Ever find yourself drowning in a sea of emails to read and send responses to? Don’t worry; you are not the only one. According to a report by the Adobe Corporation, emails take up to 5 hours a day of an average worker's time. That includes reading and answering emails but doesn't usually mean they've cleared their inbox, which means many emails would fall through the cracks.
Your patients probably spend that much time sifting through their emails as well, so your practice emails should be carefully crafted to solicit attention. Utilizing these few tips will prove that emails can be effective and efficient at your eyecare practice.
Increase Your Eyecare Practice Emails Open Rate
1. Keep It Brief
As you struggle to keep up with your emails, you can also expect the others to be dealing with the same problem. So keep your emails concise. To help with that, there's Shortmail, a service that gives you the convenience of emailing limited to 500 characters. There are no attachments, junk mail or folders to manage. Your message has to be short and to the point, making it easier for the reader and writer.
Including several topics on a single email does not necessarily mean that you are being more efficient just because you are sending fewer emails. Your reader might have skimmed the email quickly and left portions of the emails unaddressed. It may just be better sending two separate emails and getting the response you need rather than sending multiple emails back and forth about the same subject and dealing with delayed response time.
Round up emails also make it difficult to track different issues. You might find it harder to reference these emails in the future when the subject title does not match its content, which brings me to my other tip…
2. Be Smart About Subject Lines
Your subject line will determine whether your reader is going to read or toss your email into the trash. Label “Urgent” when necessary and give a clear idea on what the email is about. After researching their existing database, Optinmonster compiled a list of best subject lines here. We've included why certain subject lines work here:
Things to think about when writing your subject line: Fear of Missing Out, Curiosity, Humor, Pain Points
3. Make Sure Email Content is Reader-Friendly
Formatting is important to keep in mind when creating your email. While you might want to spice up your email with cool designs, make sure that it will be readable on various browsers and devices. Broken images and page breaks will result in readers unsubscribing to your content or receiving even more emails requesting to re-send the mail.
Flash and JavaScript are not mobile friendly and you should avoid using them. At this point, a large percentage of your patients viewing your important emails through a mobile device. Stick to using bold text, headers and images.
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Originally published in September 2012