A while back I made a post about using an email marketing software called GetResponse to simplify your email marketing.  What, you don’t use an email marketing software in your chiropractic business?  Well, you’re behind the times.  Just about everyone uses email; it’s the most utilized aspect of the internet, bar none (ironically, and unfortunately the high utilization of email has caused people to speak to each other less often!).

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