First off, everybody knows a newsletter is absolutely vital to internal marketing, and is even helpful in external marketing if used properly. But unfortunately, the vast majority of our profession makes fatal, fundamental mistakes when it comes to creating and using their newsletter.

To understand this, let me just touch briefly on the TRUE role a newsletter plays in the overall marketing strategy. Then I’ll show you what most people do wrong, and how to fix it. Ready?

First things first. Why even bother with a newsletter? Simple. A newsletter is vital to your marketing for two reasons:

• First, Brand Awareness
• Second, Open Rate

Let me break that down for you.

You’re probably familiar with the concept of Brand Awareness. It’s how familiar (and comfortable) people are with you and your office (yes, you are a brand).

Most importantly, brand awareness is how often people think about your office. One of the reasons why people drop off of care (either active or wellness) is this: they’re too caught up in all of the other details of their life.

Bills, kids, deadlines, jobs… people are overwhelmed. Distracted times a thousand. A good newsletter will keep your office fresh in their minds, without annoying them (like re-activation calls annoy them) or seeming self-serving.

Now let’s talk Open Rate. This is the part that everybody misses out on.

A properly constructed, high quality newsletter provides the golden ticket to hugely successful marketing: a high open rate. “Open rate” is what it sounds like: … the percentage of patients that are actually opening your emails. This may not seem like a big deal, but trust me, from a promotional perspective, it's huge.

How much of the direct mail in your mailbox do you throw away sight unseen… so called "Junk mail" that you toss unread into the trash? How many emails do you get that you ignore and never open? Open Rate is a major statistic for success. You can't get a message to your patient base, if they never open it.

So there's the secret weapon to the right kind of newsletter. Getting people used to opening and reading emails from you. That may not seem, on the surface, like that big of a deal, but if you think about it, you'll start to see why it's so important.

Imagine if every time you called a patient, they answered. Imagine if every time you mailed a letter to a patient, they opened and read it. This is what forms the basis for further communication with your patients… getting them to actually look forward to opening your emails.

Between this and brand awareness, I hope you see how absolutely vital a good newsletter is. They form a solid foundation off of which a chiropractor can create a massively successful internal marketing campaign. But it’ll never get off the ground, if it isn’t done right.

By the way, notice I didn’t say anything about “pre-selling” or “pre-educating” patients on chiropractic. In fact, you’re about to see that’s one of the big no-no’s that everybody’s getting wrong.

Oh, I know, I know, all the old-timey dinosaur gurus from the ‘80s have been selling you for years on the idea that you have to hammer your patients insistently with what I call “Chiropractic And” articles. “Chiropractic and Headaches”, “Chiropractic Fixes Everything”, etc. etc. Huge mistake.

But I’m getting ahead of myself. Let me take a quick step back and summarize the major mistakes I see being made by my fellow chiropractors when it comes to their newsletters. This is the stuff that kills your open rate and makes you look like an amateur.

Let’s go over each briefly in turn.

First off, not doing a newsletter. This may seem self-evident, but you’d be surprised at how many chiropractors just don’t bother with it. Maybe they used to and got burned out, maybe they never got one started… but tons of your competitors are not even bothering at all with a newsletter. So just having one is a huge advantage.

Second, not sending out content often enough. So, the conventional wisdom from the ‘80s gurus is, send out a newsletter once a month. Wrong. So wrong. I can tell you flat out that in this day and age, once a month is just not going to cut it. Not even close.

Once a month is simply not enough to stay fresh in your patients' minds, and remember, that's one of the two reasons why you put out a newsletter in the first place: Brand Awareness… having people think of you more often, think of you more highly, and feel like they have a closer relationship with you. But once a month is so spread out, it's like constantly trying to revive a dead fire rather than working with already hot coals.

Part of Brand Awareness is called “Front of Mind”; which is how often people think about you (or don’t forget about you). If you want your patients to be compliant with either an active care plan or wellness care, you're going to need to stay in their thoughts while their lives spin out of control around them.

Bills, kids, deadlines, jobs… people are overwhelmed. Distracted times a thousand. A good newsletter will keep your office fresh in their minds, without annoying them (like re-activation calls annoy them) or seeming self-serving.

I send out two newsletters a month, and on the “off” weeks, I send out additional “points of interest”… this is basically a list of links to nifty health-related articles I found on the Internet. I send those out with a little note essentially saying “Saw this cool stuff and wanted to share with you”.  (UPDATE:  There are people sending out weekly newsletters as well with good results.)

That once-a-week tempo seems to be the ideal for staying front-of-mind with patients without becoming too much of a pest. That’s the tricky part: keeping your patients thinking about you without coming off like a pain in the butt or a stalker.

Third, writing about the wrong stuff. Now, this might sting a bit for some of you. Here’s the bad news. Nobody is going to stop what they’re doing to read an article called “Chiropractic and Headaches”. Sorry, but it’s true.

