Online health platforms often struggle with high user turnover, making it essential to attract and retain patients. Knowledge sharing has emerged as a key strategy in this effort. However, previous studies have shown that physicians benefit from knowledge sharing through reputational gains and indirect financial returns, the mechanisms driving these effects remain unclear. This study draws on sensory marketing and feeling-as-information theory to examine how sensory cues of linguistic features in physicians’ knowledge sharing influence their online service volume. Using structured and unstructured data from 307 physicians with 3,834 knowledge-sharing instances in online health platforms in China, we apply text mining and empirical modeling to test our hypotheses. Our findings indicate that haptic cues in physicians' knowledge sharing positively impact their online service volume, whereas auditory cues have a negative effect. Moreover, the influence of these sensory cues varies depending on physicians’ specialties and professional capital. By integrating sensory marketing into the study of online healthcare, this research advances the understanding of how linguistic features in knowledge sharing drive physicians’ financial returns.