Your Guide to Segmentation: The Cure to Healthcare Email Chaos
When should you segment your emails for your digital healthcare company? Hint: yesterday.
Hi, I’m Ben Watkins 👋 Thanks for joining the first edition of La Vie Ben Rose. Every week, I unravel copywriting questions, examples, and conversion tactics from the most recognized healthcare brands.
Get my Copywriting Mastery Bundle here (loved by 223+ students)
In my experience, email is a four-headed monster.
It goes like this:
First head: The strategy
Second head: The message behind the strategy
Third head: The ESP (like HubSpot or Salesforce) to send the emails
Fourth head: The segmentation strategy to send more wonderful and preferably better emails
Now, we’re not going to conquer this monster in one day like Madam Curie (assuming she also had a background in marketing and copywriting).
Instead, we’re going to discuss how to segment your healthcare audience from beginning to end, especially when it comes to HIPAA compliance and explicit opt-ins.
Even better, you’ll learn how to send the right message to the right audience.
Really Bad Email Segmentation Mistakes
Wait, you’re segmenting without a purpose?
You put your audience in a bucket after they clicked on a link. And then you have no idea what to do with that audience next. Maybe congratulate them on making it to the next level of segmentation (maybe a little too honest of an email to send).
Another mistake is oversegmenting. You’ve created list after list after list. Now you have a list of two folks here, five there, and three over there. It’s way too small to make an actual difference.
The most drastic mistake is not using segmented lists to prevent sending the wrong information to the wrong people. Disaster. That’s why you need to categorize your segments.
Let’s review the most common mistakes:
Segmentation without a clear next step for whom you’re segmenting
Oversegmenting or undersegmenting
Not segmenting according to data and behavior
Not segmenting at all (this is real bad)
What’s the Goal of Segmenting?
The goal of segmenting is to send the right message to the right person based on something you know about them.
Here’s how you could segment your audience:
Engagement segmentation (opens, clicks, recent activity) - This is probably the most effective because you’re emailing your audience based on their behavior
Behavior segmentation (cart abandonment, past purchases, post-visit guides) - also highly effective
Demographic & Psychographic segmentation (Age, gender, or values).
Time zone (really effective if you’re working with different organizations or patients nationally or globally)
Professional segmentation (what kind of industry are they in - smaller healthcare clinics vs. larger provider organizations)
Funnel segmentation (what choices are they making that reflect market sophistication and market awareness in the funnel)
Time & event segmentation (you’re sending emails after a tradeshow, or there’s seasonality, or health and wellness reminders
Examples of segmenting in digital healthcare
If Carbon Health, Teladoc, or One Medical, wanted to segment their audience, they could do so in this way:
Patients who booked a telehealth visit in the last 30 days
Patients who opened but didn’t complete an intake form
Patients who searched for a specialist but didn’t book
You could also do it more behavior-based (one of the most effective ways to do it):
Which services they clicked (urgent care, mental health, women's health)
Whether they engaged but didn’t book (create a new flow)
How often do they view their care team or visit history
Let’s look at a more B2B healthcare example like Doximity, Zus Health, Elation Health
First, you have to consider the audience (examples)
Independent practices vs. large health systems
Primary care vs. specialists
Tech-savvy vs. legacy EMR users (based on product usage)
Then you have to plan the segments based on their behavior:
Interacted with the exit-intent pop-up
Downloaded a white paper or case study
Scheduled “Request Demo” but didn’t attend
Each segment creates a new flow of emails that you’re going to strategize and then send emails based on that stage of awareness and market sophistication.
Example of Segmenting for EHR
Not every email is a single segmentation. You might have multiple click points, where you can segment around different types of awareness.
If a user clicks the blog, you get a sense of what article they want to read. Or maybe they are looking for more social proof, and you create a flow that sends them more stories.
Here’s an email I broke down that shows the different ways you can segment your audience from a single email.
How Do You Start Segmenting?
I like what Joanna Wiebe says about segmenting and optimizing emails. You just have to document what’s there and where to start.
The idea is to begin with a map. Know what’s in place from marketing to sales, and look at the triggers you have in place.
Creating a flow map helps you do a few things:
Step back and look at the bigger picture. You’re looking at the customer journey as a whole and seeing where it starts and ends. You’re looking at what the overall strategy is and how you’re driving the user down the stage of awareness.
Create triggers based on specific roles' content, especially if you’re serving multiple audiences. If you don’t have a survey or something to identify your audience, you need to have content that is specifically tailored to that persona (cater your CTAs around this).
You can evaluate lead scoring based on where the user comes into the picture in the flow sequence.
You can identify the next step for users who either need to be reengaged or for when there’s no clear next step after they were segmented based on their behavior.
How to Optimize Beyond Segmentation Around Healthcare
Healthcare emails are different because there’s a stricter line around compliance, no matter if it’s B2C or B2B.
Here’s a list of questions you should be asking if you’re sending emails in healthcare:
Is our email list segmented based on user behavior without the wrong information?
Have SPF, DKIM, and DMARC been set up to protect internal messages from being flagged?
Did you break the cardinal law of CAN-SPAM, GDPR, or CASL?
When was the last time your list was scrubbed to remove disengaged subscribers and bots? High bounce will hurt your domain
These are some of the things you have to consider as you dive into healthcare emails. And it’s different across healthcare industries.
Email can be as messy as you make it, especially in healthcare. The key is to look at what you have so far. Know what’s being triggered and sent in a particular cadence.
When you understand email segmentation at a deeper level, you know what to send your audience and what they are actually looking for.
That’s it for today, folks.
BenTen out.