Why medical and health email is a different job
Three things change when the product is a mobility scooter, a compression garment, a TENS device, a supplement for a child or a piece of home medical equipment:
- The cost of a wrong email is not a lost sale. It is a complaint to a regulator, a refund on a $2,000 device, or a customer who followed advice an email should never have given. Copy is written to the MHRA, FDA or TGA rules for the market, with claims limited to what the product is cleared for, and reviewed before it ships.
- The buyer is solving a problem, often for a parent or a child. They want to know it will work, that it will arrive, and what to do when it does. Reassurance and instructions convert; urgency and hype do not.
- A big share of revenue never touches the list. Clinics, NHS and insurance orders, marketplaces, phone orders. That is why email share is lower here than elsewhere: 10% on the UK medical equipment store we run, against a 22% all-store median, and that 10% is good for the category.
What the numbers look like
From our 2026 benchmark and the UK medical store, 12 months to October 2026:
| Metric | UK medical store | Baby, kids and health group (3 stores) | All stores |
|---|---|---|---|
| Email share of revenue | 8.9% | 17.0% | 22.4% |
| Share of email revenue from flows | 88% | 73% | 69% |
| Flow click rate | 2.63% | 1.61% | 2.34% |
| Flow conversion rate | 1.35% | 1.35% | 1.33% |
| Campaign click rate | 3.25% (small, informed list) | 0.36% | 0.64% |
| Popup submit rate | 42.9% | 10.5% | 4.7% |
Two things to notice. The flows work exactly as well as anywhere else: conversion 1.35% against a 1.33% median. And the popup converts 42.9% of unique viewers because it offers a product guide (which scooter, which size, how funding works), not a discount. In health, information is the offer.
The flow set for health and medical products
- Welcome as a buying guide. Three to four emails that answer the questions a first-time buyer has: which model for which need, sizing, delivery and installation, warranty, funding or insurance where relevant. The product comes last.
- Abandoned checkout with reassurance, not pressure. Delivery date, who installs, what the return and warranty terms are, a phone number. No countdown timers.
- Post-purchase as care. Set-up instructions, first-week check-in, maintenance reminders, accessories that make the product work better (a battery, a cushion, a carry bag). Review request after the product has proven itself, not after delivery.
- Replenishment. Consumables (pads, filters, electrodes, supplements) on their actual replacement cycle, with a one-click reorder. This is the highest-converting flow in the category when the cycle is right.
- Winback for consumables only. A scooter buyer does not need a winback; a supplement buyer does.
Campaigns
Few, and informational. A new model with the clinical rationale, a seasonal guide (keeping mobile in winter), a funding update, a customer story told within the rules. The medical store’s campaigns click at 3.25% because the list is small and every send is useful. A promotional cadence would halve that in a quarter. Send to an engaged segment; never to the whole list.
Compliance in practice
- Claims limited to the product’s cleared indications; comparative and curative language removed in review.
- No before-and-after imagery or testimonials that imply a medical outcome unless the market allows it.
- Unsubscribe and sender identification on every email; data handling under the market’s health-data rules where the purchase reveals a condition.
- A review step before any email goes live, by someone who is not the writer.
What a medical or health brand should expect from a Klaviyo agency
Someone who has written to regulator rules before, who leads with guides rather than offers, who builds replenishment on the real product cycle, and who reports email share honestly in a category where it is lower by design. This is the kind of client we built the agency for: high cost of error, no room for a sloppy send. Our Pro retainer runs the medical store above; the free 30-minute audit shows where your flows stand.
The next benchmark, before it is public
Every quarter we re-pull the numbers from the accounts we run and send the summary first to the list, with the teardowns in between. No weekly newsletter, no discounts, unsubscribe in one click.