Running Great Vet Email Campaigns (Our Top Tips)

If you’re a vet practice manager, owner, or marketer, you might already be contacting clients by email, either with practice news, appointment reminders, or clinical information. But have you considered the difference that a few great vet email campaigns could make to your practice and clients? In this article, we’ll cover the benefits of effective email campaigns in veterinary practice and the factors that contribute to vet email campaign success.

What are the benefits of vet email campaigns?

Wondering why a good email campaign is important for your vet practice or pet business? Here are just a few of the benefits:

Keeping clients engaged

As with any business, keeping your brand visible and regularly reminding your clients of your presence will help ensure that when they do need help or advice, you’ll be the first place they go. This means they’re less likely to try to source information from less reliable places, and they’re more likely to seek veterinary help early, rather than waiting until their pet’s condition worsens.

Encourage preventative medicine

Email campaigns are the perfect opportunity to promote preventative healthcare. Encouraging your clients to bring their pets in for flea control, worm treatment, vaccinations, and routine health checks, will help to keep them healthy and reduce avoidable illness, as well as being a source of revenue.

Provide client education

As veterinary professionals, we all want what’s best for the animal, and if time would allow, we’d spend additional time with every appointment answering extra questions and discussing general pet care in detail. However, with the time pressures that are inevitable in veterinary practice, we don’t always get the chance to say everything we would like to. Client emails allow you to give your clients in-depth information about common health conditions, nutrition, and other pet care topics that you might not have time to address in every consultation. What’s more, an email means the client has access to the written information and can reflect on it and process it in their own time – and knowing that clients don’t always retain everything that is said during a consultation, due to stress, distraction, and other factors, an email could be a good solution! One efficient way of working is to link your email content to your vet practice blog, so you don’t have to write too regularly!

Strengthen the vet-client bond

The best veterinary practices are built on good vet-client relationships based on mutual trust and respect. A great vet email campaign can demonstrate to your clients how much your practice cares about their pets’ health, which will strengthen your bond.

Establish client loyalty

Client loyalty is crucial to veterinary practices. After all, you may gain lots of new clients, but if they quickly move on to another practice with lower costs, an attractive pet health plan, or a special promotion, they may not be helping your business. An effective email campaign will inspire client loyalty as your clients get to know your practice and team.

What makes an effective vet email campaign?

Okay, so you’ve decided that making use of email communications at your practice is a great idea, but where do you start? Here are some tips to get you started on creating an effective email campaign:

Establish your goals

Email communications can serve lots of purposes – from client education to light-hearted team news. Before you design your email campaign, decide what content you want to deliver and what you are trying to achieve with it. Do you want to give information that inspires clients to talk to their friends and potentially gain you some new clients? Or perhaps you’ve had a string of lungworm cases in dogs and want to get more clients on board with using preventative treatment.

Use effective calls to action

Email communications can be great for generating traffic to your website, or even phone calls to your practice. With any effective email campaign, a specific call to action will tell the client what to do with the information you’ve given them, e.g., call the practice to make an appointment, book a nurse clinic, or find out more information on your website. By giving the client their next step, it’ll help turn casual browsing into action.

Provide value

These days, people’s email inboxes are full to the brim with newsletters and similar ‘subscription’ emails. To avoid your practice’s email getting lost in the mass of ‘junk’ that is instantly deleted by the client, make sure that your emails are valuable to the client. This could mean offering a discount on a flea and worm treatment, or it could just mean giving practical hints and tips regarding healthcare. Remember, most email campaign platforms will store information regarding how many people opened and clicked on your previous emails, so over time you can work out what appeals most to your clients.

Show your uniqueness

Another way to stand out from the crowd of mailing list emails is to show your practice’s uniqueness. Stick to your brand design in terms of font and colour scheme and keep the tone and information true to your practice’s values. Adding content introducing team members and including photographs will make sure clients feel part of the family.

Balance the tone and content

Balance is key when it comes to an effective vet email campaign. Sure, no one wants to read an email that’s too information-heavy and looks just like a veterinary textbook; but it’s also unlikely that they want their pet’s veterinary team to appear too light-hearted or unprofessional. Try to include a mixture of information and light-hearted news to keep your client interested as well as informed.

Struggling to find the time to run high-quality vet email campaigns?

Creating an email campaign isn’t easy and can take some time. If you know what your practice needs but don’t have the time available to achieve it, our team of veterinary writers can help create the perfect newsletter or email campaign to suit you. Get in touch to find out more.

Summary

These days, email campaigns are an important part of veterinary practice marketing, but they can also be useful for educating clients and establishing their loyalty. However, designing an effective email campaign that stands out from other emails that will be filling your clients’ inboxes isn’t easy. We hope that the tips above will help you get your vet email campaign up and running, showcasing your practice’s brand, values, and identity.