Email marketing is a great marketing tool for chiropractors, it helps get your message out to large numbers of people easily and it’s more affordable. When used correctly email marketing can help you generate new patients and build a loyal patient base for your chiropractic business with very little investment of time and money.
It’s not foolproof though. If done wrong or inconsistently, an email marketing campaign can end up creating a lot of unhappy recipients.
Email marketing software
Email marketing is inexpensive compared to some of the chiropractic marketing you’ll be spending money on, like a website or newspaper ads – but that’s not to say it’s totally free. You’ll need to find an email marketing program to help you gather information to build your lists and then send out the automated email campaigns.
There are several companies to choose from, a few that come to mind are;
Each one of the above will do what you need them to do for email marketing, but do your research and compare, don’t just buy the first package you come across. Make sure it’s not only easy for you to use, but for your staff to use too, as you should be handing this task over to a staff member.
Have several opt-in systems in place
An opt-in system is where visitors to your site confirm that they want to receive electronic communications from you in the future by sharing their email address in the opt-in form on your site or on the new patient information sheet filled out before the initial exam. When individuals have expressed an interest by sharing their information, it’s more likely that they’ll respond positively to the communications you send.
Make sure it’s easy to opt in and opt out
It’s worth having a ‘subscribe to e-newsletter’, or something similar on each page of your practice website. The biggest mistake to make here is to confine it solely to the Home page. Assuming that you’ve got plenty of useful and interesting content throughout your site, what you’ll probably find is that the majority of the traffic to your website doesn’t come in via the Home page at all. Visitors might be coming to your site from a PPC campaign and arrive on a landing page or a post on your blog, perhaps not even looking at your Home page at all – which means you need to give them the opportunity of signing up to receiving emails regardless of what pages they’re viewing.
Make opting in simple . You only need name and email address as necessary fields.
Send useful information
Sending information people want to read about – such as treatment guides, seasonally relevant content, health tips, exercise and nutritional information will help ensure people stick around to read more.
Only sending promotional content is going to be a major turn-off.
Create Separate email lists
Tailor your email promotions to benefit the list you will be publishing to, for example;
- Established patients – Monthly newsletters, healthcare updates and referral coupons for friends and family
- Prospective patients – Monthly newsletters and current exam offers and active coupons
- Inactive patients- Engage once and follow up, then move to quarterly newsletters and healthcare updates unless they’ve opted out
Keep all lists current
This is what email marketing software is for typically, but you should check to see that it’s working. Make sure duplicates are removed and that un-subscribers are removed from the list immediately. This would also include transferring prospective and inactive patient emails over to the active list once they have established or reactivated care.
Don’t be spammy
One or two emails a month is plenty. One should be your monthly newsletter and then possibly a second if you have current promotions going on in your office. You don’t need to bombard potential or existing patients with messages.
One last tip, always suggest to your readers that they share your newsletters with others, this will only get you and your practice in front of more viewers. Also, always have a link back to your website in your emails, especially if you are asking your readers to share your newsletter with others, this will help build your email list too.