This is the first blog in our "Digital Marketing to Physicians" series. In the coming weeks, we’ll take a close look at how health systems, medical device manufacturers, and healthcare recruiters can use digital marketing to engage specific physician audiences.

How much time do you spend thinking about email deliverability? If you're like most medical device marketers, the answer is probably "not much."

Deliverability is a measure of your ability to get an email into the intended recipient's inbox. It’s the most fundamental metric of email marketing, but it's often overlooked. In the rush to write and design your email messages, optimize their deployment timing, and analyze the resulting data, it's easy to forget about deliverability. Yet your email campaigns will never be truly successful without high deliverability rates.

Here's why deliverability matters for medical device marketers:  

1. Doctors have to receive your messages in order to read them. If your target physicians aren't actually receiving your emails, you can't hope to engage them with your marketing messages or be sure that they read critical recall notices. All the time, money, and effort you put into developing effective email campaigns is essentially wasted.
   
2. 99.5 percent deliverability reaches more doctors for the same cost. The math is simple. If you purchase 100 email addresses but your message is delivered only to 86 of them, you're paying for a lot of worthless addresses. On the other hand, if you use a physician email database that guarantees 99.5 percent delivery, you get more for your email marketing dollar on every campaign.
3. High deliverability lets you expand your medical device user base. The traditional sales rep model is effective for building physician loyalty to your products, but it doesn't scale well. However, email lets you engage far more qualified prospects in the same amount of time. When your email messages reliably reach nearly all of the physicians on your list, you can be confident that you're connecting with many more valuable targets.
4. Low deliverability means some doctors may not receive critical recall notices. When a serious problem with a medical device is discovered, patient health depends on alerting doctors as quickly as possible. Email is fast, but unless your database provides high deliverability, many physicians may not hear about the recall. Both patient safety and your brand will be at risk.
5. High bounce rates may lead to blacklisting. Low delivery rates indicate that many of your emails are bouncing, often because the email address is invalid. If your campaigns consistently generate high bounce rates, ISPs may blacklist your IP address, which will prevent delivery of all of your email messages at least temporarily.  

Deliverability is the most fundamental metric of email marketing, yet it's often overlooked.

The best way to ensure high deliverability rates is to work with an authenticated physician email list.  Simply put, authentication is the process of verifying that the addresses on your list are accurate and belong to the intended recipients. In addition, a high-quality physician email database should be updated daily and include only physicians who have opted-in.

Keep these factors in mind to ensure your medical device email messages reach the doctors for whom they’re intended.