topics generate the highest click-to-open ratio? At what point does disengagement occur in the email series?
Such information should continually guide your campaign development. A successful first-month program needs to be substantially different in the sixth month based on engagement results.
Final Thought: Earn the Relationship
A nurse’s life revolves around caring for others, sometimes even at great sacrifice to themselves. Those brands and companies who are able to develop a true connection with this demographic are the ones who know this well, sending each email not as a way to market their product, but to return the favor.
With an outreach program like this, engagement becomes inevitable.