Email marketing is an important part of any chiropractor’s toolkit. It’s a great way to keep in touch with your existing patients and remind them about the services you offer, how you can help them achieve optimal health, and educate them on the overall power of chiropractic. It’s also an important way to continue nurturing leads on your list that maybe have not come in for care just yet.
By dripping content to their inbox periodically, you can keep your name at the top of their mind and increase the chances that they’ll choose you when they’re finally ready to seek chiropractic care, or if they run into another health issue that they want support with.
Email marketing is a cost effective and personable way to stay in touch with your community. Below, we’ll look at some of the top benefits and strategies to utilize email marketing in your practice’s promotion efforts.
A patient may have original come in to see you about lower back pain, but that does not mean they know about all the different symptoms that you can help them with. Maybe they also end up experiencing headaches, or carpal tunnel, or a knee injury.
You can use email as a channel to constantly feed your patient list new information about how you can help them with their health goals. Send out tips and tricks, case studies of patients you’ve worked with in the past, and even infographics that illustrate how chiropractic can help resolve health issues.
This type of email marketing is a great way to keep your patients feeling engaged and like they’re constantly learning about what you do – even if they haven’t been in to see you lately. Plus, it can encourage them to come back in for another appointment to explore how you might be able to help them with their other symptoms or condition they are struggling with.
For patients that you haven’t seen in a while, showing up in their inbox could remind them that they need to come in and see you. It could be an email about a new promotion you’re running, or a health tip that is specific to something their dealing with, or literally just a reminder that you and your practice exist. People are busy and sometimes they forget to make their health a priority.
Whatever the email content is, it should aim to spark some level of reactivation so that patients will be reminded of the great work you do and how they can benefit from it. Some patients may still need that little nudge in order to come in and see you, so email marketing can be a valuable tool in your arsenal for reaching out to them and triggering some action to get them back into your office.
If you are collecting leads from any other activities, it’s important to continue to nurture them for the long-term. If someone signs up for a promotion and they don’t come in right away, that doesn’t mean they are not interested. It just means they’re not ready to make that commitment just yet. Sometimes it can take weeks, months, or even years for a patient to finally be ready to come in.
You have to play the long game here. Leads that you collect today could convert months or years down the road. Periodic email communication will keep you top of mind, continue to educate them, and further build trust because they are seeing you over and over again. So when it’s time for them to finally make that appointment, you’ll be the first chiropractor they think of.
Rather it’s an existing patient or a new lead, you want to stay at the forefront of their mind. You want your people to see you frequently. The more people see you, the more they will trust you and be comfortable coming to you when they need help. You’re also that constant reminder for building a healthy lifestyle. There is an association that you create with your image and the ideal healthy lifestyle that can draw patients back in.
Feed your list of patients and leads with email marketing messages so that you are always top of mind and the first go-to resource when they need help.
It’s recommended to use the email marketing channel as a way to be valuable to your patients. If you are constantly sending out promotions, it’s going to annoy your list and people will stop opening your emails. Or worse, they’ll unsubscribe!
Instead, we see the most success in email campaigns that are giving out value without expecting anything in return. Typically what we’ve seen work best is educational content. Your patients and leads got onto your list because they have a goal of being healthier. They want to solve their aches and pains and live a healthier life. So use this channel as a way to provide that content to them on a regular basis.
Send out content that teaches them about the symptoms and conditions they are dealing with. Explain where that issue comes from. Give them tips and tricks to help mitigate those symptoms and heal their conditions. And of course, invite them in for help if they need it. The most important thing is to make sure that you are providing value without selling too hard.
Think about what your patients will care about and what will be memorable for them. As you teach your patients, multiple things are happening:
When you give them something valuable that they can take away, they can see you have their best interest at heart. They’ll trust you more and more as you teach them about their health and how to improve their lives.
Most patients do not know all the things that chiropractic care can help them with. The more you teach them, the more likely they’ll come to you for their health related problems.
You become the go-to resource for help. You are the one out there teaching them, showing them, and providing value, and you’ll be the one they will go to when they need help.
Usually we suggest sending out an email to your list once every 2 – 3 weeks. This cadence seems to be enough to continue staying top of mind without bombarding your list with constant communication that annoys them. Sending too infrequently won’t keep your list engaged, but sending too frequently will increase your unsubscribe rates.
One powerful method is to not send an email blast off all at once, but instead to use automation that will trigger emails to your patients based on certain events. These types of emails are automatic, so you don’t have to manually send them, and they are typically personable because it’s related to something that they acted on.
For example, if a lead signs up for a new patient special, email them the special information. Include a call to action to book their appointment with your contact details.
Or another example is using email automation for appointment reminders. Sync your email system up with your calendar system and have emails automatically go out to reminder patients of appointments. This is extremely beneficial for new patients that haven’t been in to your office yet to increase your show rates.
The great part about using automation for your emails is that it allows you to write the content of the email once and have it automatically sent out without you having to do anything.
In order to send emails, you have to have an email list. This is a list of email addresses that you have collected from patients, leads, or other sources.
There are a few ways to go about building your email marketing list:
When you onboard a new patient, always try and collect their email address. If they are hesitant to provide it, you can let them know it’ll be used to stay in touch about appointment reminders and other education related to their health and care plan.
On your website, your contact form should have a field for the user to leave their email address. This is extremely important so you can respond to inquiries, of course. But you should also be adding these people to your leads list so you can follow up with them. Of course, make sure you have the appropriate language informing them you’ll use their email address to contact them.
If you’re running lead generation strategies from any channels, you’ll also want to make sure you are capturing email addresses. It’s important for following up with those leads, but also for adding them into your long-term email marketing sequences so you can further nurture them.
The more people in your community you can get on your list, the better!
There are a lot of email marketing tools that you can use to actually send out your email marketing messages. Each one comes with their own user interface, features, functionalities, and integrations. So, which one should you be using?
We recommend that you dive into CHIROPIPE. This is the tool that we use with our clients because it has robust email marketing features built right into it, along with a lot more.
You’ll get all the standard email marketing features where you can use a drag and drop builder to build beautifully styled emails. You can create custom lists and segments, schedule email blasts in the future or even in drip mode, and a lot more.
But what’s even better outside of the email marketing functionality is all the other capabilities that it comes with:
It’s a pretty robust marketing system that can be extremely powerful for your practice, and it has email marketing capabilities built right into it.
If you’re not looking for all those bells and whistles and want something more basic just to do emailing, you can look at a more simple tool like MailChimp, Constant Contact, ActiveCampaign, MailerLite, and more. There are tons of options out there that just do the basics for you.
Email marketing is greatly underutilized by practices today. It can be an absolute powerhouse for increase your weekly visits to your practice. It’s an inexpensive and low friction way to generate more growth.
To get started with email marketing, there are several steps:
This is a really simplified version of what it actually takes. If you need help with your email marketing program or any other practice promotional efforts, we’re here for you.
Nick is the Founder of CHIROBASIX, a marketing agency that specializes in helping Chiropractors dominate their local markets and drive new patient acquisition.
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