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Wow, a little tinkering and I found out how to get texted whenever someone makes an appointment via a web form or designated email address.  This can come in handy if you are running a low overhead practice and have minimal staff to answer the phones.  You can be at Starbucks around the corner of your office during a lull in your schedule, and get texted if someone books an appointment.

(Note:  this method works if you have a domain-based email address where you have a hosting account; for example, drsmith@mainstreetchiro.com) and use an email client like MS Outlook where you have total control.)

Here’s what you do.  Let’s say your chiropractic website domain is mainstreetchiro.com.

1.  Create an email account “appointments@mainstreetchiro.com.”  You’ll do this through your web hosting panel.  Set it up in your Outlook.  Send a test message to it and from it to make sure it works.

2.  Next, you’ll need to have online scheduling capability, or have an online form whose URL you give to your patients.  You can get a form builder like Freedback.com, which is a dummy-proof web-based form builder that you can customize yourself (name, date, appointment time and date, etc.).  You set the form to send all form data submissions to appointments@mainstreetchiro.com.

Alternatively, you can use Genbook’s online scheduling service (FREE!).  When you enter your clinic settings in Genbook, set it so that all notifications go appointments@mainstreetchiro.com.

3.  Find out from your cell phone carrier your cell phone email address.  The format is different based on the carrier.  For example, Verizon cell phones have emails in the form (your cell phone#)@vtext.com.

4.  Go back to your web hosting admin panel.  There should be an icon labeled “forwarding” or “email forwarding.”  Click it, and find appointments@mainstreetchiro.com.  Set this email to forward to your cell phone email.  Now, whenever your online appointment forms send form submission data to your email, you will be texted the info as well!  Make sure to set your text tone loud so you don’t miss any appointments.

Now, don’t you feel like a techie now?

Of course, you can also instruct your patients to send appointment requests by emailing you at appointments@mainstreetchiro.com.  It’s not a good way to have new patients contact you for an appointment, though; use a form.

The  above technique follows the Guerilla Chiropractic principles of using technology to lower your overhead, and it’s a good one.

Dr. Dan

As a chiropractor and a businessperson, have you ever calculated your new patient acquisition cost?  That is, take all the money you spend in marketing efforts (including payroll if you have your staff make calls and send out postcards, etc.) in a month, and divide that number by the number of your new patients in that month.  That’s a rough estimate of how much it costs to bring in a new patient.  It can get very expensive.  You should think of these expenditures as an “investment”, and with investments you want to keep long term to add value to your practice.

Email marketing is a very cheap and effective way to communicate with your patients, and to acquire new patients.  People are in front of their computers more than they are their TVs these days, and the email Inbox button is just a click away (after they are finished with FaceBook .   Email is so heavily utilized now that most people are conditioned to provide it as though it were their telephone number when filling out forms.  So definitely take steps to acquire your patients’ email address; this email list will wind up being a very valuable business asset of yours.

Fist step, include an email field on your intake forms.  Go one step further and type up an “Email Policy” sheet and include it in your new patient intake form pack.  This is where you really convince the patient to give you his/her email address, so pour on the benefits.  For example, mention that they will receive important information pertinent to their care such as exercise and stretching videos, ergonomic instructions, diet and supplements, posture, and so on through a monthly email newsletter.  You may also consider allowing them access to your personal email to ask any health questions that may come up, if they provide their email.  If you have an online scheduling software like GenBook, say that you need their email for appointment confirmations.  If you do these things, you should get your patient’s email 80% of the time.

You will create a campaign for your chiropractic patient marketing in your GetResponse account.  Every email you get via your intake form will need to be manually entered in your GetResponse account under this campaign (you can have multiple campaigns).  Beforehand, you set up what are called “autoresponder” email messages on these topics and specify the intervals they go out to your email list, such as 14 days apart.   Getresponse sends them out, counting Day 1 as the opt-in date of the email subscriber (patient), and sends out as many as you create ahead of time.  You can go gangbusters and create 24 autoresponder messages set to go out semi-monthly, so that all new patients who opt in get marketed to for a whole year, all on auto-pilot.  Let’s say a patient starts care, then goes on vacation without scheduling her next appointment.  She comes back, checks her email and sees your clinic’s most recent e-newsletter (sent automatically by Getresponse) in her Inbox, and it reminds her to call to get back on her treatment plan.

