How to Write Addiction Treatment Email Marketing Messages That Your Leads Will Actually Open

So, you’re working on an email campaign for your addiction treatment center, group practice, IOP, PHP, sober living home, behavioral health what-have-you organization.

This is FUN, right? (Well, I think so! I love writing love letters to potential clients!)

Of course, this process doesn’t start with writing the email, right? You’ve been working on this project for a while.

You have already…

slaved over the strategy.
identified your ideal customer/patient.
researched what they care about most.
identified their objections.
understood their hopes and dreams.
noted the language they use to talk about their problems.
zeroed in on their pain points.

And you have…

shrewdly positioned yourself as their solution!

Right? You’ve done all of that, right? RIGHT?!

If not, then stop what you’re doing and go do that. Stop worrying about how to write an email that folks will open. You can’t skip your homework and expect to ace the test.

As for the rest of you: let’s say you have done all of that — great!

That’s the raw material you’ll need to use to craft this email. That’s the “heart and soul” of the message. What I’m about to discuss is just some very strategic window dressing that will help catapult a very well-researched and carefully considered email into rockstar email status.

Send The Email From An Actual Person at Your Addiction Treatment Organization (or make it look like you did)

Here’s what we don’t want to see in the “from” box:

info@yourorganization.com
reply-to@yourorganization.com
yourorganization@yourorganization.com

Who opens emails like that? Certainly not me. Probably not your leads, either. I don’t get excited about obvious robot emails.

I do, however, get very excited about new and exotic personal emails from strangers that appear to be real people. The mystery! The novelty! The personality! The possibilities!

What we’re looking for here is a real person’s email address or something that at least appears to be a real person’s email address, even if those emails aren’t technically coming from or going to this real person’s inbox.

Your “from” section should look like this:

Carol might be your Medical Director or your Intake Coordinator or your Lead Counselor - these are all good choices.

Think this might be really annoying for Carol? You’re right.

Good news: the account you use doesn’t actually have to be Carol’s real email address. You can have a copywriter write the email (me perhaps?), set up a dummy account using Carol’s name and then automatically forward any and all responses to a third party, like your admissions, marketing or admin department.

Easy.

Choose an email Marketing Subject Line that Demands Your Addiction Treatment Lead’s Attention

If your subject line is boring, no one will even open your email, let alone read it.

A good subject line makes the reader feel a powerful, sticky emotion like:

Fear
Anger
Outrage
Excitement
Curiosity

These hard-to-resist emotions spur most readers into action.

“But wait,” you may be thinking, “Anger? Fear? Why would I want to piss my leads off or scare them away?”

Well, yes, don’t get your leads pissed off at your organization. Don’t scare them away from your organization. Instead, tap into their anger about a pain point. You can target their anger towards many different things, depending on your audience:

the frustration of relapse
the injustice of stigma
the presumption of victimhood
the difficulty finding good help
the inaccessibility of treatment
the inconvenience of treatment
the cost of treatment
the dearth of evidence-based treatment
the mixed messages about addiction in the media, in their family
etc, etc, etc

Same with fear. You don’t want your lead to fear your organization, no! But you might want leads to be afraid of what might happen next if they don’t choose recovery now:

further damage to their relationships
further damage to career
further damage to their legal situation
loss of job, home, car, freedom
further damage to their self esteem
further damage to their finances
further damage to their health
increasing loss of control
increasing loss of self-respect
further spiritual alienation and/or loss of self

Urgency and scarcity are actually your friend when it comes to writing effective email subject lines, because they, too, trigger fear responses. That’s what makes limited time offers and “only 2 spots left” messages so effective.

FOMO is a great sticky emotion to leverage in your subject lines.

Ask Your Addiction Treatment Lead a Question About Themselves in Your Email Subject Line

People love to talk and think about themselves. We all do!

That’s why you should strongly consider addressing your reader in the second person using you, your and yours. This time-honored copywriting technique captures the reader’s attention and makes the writing personal.

This personal tone is especially important for anyone considering addiction treatment for themselves or a loved one.

Why?

Simply put, people who are active in their addiction are starving for compassionate connection.

Addiction is a deeply isolating disease that makes people with SUD feel very alone in their experience. The same goes for those whose lives are indirectly affected about SUD: the shame of caring for a loved one with SUD can also be highly isolating. The disease is complex and very misunderstood in broader society. Family and friends often don’t know how to provide meaningful emotional support to the sufferer and their closest loved ones because they simply don’t have a good grasp on the fundamentals at work. As the disease progresses, it’s common for the support network of people with untreated SUD to shrink as relationships are increasingly strained by the deception, inconsistency and unpredictability that are the hallmarks of this disease. For the patient, this shrinking support network translates into a lot of unmet needs for connection, understanding and meaning-making.

Using the second person and asking leads questions about themselves is a powerful and strategic invitation into relationship. This invitation is especially appealing to addiction treatment leads!

Build trusting relationships with your leads and you’ll be amazed at how easily the rest of your operation flows.

insert Numbers into Email Subject Lines for eye-catching Addiction Treatment emails

The relationship building I discussed in the previous section is a tricky art form, but here’s a quick tip that literally anyone can implement:

Use numbers in your email subject lines.

