Email marketing remains highly significant and should never be overlooked in an online marketing mix. The direct line to a person's online inbox and the fact that interested parties have consciously subscribed to a newsletter and thus already show some interest is a unique selling point that should not be underestimated.

Especially in the healthcare sector, physicians face the challenge of constantly staying up-to-date with medical developments, therapies, and technologies. A newsletter tailored to one's own field of expertise and personal needs and interests saves a lot of time in everyday life and is gratefully accepted.

Most of the time, the potential of an email campaign on the sender's side is not fully exploited. Lack of evaluations and the resulting imprecise and somewhat intuitive optimization processes often lead to the assumption that email marketing does not deliver the desired performance and is less relevant for medical professional groups today.

We often encounter email campaigns where mass emails are sent, ending up in spam folders and never being read. A first glance frequently shows that the reporting and metrics of the email marketing tools are typically not even used. Most email marketing solutions offer a range of metrics to analyze and evaluate sent campaigns. These metrics range from open and click-through rates to measuring bounce rates. These figures are suitable for comparing different newsletter editions over time and drawing conclusions on the relevance of topics or even just the headlines used. Generally, however, these evaluations only take place within the newsletter itself, leaving a large and crucial part of the customer journey unconsidered.

However, how the customer journey continues after the newsletter and whether the intended conversion aimed at by the newsletter is triggered on the website can only be measured on the website itself. Conversions on a website can, for example, be contacting through a form, downloading a medical professional article or whitepaper as a PDF, clicking on a symposium video, or directly inquiring with customer service. Only by linking the website analytics tool with the newsletter software can all call-to-action elements on the website be measured, and you keep track of the extent to which the sent newsletter has contributed to triggering the desired conversions. This way, you have the opportunity to accurately identify the origin of website visitors and assign conversions to particular newsletters and even specific content elements within a newsletter. In this manner, the effectiveness of individual campaigns can be thoroughly evaluated, and optimization potentials for future campaigns can be uncovered.

Ideally, all channels come together in the website analytics tool, and you also receive meaningful comparative values. Without much effort, the performance of, for example, Google Ads, social media campaigns, or SEO activities can be compared with the newsletter campaigns. Considering the costs for activities in individual channels, sensible decisions can be made for future measures, and the available budget can be reallocated to the more effective campaigns within the entire multichannel context.

Besides the actual conversions, the behavior of the visitors on the website is also interesting. Which pages are visited most frequently, how long does your medical audience stay on certain pages, or on which pages do they exit again? Here you gain crucial insights for optimizing the content relevance of your email campaigns.
Based on the analysis of behavior on the website, the newsletter subscribers can be segmented into different recipient lists and thus into different target groups within the newsletter tool. You now have the opportunity to send individually suitable content to each recipient, based on their behavior on the website, instead of presenting the same topics to all recipients in the newsletter. For instance, it is possible to identify and differentiate these different target groups on a website that addresses both the medical profession and patients based on their behavior on the website. Subscribers identified as patients will only receive relevant, less specialized content for them in subsequent campaigns, while physicians will only receive topics relevant to their field. As these tailored contents hold particularly high relevance for the individual target groups, their performance in the result analysis is also more successful.

Linking email marketing campaigns with an analytics tool offers many advantages and is almost indispensable for making optimizations, developing new strategies, and sensibly and sustainably evaluating the measures and success.