I really, really love to make fun of the dusty old outdated chiropractic marketing gurus from the ’80s…. the ones I like to call the “dinosaur gurus”. And if there’s one awful tactic that the dinosaur gurus from the ‘80s teach, that is a prime example of exactly what NOT to do if you want to build a successful practice, it’s the dreadful and counterproductive reactivation call. It is without a doubt the most damaging and useless thing you can do to your practice.
Like these dinosaurs, the chiropractic marketing gurus from the ’80s got left behind.
I’m not talking about calling people who miss their appointment. Of course you should call them. They’re expecting that; it’s the natural social expectation that, if you set an appointment with someone and miss it, of course they’ll follow up with you and try to re-schedule.
No, I’m talking about the cold call campaign that makes everybody in the office miserable. The doctor hates doing them and so they push it off onto the staff or an associate, and THEY hate doing it. And, on the receiving end, patients hate getting that call.
And therein lies the problem. You’re contacting someone who doesn’t want to be contacted. They don’t want to be pestered. They’re already swamped with the nonsense of life and trying to keep a million balls in the air, so the second they get to catch a breath and relax… do you really think they want to get an unsolicited sales call?
I know, I know, that’s not how the dinosaur gurus pitch it to you. They’ll tell you that your patients WANT to hear from you, that they really deep down inside want their chiropractor to poke them in the ribs over and over until they finally come back in for a visit.
NOBODY WANTS TO GET A COLD CALL
Well, let me be the first person to tell it like it is and label that idea is a foolish fiction. NOBODY wants to get a cold call. NOBODY. The fact that there was a law passed allowing for the creation of a Do Not Call list to prevent cold calling, should be a glaring wake-up to the fact that people do not want to be cold called.
Now, don’t take that personally. It isn’t that your patients don’t like you. They do. Well, I hope they do. But as I just said a few paragraphs ago… they’re swamped. They’re locked in their own lives of chaos and swirling lunacy, spun around by a million little details that keep them stressed out and distracted. So they don’t want cold calls from anybody at all.
This is the key component that guarantees the failure of the reactivation call campaign. By definition, we’re calling people who we haven’t seen in so long, that we’re calling it a “reactivation”. What that means from a marketing perspective is, this is a COLD LEAD. This person hasn’t interacted with you in so long, that they’ve virtually forgotten about you.
The consequence of that is, they aren’t expecting to hear from you. And so, if we do contact them without their permission, we are automatically labelled as an unwanted pest. We’re not seen as a kindly voice reminding them about a valuable service that can dramatically help their lives, we’re seen as yet another insistent distraction, another sales pitch amongst many from (as the patient sees it) yet another company that just wants their money.
And it leads to animosity. If you want to drive inactive patients away from your practice and into another doctor’s office, pestering them with cold calls is a great way to do it. I can’t count the number of patients I’ve gotten over the years that have told me, “I used to go to the guy up the street, but he kept calling and pestering me, so the heck with him”.
LEARN A LESSON FROM SIRIUS
I’ll give you another example from outside of chiropractic. I bought a car about a year ago, and got a couple of free months of Sirius satellite radio as a part of the purchase. Not a bad idea on the part of Sirius. Let me try it out for a bit, see if I like it, and sign on if it’s something I enjoy.
Except.
Then, when I didn’t sign up, they started cold calling my cell phone. EVERY. DAY. And it kept going on for over a year. I still get calls from them occasionally.
Let me ask you this. What do you think my thoughts and feelings are toward Sirius satellite radio? Do you think I feel warm and fuzzy thoughts about them, and hope they do well in the future, or do you think I hope their company dies a fiery death and is erased from corporate existence as soon as possible?
See where I’m going with this? Not only did I never become a customer, now I HATE the company, and will bad mouth them any chance I get. Now whenever I talk about them, it becomes a warning to other people to NOT do business with them, or even try a free trial, lest they too suffer a constant barrage of unwanted phone calls.
Is this how you want your patients thinking about you?
HOW TO DO REACTIVATIONS WITHOUT COLD CALLS
So what should we do instead? How do we bring our patients back into the fold, or better yet, keep them in the fold in the first place so that they never have to be reactivated?