For whatever reason, our eyes gravitate towards numbers and figures on the page. The same applies to our email inboxes.

That’s why you see so many articles with titles like, “Top 5 Vacations in the Pacific Northwest,” or “Best 7 Holiday Movies for Your Next Date Night.”

We like numbers. We have favorite numbers. We apply gender to numbers. We have a common tendency to imbue numbers with spiritual, social and prophetic meaning.

Why? Who knows. You don’t need to understand all of the ins and outs of the power of numbers to make them work for you in your marketing efforts. Just start using them.

And another tip? Don’t write numbers out long hand. In an email subject line, it’s not eight, seven, six. It’s 8, 7, 6.

Let the digits do the magic.

Are emojis appropriate for email marketing messages for addiction treatment?

The evidence to support the use of emojis in emails is a mixed bag.

There’s studies that say emails with emojis get more opens and there’s studies that say they don’t. Some studies have demonstrated that emails with emojis in the subject line get more “click throughs” than emails with plain text subject lines. There’s also studies that have shown that emails with emojis generate negative sentiment with leads. Still other studies have found that brands that include emojis in their subject lines are perceived as more friendly and more memorable than brands that don’t use emojis.

Emojis are controversial!

Some people hate them, some people love them.

The same is true in addiction treatment. Some organizations hate emojis, some organizations love emojis.

Your decision to use emojis should be about one question: Do emojis attract or repel your ideal client?

For some brands, it’s pretty obvious that emojis make a lot of sense as a relationship building tool with customers. A sober living home for young affluent women, for instance, can probably get away with plenty of emojis.

For others, emojis would feel very random and out of place. Worst case, they might even irritate your leads to the point that they hit the dreaded spam or unsubscribe button. Consider the coastal luxury residential treatment program with executive suites. While it may be tempting to throw a few palm trees into the subject line, emojis in this context may feel cheap and overly familiar.

Ultimately, you’ll need to do the cost-benefit analysis on emojis for your own brand. Every situation is unique. If your addiction treatment organization can use emojis without veering too off-brand, then go for it! If you’re unsure, it’s my belief that the evidence supports going for it, anyway. When in doubt, you might consider experimenting with emojis on a temporary basis. Run a few campaigns with and without emojis and review the stats. That way, you’ll be able to determine the extent to which emojis help (or hurt) opens for your leads.

Keep Your email marketing Subject Line as Short As Possible

Mobile devices are particularly unforgiving to long subject lines.

Ensure your subject line is effective even if readers only see the first four or five words.

Enough said.

be weird and Get Outside Your Comfort Zone With addiction treatment Email marketing to Get More Opens

Remember what I said earlier about curiosity, excitement, and outrage?

Yep, those sticky emotions make people want to click buttons the internet. It’s just human nature.

Think about it: when was the last time a boring, expected, ho-hum email subject line made you feel curious, excited or outraged? The answer is: never.

So, when you’re sitting down to write your subject line, get outside your comfort zone and take a risk on something borderline ridiculous.

Be provocative. Say something strange and make your audience wonder what in the world you’ve written inside that quirky email. Sure, you could go the safe route and use the same twenty email subject lines your competitors are using. That will build your reputation as an addiction treatment provider that is “safe, reliable and professional.”

The problem? Those exact same adjectives describe everyone and no one at the same time. Why would your leads choose your center over all the rest that are presenting themselves in the exact same “safe, reliable and professional” way?

Stand out from the crowd. Share something unique and interesting with your audience and see what happens.

Never Go With the First Subject Line that pops into your head

This is a huge newbie mistake. Your subject line is a chess move, not an interpretive dance. This is not “creative writing time.” This is strategy.

Before you dream of pressing send, brainstorm a list of possible subject lines. Think about some keywords that will pique your audience’s interest and be sure to include those. Try some silly subject lines and some serious ones. Experiment with different words and emotions. Try declarative sentences as well as questions.

If you’ve been sending emails to a particular audience for some time, definitely review the stats on those campaigns. What patterns of success can you discern? What words, structures, lengths and topics have garnered the most “opens” with your audience? Conduct an experiment to see if you can capitalize on these findings and leverage them in your next subject line.

STUCK? I SPECIALIZE IN ADDICTION TREATMENT email marketing AND I’M HERE TO HELP

Does this all sound like too much work? Does the thought of writing email marketing messages send you into a panic? Have you been meaning to jump into email marketing but just can’t seem to find the time to get started?

Well, good news. You’ve found somebody who can take all this email marketing business off your plate.

Hi, I’m Erin. I specialize in digital content and copy for addiction treatment providers. I’m a former drug and alcohol counselor, so I “get” the rehab business and I understand what it takes to turn treatment leads into treatment patients. My clients range from local “one doc shops” to big treatment centers all over the United States. You can learn more about what I do here.

I’d love to chat with you to see if I might be a good fit for your project. When you’re ready to get the ball rolling, feel free to drop me a line for a free 15 minute consult.