Why Marketing to Nurses is a Smart Customer Acquisition Strategy

Many marketers use a buyer’s online activity to personalize their marketing, but it’s no longer enough. Responding to clicks and searches shows you understand someone’s interests, but to create true and lasting connections, you need to engage buyers based on something far more personal — their identity.

This next wave of personalization calls for targeting segments based on deep-seated attributes—such as their affiliation (military), life-stage (college students), or occupation (nurses)—and it’s highly effective. Brands like Lowe’s and T-Mobile that use this technique are seeing engagement rates that are 2-3 times better than their other campaigns.

In this post, we take a look at why marketing to nurses can be your next growth segment.

Targeting Nurses is Segment-Specific Gold

Few occupations are as deeply rooted in someone’s identity as nursing. Nurses often feel a personal mission to care for their community that makes their work an important part of how they see themselves.

Society highly values this commitment. As the American Nurses Association says, nurses have a time-honored reputation for compassion and dedication, and are “the glue that holds a patient’s health care journey together.”

Marketing to nurses with a gated, exclusive offer is a powerful way to honor their service and launch a meaningful brand relationship that grows into long-term loyalty.   

5 Steps to Engaging Nurses

Gated offers are a highly effective way to create personalized offers based on a customer’s identity. Here’s how they work:

01 Determine if Nurses Align with Your Brand Promise

Nurses are community driven, and care about issues. They tend to be women (91%), older (51 years old), and care about supporting the community as well as themselves.

02 Create an Offer That Shows You Care

You can start with a standalone campaign during Nurses Appreciation Week, held annually May 6-12. Or you can fold nurses into a larger-scale Heroes Program with exclusive discounts that honor community members—the military, first responders, teachers, nurses, even federal employees—for their invaluable service.

For insight on how top brands are using gated offers to appeal to members of the military and first responders, you can read about programs launched by Lowe’s, Kettlebell Kitchen, and T-Mobile.

03 Invite Nurses to Partake

Market your gated offer through all your channels—on your website, through online ads and email, in social media, and more. Get the word out in whatever way you can.

04 Verify Their Eligibility

Verifying someone is a nurse before allowing them to redeem your offer keeps it exclusive, which is the magic that makes gated offers so powerful.

When nurses know your promotion is just for them, it makes them feel special, and that motivates them to act. Our survey revealed that when consumers are given a gated offer, 82% are more likely to shop at a brand, and 58% are more likely to purchase.

You create this exclusivity by implementing your offer with SheerID’s Digital Verification Platform. SheerID uses thousands of authoritative data sources to instantly confirm a shopper is a nurse. And the platform covers the entire nursing profession, including RNs, LPNs, nurse anesthetists, nurse midwives, and more.

Verification is a seamless process that occurs entirely in-brand, which creates a positive customer experience—a great way to launch a relationship.

05 Nurture Your Brand Relationships

When nurses redeem your offer, they explicitly express interest in your brand and give you the data you need for ongoing nurture campaigns.

You can follow up your first offer with other promotions that facilitate loyalty, such as exclusive access to VIP experiences and discounts timed around relevant holidays, like Nurses Appreciation Week and National First Responders Day.

Identity-Driven Campaigns Deliver Results

Using gated offers to target segments based on deep-seated attributes—like a nurse’s commitment to care for others—is a simple yet powerful customer acquisition strategy.

Gated offers intrinsically leverage a deep sense of belonging to a “tribe,” which, according to our consumer survey, makes buyers feel rewarded, excited, honored, and special.

And when consumers feel this kind of connection, they act. Our survey revealed that 94% of customers would take advantage of a gated offer, and 91% would share one with friends and family.

Leading Brands Create Competitive Advantage with Gated Offers

Many brands already run gated offer programs for high-value segments, including the military, first responders, and teachers. Communities view these segments the same way they do nurses—as heroes. And brands that market to them that way are seeing stellar results.

Kettlebell Kitchen’s Hero Discount for military and first responders (police, firefighters, and EMTs) targets customer segments most likely to gravitate to the brand’s fitness-oriented meal delivery service. The program triggered a 6x increase in orders, with an 83% increase in new military and first responder customers signing up every week.

Globus launched a gated military offer on their tour packages. This new customer acquisition program outperformed the company’s other flash sales by 20% and required 75% less effort to implement.

Target’s teacher discount caught fire in the national press. Brands targeting a mostly female audience should take note: nearly 90% of nurses and nearly 80% of teachers are women.

These are just a few examples from the hundreds of brands using SheerID to amplify the value of gated offers. On average, brands across the retail, software, subscription, and travel industries report a 3x increase in conversion rate, 2x increase in repeat purchases, and ROAS as high as 18:1.  

The ability to target nurses with gated offers is part of the next wave of digital promotions. And making them part of your customer acquisition strategy now will put you ahead of the pack.