Simple. First, we get our patients on an email list. Then, we train them to open our emails to them. Lastly, we stay engaged with them with consistent communication. Let me go through each in turn.
STEP ONE: GET THEM ON AN EMAIL LIST
This is the #1 rule of 21st Century marketing: the money is in the list. Anybody who teaches marketing that isn’t still wearing parachute pants and listening to a boom box the size of a refrigerator will tell you this. You have to, absolutely have to, get your patients’ emails.
Easy for me to say, right? Everybody’s on their guard with their email. Of course they are. They get ridiculous amounts of spam email. They’re paranoid that YOU’RE going to spam them. So in order to get their email on our list, we’re going to have to work around that and prove to them that we’re not a spammer.
The best way is to have a reason to need their email. I tell them that my office emails our policies and procedures to them, like office hours, holiday closing polices, and all that sort of stuff, rather than hand it to them in a printed form. That way, the printed form never gets lost, they can save the email with the policies to their computer, and they’ll have it whenever a question pops up.
Another way is to bribe them. I also include a series of emails for all of my new patients on how they can stay younger, longer. Note that this pulls double (actually triple) duty: it bribes them to get onto my list, and it introduces wellness concepts to them (sort of like the old-timey Half Hour To Health Talk was supposed to do back in the 20th Century). It ALSO serves to accomplish our next goal, which is:
STEP TWO: TRAIN THEM TO OPEN YOUR EMAILS
This may seem extraneous or unnecessary. Why, your patients all LOVE you! Why should you have to convince them to open your emails?
I’m sure your patients do love you. But I’m also sure they’re not opening all of your emails. Statistics show that less than 16% of health care practitioners’ emails get opened. And those stats are usually worse for chiropractors.
Don’t take it personally. Think of how many jillions of emails you get every day, that you just delete sight unseen, by necessity if nothing else. People are super busy and already overwhelmed. If you don’t train them… not TELL them, TRAIN them… to open your emails, they won’t do it.
But, if you bribe them with a series of emails telling them how to extend their youth, naturally… well, once they open four or five emails, once a day, and like what they’re reading… now you’ve formed a new habit for them. Now they ARE likely to open your emails.
So long as…
STEP THREE: KEEP THE FIRE STOKED
Now that you’ve caught their attention, and trained them to pay attention, now you need to KEEP their attention. This is how we avoid the need for reactivation calls.
And we do it by staying engaged with our list. That means, occasional messages sent to them, not to pester, not to sell, not to self-promote, but to send them information of interest… specifically, information of interest TO THEM.
I’m talking about social media and newsletters, here. And the big mistake so many chiropractors make is to only talk about chiropractic in their newsletters or social media. I’ve talked in other articles (extensively!) about the perils of what I call “Chiropractic And” articles: “Chiropractic And Headaches”, “Chiropractic And You”, etc.
The lay person isn’t going to stop what they’re doing to read that. It isn’t compelling to them. Oh, it’s interesting to US… we’re chiropractors! Of course we care about chiropractic! But for them, chiropractic is just a means to an end.
So be sure to send out messages on social media and in your newsletter that are of interest TO THEM, and if you do, they’ll keep opening and reading your emails, and pay attention to your social media posts. And every time they do, they’ll remember your office. Your office will stay in the front of their minds (more on “Front Of Mind” in this article).
That means, they won’t forget to come in. Or if they do, guess what? Your newsletter, or social media, will remind them that you exist, and then they slap their head and say “Oh, crap! That’s right! I have to get in there!”
See how it works? You don’t have to be an invasive little pest now, calling them when they don’t want to be called. You subtly, passively reminded them, and now they’re far more likely to come in than if you called them up out of the blue and laid a guilt trip on them. They’ll think more highly of you, too.
SOUND TRICKY TO DO?
Not really. It does take some set-up work. But if you want a short-cut to get those first two steps up and running in less than an hour, you can click here to have a look at a template I created for you. Be sure to use that link to check the template out… it’s got a substantial discount attached so you can pick the product up for the price of a Happy Meal.
Or, if you’re confident in your writing and digital marketing skills, create a New Patient Email Sequence of your own… just don’t do any more reactivation calls. Unless you want your competitors to get all of your patients, that is.
