In part one of this three-part blog series, we looked at:
- Why seasonal pet health email campaigns can help increase profitability for your practice and ultimately improve pet health
- How effective pet health email campaigns can easily be created using LifeLearn ClientEd articles, which can be used for more than single post-appointment handouts. Comprising one of the industry’s largest and most trusted pet health libraries, ClientEd articles can be used proactively as grouped information to create pet health email campaigns to help increase appointments.
- How to perform a simple search in ClientEd to find articles for your campaign, and how to save your searches to send email campaigns either directly from the ClientEd portal or from your office email system.
If you missed part one of this blog series, click here
Once you’ve gathered articles that support your pet health email campaign, the next step is to drop those links into an email with a subject line and short content that provides a timely and compelling reason for pet owners to open the email and click those links to ultimately make an immediate appointment with your practice.
Here’s why the word “compelling” is accentuated in the previous paragraph and why this particularly applies to email subject lines:
The Email Subject Line
Email is a very competitive medium where you only have seconds to grab someone’s attention. According to the Radicati Group, people worldwide received an average of 96 emails per day in 2019. Just like in a busy practice, time is always at a premium for people. To maximize their time, people first decide what emails they want to discard before moving on to the emails they want to read, and they commonly make that decision based on the subject line alone.
To better ensure their emails get read, email marketers have long followed a basic guideline when writing subject lines:
The job of the email subject line is not to make the sale. The #1 job of the subject line is to compel the open.
Veterinary teams may not be in the business of traditional email marketing. Yet they are in the business of pet health care and increasing appointments for improved practice profitability. If pet owners don’t read practice emails, pet health care and practice profitability suffer. So, the overall sensibility of subject lines followed by email marketers also applies to pet health email campaigns.
Don’t give pet owners all the information they need in a subject line to decide on the spot that they can trash the email because they know what it’s all about, as in the following example:
Vaccinate your pet today against rabies
Vaccinations are certainly important to help protect pets from the risk of potentially serious and even fatal diseases like rabies. Yet the subject line is a compliance demand, and some pet owners may be skeptical or outright against pet vaccination (or just don’t like being told what to do). Moreover, some pet owners may decide that rabies really isn’t a risk in their area. Overall, the subject line provides many pet owners with all the information they need to hit the Delete button before opening the email.
Contrast this to another example subject line about vaccination:
3 reasons why summer pet vaccinations matter
This subject line does not demand pet owners to do anything. Rather, the subject line entices pet owners to open the email through three compelling ingredients:
- Value: For pet owners who may be skeptical or resistant to pet vaccinations, the subject line plays on doubts by informing readers that the email contains three reasons why vaccinations matter.
- Urgency: The subject line is not about any old vaccinations. The subject line mentions summer vaccinations, which lends urgency to reading an email immediately if it’s part of a summer email campaign.
- Intrigue: The overall subject line is an unanswered question. To discover why summer pet vaccinations matter, the reader must click open the email.
The Email Body
The email body is a congruent extension of the subject line. No matter what your pet health campaign is, the purpose of the email body is to get pet owners to click on the ClientEd article links that support your campaign and ultimately influence pet owners to make an appointment with your practice. To accomplish this, you must immediately answer a certain blunt and seemingly hostile two-word pet-owner question: “So what?”
Here’s an example of how to do that:
Subject Line: 3 reasons why summer pet vaccinations matter
Email Body—Opening Paragraph:
With summer in full swing, pet owners often forget the importance of vaccinating their pets against the risk of potentially serious and even fatal diseases like rabies, which reaches a seasonal peak in summer and is commonly carried by raccoons, skunks, foxes, and other animals commonly encountered while camping, hiking, or just taking a walk in the park.
Are your pet’s vaccinations up to date?
If not, here are three reasons why summer pet vaccinations matter.
ClientEd article: Rabies in Dogs
ClientEd article: Indoor Dogs and Infectious Diseases
ClientEd article: Indoor Cats and Infectious Diseases
Contact our clinic today to make sure your pet’s vaccinations are up to date.
The opening paragraph doesn’t begin in a self-serving way. Rather, the email begins in the vein of public service by reminding pet owners that they may have forgotten certain timely pet vaccinations. To reinforce why summer pet vaccinations are important (meaning to answer the “So What?” question), the email next offers three links to three ClientEd articles about why pet vaccinations matter.
Only then does the email call pet owners to make an immediate appointment with your practice.
In our next blog, we’ll tell you about time-saving apps that allow you to easily schedule and send emails. We’ll also show you how a simple pet health email campaign helps drive improved traffic to your practice website.
To avoid missing this three-blog series, now is a good time to subscribe to the LifeLearn newsletter (if you haven’t already done so).
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You don’t want to miss this series to increase practice appointments with simple seasonal pet health email campaigns.
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