You can also send “broadcast” messages to your email list.  Let’s say you bought a new laser or other new piece of equipment for your clinic.  You can send out a single email blast to your entire list notifying them of your newest acquisition, and how it can help them.

GetResponse also has Video email capability:  record a short video (can you imagine the possibilities?) and add it to your autoresponder sequence (a Welcome to the Clinic video perhaps?) or email it to your list (a Reactivation message for the inactive patients?).

If you have a blog (which I highly recommend you do), there is a setting in GetResponse that will notify your subscribers by email that you posted a new blog post.  Pretty cool!

So, if you don’t have an email marketing system (hopefully you aren’t cutting and pasting your patients email addresses into your Yahoo or Outlook email client and trying to send messages that way–totally inefficient, and usually flagged as Spam by the ISPs), make sure to check out GetResponse.  There is a learning curve, but you should be able to figure it out quite easily, no problem.  And when you do, just watch your patient visit average shoot through the roof, with no extra effort!  Now that’s time leveraging, the central concept of my Guerilla Chiropractic system.

Dr. Dan

Your website needs to:

1) be visible in the search engines (Google) for multiple keywords that reflect what people search for when they need chiropractic care; i.e. (Your City) Chiropractor, Chiropractor (Your City), back pain doctor, etc.

2) be able to convert; i.e. cause the website visitor to pick up the phone and call your office.

3) be able to capture leads and market to them over and over again.

Ranking high in the search engines involves creating a lot of good content in your site (perfect job for a blog) and attracting back links to your site.  Integrating several tools to increase your chiropractic website’s conversion rate will insure that your website will be doing what it’s supposed to do:  sending you patients.

Having a good email marketing software like GetResponse is critical if you want to make life easier for yourself.  Don’t be one of those chiropractors who get lazy and email their patients announcements or newsletters by manually typing in their patients’ email address in their Outlook, Yahoo or Gmail accounts, and send crappy looking emails, many of which to straight to the spam folder.  Why not let GetResponse  automate the whole process where the software receives the prospect’s email, adds them to the database, and sends them a nice monthly newsletter automatically?  It can also handle unsubscribe requests behind the scenes.  All you have to do is set it up, and the thing runs by itself.   You can even check your stats, like how many people received your email, and how many clicked it to open and read.  This will tell you if your marketing message needs tweaking.

It starts with installing an Opt In form in a highly visible spot on your website, or have it fade in or pop under from the screen.  The purpose of a pop up form is to get the visitor to notice it.  Many times they miss the static opt in form because it blends in with the rest of the web page.  GetResponse can generate the code for your opt in box (static or pop up); or, you can use an advanced one like Ultimate Footer Ad, the one this blog uses.

So, to recap:  Get your website an Opt-In box to capture website visitors’ email address and connect it to an email marketing software like GetResponse so that you can market to them periodically.     If you don’t wish to deal with the technicalities of it, I can do it for you; just shoot me an email.

Remember, it cost you money to get your website built and maintain it, so it needs to be getting you new business every day.  Demand it!

Till next time,

Dan Perez DC
Guerilla Chiropractic

The result: the Good, the Bad, and the Ugly of the chiropractic profession are in broad daylight for all to see, including your current and potential patients. The miracle stories, the good PR coming from the sports world and other positive chiropractic human interest stories are competing with the stroke comments, chiropractor insurance fraud stories (who among us hasn’t read such an article in our local news?), and witch doctor comments. Yes, some of the Bad stuff out there isn’t true– after all, anyone with a heartbeat can post anything online. We can cry foul when these things occur, but by that time it has influenced a lot of minds. This is the information age, and we’re in a fight to win over the minds of those who need our services.  And everyone knows the old adage that bad news spreads more quickly than positive news.  So, you’ve got to operate as your own PR agency.

