November 12, 2019  |  Kelly Holder

Top tips for Building an Effective Medical or Physician Email list

When you have an exciting new product or service for a doctor’s group or medical office, you want to reach the decision makers in those physician groups as quickly as you can.  Starting with the right data source for medical lists is key to getting the response you want for your mail, email or sales actions. If you are licensing a database of healthcare providers or just looking for a doctor email list, ask your data partner about:   

Deliverability

When it comes to physician email lists, you need valid contacts for the buyers you are looking to reach.  Whether you need a broad dentist email list or a specialty orthopedic surgeon email list, you want your message to be seen by your target audience.  Ask the provider how their email list of physicians is validated.  Most snail mail data lists are CASS and NCOA certified (to ensure deliverability) but ask if the list of health care providers you want to buy follows these standards. 

Decision makers and gate keepers

Although doctors may be the ultimate user of your product or service, office managers and assistants frequently serve as gatekeepers and influence the buying process in physician groups.  Ask your provider about those contacts in larger doctor groups, as well as for more specific requests such as arthritis specialists, lists of cardiologists, imaging centers, pediatrician lists or nursing home address lists.  In general, when building doctor lists, you will often get better results when you target decision makers and gate keepers with your content.

Timing and response rates 

A good health care database partner will be able to share experience and insight to help you set up a test of any medical provider list, including subsets of doctors’ groups (like a dermatologist email list) to find the best time of day, week, or year to maximize the response for your product with the right medical list and marketing channels.

What options are available to reach physician practice groups, imaging centers, nursing homes, hospital databases and healthcare lists? 

Your health care data solution partner can advise you on the best ways to connect with health care professionals across email, mail, and face-to-face engagement.  Starting with your own customer information, a healthcare data company should be able to help you better understand what your buyers look like, including where you have clusters of buyers by region, size of businesses, titles that are buying, and more.   Your partner should offer more than just a one-and-done list transaction; instead delivering strong data and insight as part of a broader healthcare analytics company. 

Every product and health care provider have their own unique buying cycle and part of building your business is learning who will (and won’t) respond to your offers. But an experienced health care data solution partner will help you test and learn what works best for your business, as well as provide the healthcare analytics you need to accelerate your insight…and revenue.

What data elements from a medical list of providers will help me build the best physician email marketing? 

When you build a strategy to grow your customer base, start with your existing customers.  Where are the physician practice groups located? Do you have specialist information like arthritis specialist or orthopedic surgeon to target your prospect doctor email list?  Who are the primary contacts and what is their role? What do you know (or not know) about the decision-making process? 

A good health care data solution provider will help you across a wide-range of prospecting data – starting broadly with a medical list of providers to more specifically target by location type:  physician practice groups, radiology facilities, medical imaging centers, hospitals, and list type like nursing home mailing lists.

Within those locations, your partner can help further identify buyers and influencers by role and specialty (such as pediatricians lists, geriatric physicians lists, radiologists lists, oncologists email lists).  Don’t forget about medical office managers and assistants, who can help you open the door to the ultimate user of your product or service.

How easily can I target specialties in physician practice groups, nursing homes, and other medical lists of providers?

Once you have insight to who you can and should be targeting, look at the quality of the data providers are offering.  Some will offer lots of data for low prices, but you may not get the consultation and service you need to execute campaigns and gain insight from your efforts.  Other providers come with a big price tag and offer significantly more research data and adjacent services than you may need.  Look for a partner who will spend the time helping you define your best audience, whether it is a list of cardiologists or an orthopedic surgeon email list, or complete healthcare provider database.  Ultimately, find a partner who can help you understand the results of your campaign.

Sometimes, housing and analyzing your campaign results is a challenge due to limited technology and resources.  Oftentimes, bandwidth issues for marketing teams creates a constant tension between getting campaigns out the door and analyzing what’s working and what’s not.  Look for a partner who can help you enhance and expand what’s working in your marketing, including data linkage to standardized physician NPI data, append services to help you know more about your existing health providers data, and specific campaign analysis to know what may or may not be helping a medical professional to buy. 

A trusted partner

Ultimately, you need to find a partner you can trust.  Who will take the time to hear your needs and help you shape a plan that tests your offer, creative, value, and pricing?  Consider a provider who makes it easy to use their data and combines straightforward online ordering tools with options for consultative planning on the front end with campaign analytics and strategizing on the back end of your program. 

At MCH, we’re here to help.  Give us a call at 800-776-6373 to discuss your goals or visit mchdata.com to order data online.