You see, the old-timey gurus want you to believe that a newsletter is there to pre-educate patients on chiropractic… and so every chiropractic newsletter out there looks the same: "Chiropractic and Neck Pain", "Chiropractic Helps Headaches"… do these headlines sound familiar?

Here's the problem. First off, nobody's reading that. Sorry. That might sting to hear; I know it was a tough lesson for me when I first started writing patient education material. And for us chiropractors who are passionate about chiropractic and how it can help people, it sucks to hear that the Average Joe and Jane just don't get excited about chiropractic. They won't read an article with a headline of "Chiropractic and Neck Pain". That newsletter goes into the trash without a second glance.

How about this headline? "Scientists Use Lasers To Reverse Emotions Associated With Memory". Science? Lasers? Reversing memory… what? Yeah, I want to read that! And so does your typical patient.

That means, my newsletter gets read. That's the first and most important step. Second, my newsletter never gets perceived as a thinly-veiled sales pitch for chiropractic… again, sorry, but that's what the typical patient sees when they spot yet another "Chiropractic and…" headline. "Oh, gee", they say, "The chiropractor says chiropractic is awesome, yet again. There's a shock".

You see? It's too obviously self-serving.

Don't rely on your newsletter to educate patients on chiropractic. It's the wrong tool for the job. First off, it's too short. Second, it's too broad; it needs to be written for ALL patients. Third, there's far more appropriate digital marketing tools to get that job done. That's beyond the scope of this discussion (which is already longer than I intended), but the bottom line is, let the newsletter do its job, and its job only.

By writing content that interests your patients, your newsletter get read consistently… remember open rate? So now, rather than put all that time and effort into a newsletter that just gets tossed aside without a glance, now you have an engine for catching your patient’s interest… and THAT forms a solid foundation to build an internal marketing campaign.

Once they open the letter, you can start adding in promotional messages for your products and services. You have to take it lightly, though… no smacking people over the head with tons of sales messages. The vast majority of your newsletter has to be completely non-sales related content, with a little bit of promotion on the side.

Think of a TV show or Youtube video. There’s ads on most of them, but people still watch… as long as it’s mostly content, with a little bit of ads on the side. They’ll tolerate that. But if it’s all ads, and no content… well, nobody’s watching THAT show.

Now, if this sounds like a lot of work… well, it is. It takes me about five or six hours to put together a full month’s worth of content, and I’ve been a professional writer for years.

So if that sounds like something that’s way too tedious to do, I have a solution for you that’s actually cheaper than doing it yourself. Seriously. It is.

Like I said, it takes about five hours to professionally create all that content for the month: researching appropriate articles, writing them to the correct length, formatting, images, all that jazz. If you outsource newsletter creation to your staff, how much is it to pay one of your staff for five or six hours? Fifty dollars? Sixty? More?

Consider this…even if your staff could somehow outperform a professional writer and chiropractor and create this much content to the same level of quality in half the time, you'd STILL be paying more than what we charge for it.

I have a done-for-you newsletter service that’s HALF that cost. You get weekly content to send to your patient list: Two full newsletters AND those off-week “points of interest” links, all for just $25/month.

UPDATE:  Due to multiple client requests, rather than a monthly subscription, we now offer a bundle package at a one-time cost.  It's 26 newsletters in a single ZIP file, so now you can get instant gratification (well, at least as far as newsletters go!).  

EXTRA UPDATE: Be sure to check out our fire sale going on right now!  Prices on the newsletter bundle have been slashed like crazy for a short term promotional event... check out the details below!

But PLEASE don't tell me you're going to write it yourself… how much money can you generate with five or ten hours (or heck, even ONE hour) of patient contact? I mean, we chiropractors all seem to be addicted to DIY projects (I’m as guilty as the rest), but seriously, when you can outsource a tedious job to an expert on the super-cheap… for God’s sake, do it!

I’m serious about that last part. Let me handle this for you. Burnout is a serious issue in chiropractic, so it’s important to outsource the boring, tedious stuff to a guy like me so that you can focus your talents and energy on providing the best quality service to your patients when they do come in… because all the marketing in the world won’t save a distracted chiropractor.

That's why I've priced this service so low. I don't want there to be any logical reason for you to not use it. At my price, you actually lose money if you DON'T use my service… doing it in-house is more expensive!

FIRE SALE!  FIRE SALE!  FIRE SALE!

As a special promotion for our chiropractic digital marketing services, we're running a fire sale on the 26 newsletter bundle package. Instead of paying 26 X $25 = $650, you get the whole bundle for only $77!!!!  That's 90% off!

It’s a super low price for a reason: I don’t want there to be any reason why you wouldn’t use my service. At this price (less than $3 a newsletter!!!), you’d have to be nuts to NOT outsource the tedious work of writing a newsletter to me!

Oh, and by the way, there's one more benefit to using my service… since it's already all been created ahead of time for you, your newsletter will never put off or forgotten or procrastinated away.

So take advantage of this fire sale promotion now and grab this bundle while the price lasts. You'll be glad you did.