In 2010 and beyond, chiropractors should consistently put out positive PR for their practices. And you’ll need to do it via the internet, because the internet and its many veins is a huge well of influence at this moment in time. This means you’ll need to set up:

• a website. Not just any ordinary website, one that is conversion optimized, incorporating all the psychological triggers that keep visitors interested.   A self-playing welcome video is a nice, powerful touch as people are used to seeing video online.   If you currently have a crappy site, get rid of it!  It could be costing you a lot of business.  You have three (3) seconds to convince the online shopper that you are worth looking into.  Nothing scares away a visitor more than a website that looks like it was made in the 1990s; or one that takes too long to load because of fancy flash animations (I do not recommend flash for chiro websites).
• An email opt-in box for your website visitors.  This is a special graphic visible on your site that gives visitors an option to receive email promotions from you.  Here’s an advanced one that I use, but there are more simple ones.  Make sure you offer something of value in exchange for their email; like health tips or a free eBook on exercises and stretches for the office worker, etc.
• a blog. Place the blog inside your website; i.e. www.yourwebsite.com/blog. Post daily to your blog. It should have an RSS feed, which enables your patients to subscribe to your blog and receive posts in their email or feed reader. The blog posts will essentially make your website bigger (more pages) and will drive it higher in Google’s natural search.
• SEO activities (search engine optimization).  You’ll need to learn how to get your website ranked naturally in the major search engines.
• Google AdWords listing.  Get your site on the top of Google by paying for it initially.  Be careful, you need to know what you’re doing here, or you’ll be wasting money on clicks.
• an automated e-newsletter delivered by an email marketing software such as GetResponse. The system takes the emails you gather from your website visitors (see email opt in box above) and sends them monthly newsletters (that you write ahead of time) that promote your services, with a link pointing back to your site or an appointment sign up form.
• a Twitter identity. Don’t use your personal Twitter account to promote your business; create a new Doctor identity. Tweet every day, with your website URL in your tweet (Tweets now show up on Google search results, so obviously use the word “chiropractor and chiropractic” in your tweets).
• a FaceBook Page. This is your online presence on the huge, 300 million member FaceBook. You’ll post news about your clinic periodically, and link your FB page to your Twitter account so that when you post something on your FB page, a tweet to your list is automatically generated.
• a YouTube branded channel.  It’s like having an online TV channel for your clinic, for Free.  You’ll make short videos of things like a short commercial of your clinic; how to stretch, how to lift, how to set up your workstation ergonomically– you get the point.  You’ll include your clinic phone number and website URL in your videos.  These videos get indexed in the Google search results.  Don’t sweat video; it’s real easy to do.  The lazy (but good enough!) and easiest way is to use this: Flip UltraHD Camcorder, 120 Minutes (Black).  You point, press record, stop, and plug it into your computer’s USB slot and edit the video.  Then, upload it to YouTube.  You can literally put a video on YouTube in less than 30 minutes from start to finish with the flip phone!

So these are the minimum things you’ll need to get going.  If you need any help on any of these steps, I can offer you my web consulting services for a modest fee.  Just contact me via this blog’s contact form or give me a call at (925) 788-6253.

If you want to give it a shot yourself, a good place to start is my Internet Marketing guide (70+ pages) that gives you the details on all of the above, as well as a lot more underground stuff that will give you a head start over your competitors.

Dan Perez, DC

But before you throw out the baby with the bathwater, I want to tell you that despite the negativity of commercial email, it can still be of great use to you.  All you have to do is to stick by these fundamental rules:

1.  You have to ask your patients/ prospective patients for their email address, and tell them how you will use their email.  Taking their email from the new patient intake form (if you have this field) is not enough.  The patient must “opt in” to your email list, on their own (after you tell them the benefits of doing so, of course).

2.  You have to provide useful, pertinent content; not a bunch of fluff.  Think about the level of content that YOU would want to receive.  Since we’re chiropractors, examples would include instructions on how to stretch properly, the proper way to set up your workstation to minimize strain, and how to apply ice and heat to a new injury.  Go the extra step and include video in your emails.  Now that’s great content.

3.  You need to make unsubscribing easy.  If the patient wishes to no longer receive your emails for one reason or another, you need to have an unsubscribe link at the bottom of each email message.

And in order to make it all work, you’ll need an email marketing software that will handle all the email subscriptions, email delivery, and unsubscribes.  There are several to choose from; the one I use is GetResponse.  GetResponse is web based, and is a monthly subscription of about $15.00 a month.  You can set up multiple campaigns.  So far, I am really excited about its easy to navigate, user-friendly interface.  The learning curve is quite short.  Check it out!

Dan