Most chiropractors who have put effort into updating their marketing know that it’s incredibly important to collect and maintain a list of patient emails. Outside of chiropractic, so-called “email marketing” is so important, a common phrase is, “The money is in the list”.
It’s really been that way for a long time… creating and maintaining a list of happy clients or patients. Ask Columbia House records… remember them? Okay, I’m dating myself a bit with this one, but they gave away tons of music for a penny, in order to encourage you to join their list. They then sent periodic catalog and ads to you to follow up and see what else you might like to buy.
It’s really not much different today. Except, the big difference is, everybody is used to communicating via email, which is GREAT news, because sending out emails is WAY cheaper than direct mail.
Strangely, though, some doctors still don’t collect emails. Perhaps it’s because they don’t know how to ask; I know that in other articles or videos (I can’t remember which off of the top of my head) I’ve gone over effective techniques for getting compliance with an email request. But regardless, if you have gone to the trouble of building up your email list, congratulations, you’ve done more than a lot of other chiropractors.
The Only Easy Day, Was Yesterday
Here’s the bad news. Just getting someone to sign up for your list, is the easy part. As hard as it might seem, it’s actually the easy part. The next big hurdle for you to stay in contact with your list, is making sure they actually open your emails.
Hunh? Make sure they open them? What do you mean? Why, of course they open them! My patients LOVE me!
I’m sure they do. But as I’ve said many, many times before, one of the key concepts when it comes to patient psychology is the idea of overwhelm. As in, people are overwhelmed; with stress, with jobs, with constant sales messages, you name it. Life is a swirling jumble of chaos.
And so, necessarily, they filter out a lot of the stimuli coming in their direction. A LOT of it. As in, the vast majority. Your emails to your patients, may very well be a casualty of that reaction to the overload of noise bombarding your patient.
Open Rate
There’s actually a term in the marketing ‘biz for what we’re talking about: Open Rate. As in, what is the rate of your list that opens your emails.
Look, I said it was a term, I didn’t say it was an EXCITING term.
And while the term “Open Rate” might seem boring, it’s one of the most important metrics you can track in your marketing efforts. Why? Because it’s a direct measurement of how much people are bothering to listen to you.
Haven’t you ever wondered that? Haven’t you ever wondered, as you put together an ad, how many people would actually see it? Or if you put out a newsletter, how many people read it?
In the past, you had to guess. With direct mail, you can’t measure how many letters are opened and how many are simply trashed sight unseen. One of the many exciting and helpful things about digital marketing is, so much of it is trackable.
You can indeed track open rate. It’s built in to most decent email list service providers. That’s the good news.
The bad news is, the open rate for chiropractors is terrible. The health care industry in general hovers around a 16% open rate. That means only one out of SIX people even bother to click on your email. And really, in my experience, chiropractors do even worse than the industry average.
Why is that? Well, two reasons, really. First, we don’t bother to train our patients to open our emails. Not TELL them, TRAIN them. There are ways to train people to get used to the idea that you’re going to be sending them occasional messages, and that they should expect (and like the idea of) your messages.
Next, we as chiropractors rarely give people a reason to get on our list, and STAY on our list. That boils down to the CONTENT of the messages we send.
Do your patients look like this when they see your emails in their inbox?
As an example… I got on a list a while back of a real estate agent. I don’t know how I got on it. But I got constant spam emails about properties that were nowhere near what I was interested in. What do you think my reaction was, after a few emails, when I saw one of that guy’s messages pop up in my in box?
If you’re guessing that I rolled my eyes, said, “NOOOOOO!” loudly, and hit DELETE, you’re guessing right.
We need to send emails and messages worth reading, but not worth reading by OUR standards, worth reading by THEIR standards. Remember your audience. If you send them articles that are only of interest to you, or only serve YOUR interests, people will quickly tire of them (and you) and no longer open your emails. And then you might as well not even have them on your list.
I’ve discussed in other articles about the dangers of writing only blatantly pro-chiropractic articles in newsletters, and the same goes for emails. You can’t send only promotions for your practice, or yet another “hooray for chiropractic” message… nobody will bother reading that.
But, if you send them interesting things about natural health… noooooow you’ve got their attention. People are super interested in that. And you, as a chiropractor, are uniquely qualified to bring to their attention and accurately discuss all kinds of topical natural health interests.
THAT means you’re throwing down something that they’ll pick up. And now, your emails stand out from the crowd of noise and nonsense, as something fun and interesting and useful, rather than just another boring self-serving sales pitch.
The trick then, is to subtlety include promotions for your office’s services and products in those messages, but that’s a whole other ball of wax.
So to sum up, you need to get them on your list and train them to open your emails. I use a five email sequence that’s all about how to stay younger naturally. This serves the dual purpose of bribing them onto the list (because who doesn’t want to learn how to stay young?) and also training them to open my emails (by opening five emails in a row, one per day). Then you follow up with messages that THEY will want to read.
By the way, if that five email sequence I mentioned sounds like a good idea, but a lot of work, I do have a template version of it for sale (click here to see if the seven dollar special is still running). It is a big time saver if you’re not all that big on writing.
Either way, be sure you follow those basic rules of email communication and watch your open rate soar. Ignore them, and you’ll just be shouting into the wind.
