Healthcare providers aren’t as accessible to MedTech reps as they once were. Hospital access has been restricted since Covid, office hours can be unpredictable, and even industry conference attendance is starting to dip. Emails are quickly becoming your best chance to get a foot in the door. But there’s no doubt you’ve heard over and over that nobody opens emails. So how are you supposed to resolve this conflict?
The simple answer is that you need to send good emails. But if creating good emails was that simple, everybody would be doing it. Let’s take a look at how AcuityMD can help you break out of the pack and target your provider prospects with emails that will make them sit up and pay attention.
70-80% of emails aren’t even opened. Of those that are, maybe 1-6% get a click. Unfortunately, this has led far too many reps to think, “Well, if I need 5 responses, I’d better send 300 emails.” There are multiple problems with this blanket approach, but chief among them is if you do happen to stumble into a click, chances are the body of your email doesn’t have much value to a healthcare provider, and those who clicked on your email once will make sure it was only once.
If your email is full of open-ended questions like “What is your current volume?” or “Are you looking to shift more of your cases to an ASC?” you’ve set up yourself for failure for multiple reasons:
The highest performing reps take a data-driven approach to learn as much as possible about your physician’s needs and challenges before they even think about their first draft. In the past, this has required a ton of legwork to pull in personalized details from disparate sources that didn’t even provide a high level of confidence that they were accurate. It’s understandable that a lot of reps didn’t think it was worth the effort if 7 out of 10 emails are instantly deleted. But that’s a bit of a chicken or the egg situation, isn’t it? Are healthcare providers prone to simply deleting all emails? Or have they been conditioned to assume all pitch emails are bad?
Research shows that 80% of consumers are more likely to do business with companies that offer personalized shopping experiences. According to Adobe, personalized emails have a 20% higher open rate, a 139% increase in click rate, and revenue gained is 5.7x compared to generic emails.
It’s clear that we need to personalize our emails. But how can we make it easier?
Let’s take a look at how AcuityMD can give you all of the information you need to craft hyper-personalized emails with just a few clicks.
First, knowing a given healthcare provider’s procedure volume is critically important to your sales pitch, because not only does it tell you if there’s actually an opportunity there, it shows the provider that you pay attention and care about their needs. If you send a surgeon who only does total knees a pitch for your latest uni-knee product, you’ve just put yourself on the permanent Do Not Open list.
With AcuityMD’s platform, if I want to target the fictional Dr. Gregory House for my knee replacement surgery product because he’s in my territory, I can easily find his total procedure volume broken down by site of care. Knowing how important case length is to maximizing ASC revenue, and that my new product reduces the time of a total knee replacement by 10%, I know I’m on to something.
But is that one detail enough to make my email stand out from the pack? Is a subject line of Reduce Knee Replacement Time by 10% compelling enough to get a click? Or can I go deeper?
Another hurdle I’m facing is that Dr. House has no idea who I am, has never heard of my new product or company, and has no idea if he can believe my claim about cutting case length by 10%. But he does have a peer network he knows and trusts.
Just by clicking into his Peer Network on AcuityMD, I see that Dr. House had the same residency as Dr. Jessica Blue. As luck would have it, I recently closed a sale with her and I know she is loving the results she’s seeing. Now I have a subject line of We Helped Dr. Jessica Blue Cut Case Length by 10%. I think my chances of that email getting opened are much better than the 20-30% industry average. And when I draft the body of my email around his procedure volume, his needs, and what my product can do for him, I know my chances of getting a response are significantly better than 1-6%.
But I’m not done yet.
We’ve got a hyper-personalized subject line and email copy. I love my chances of hearing back from Dr. House if he sees my email. So how do I make sure he does? Don’t overlook the importance of when you send your email. Send it at a time when you know he’s likely to be looking at his phone so he sees your notification come across. This study of billions of email sends revealed that Thursday at 10 am is the #1 time slot for email sends that get opened. Just make sure you know whether or not your HCP target has a case block at the time. Never send an email when a surgeon is in a case block. Not only do you run the risk of somebody else deleting your email before they even see it, at minimum they’re coming out of surgery to dozens of messages to sift through. Run down that top 10 list of best days and times until you find an opening that matches your target’s normal schedule.
Start with this technique this coming Thursday with emails to 5 of your top prospects and just see what happens.
Account Executive, AcuityMD
