287- 3 Simple Steps to Build Your Email List

Welcome to the Evidence Based Chiropractor where each week we deliver the latest chiropractic research and marketing strategies, all in the time it takes to get to your office. Now, here's your host, Dr. Jeff Langmaid.

Hello and welcome to the Evidence Based Chiropractor. I AM your host, Dr. Jeff Langmaid. On today's episode, we're going to break down what I think is one of the most important marketing concepts you need to be aware of as a practicing doc. And it's something I've gone through myself. We're going to talk about email and I want to highlight the three ways that you can build your email list, three simple steps that you can take to build and grow to develop your email list. We're going to talk about why that's so important, the mistakes that I've made that other docs make, and also those specific three steps that you can probably take action on today to start building and growing your list. Now, before we get started, I'll say a few words about Smart Chiropractor. There is nothing else to say other than we are crushing it right now on Google My Business. If you're getting traffic from Google and you're not optimized in using auto posting on your Google my business listing, you're missing out on tremendous opportunity. Our average doc is receiving over 60 calls, phone calls to their front desk on their Google My business listing. With the Smart chiropractor, we take care of posting to Google My business. We take care of posting to Facebook, to Instagram, to YouTube. We have the entire kit and caboodle of email, all of the campaigns you need automatically done for you. They're all personalized to your practice. You gotta check out the smart chiropractor. You can schedule a demo by visiting the smartchiropractor.com demo. Check it out, see if we are a good fit for your practice. But as I said at the top, today on this episode, we're talking all about email in those three ways that you can build your email list. So we're probably gonna start with why is this even important? Right? Why should this episode be different than any others? Why should you pay attention to this one specifically? And let's break it down. There's a couple concepts regarding email that I think are incredibly important to understand as a practicing doc so then you can start to implement. Number one is what I'm gonna say is beyond chirop. Meaning if you look at most businesses outside of chiropractic and healthcare in general, you look at a business that's maybe Peloton or you look at a business like Hims or Hers or Ritual or these businesses, and you're gonna notice that they have email lists that are 10 times larger than their customer list. They might have 5 million emails and 500,000 active customers. They might have 1 million people on their email list and 20,000 active clients or customers. And the bizarre thing within healthcare, and specifically within chiropractic, and I'm looking at you, if you're listening to this, is that many of us have the complete opposite phenomenon. We might have a thousand patient records and 500 emails. We might have, you know, 2,000 patient records and 400 emails. So we don't have what would commonly be called a leads list. We don't have the ability to really get people indoctrinated with what we do, understanding what we do, and converting them to clients, or in our case, patients. In every other business, you look at an email list as the top of funnel, so to speak, in this example, meaning you have many more email addresses than you have active clients. That's how you keep the engine going, right? You have plenty of people on your email list. You keep growing and developing that, and some of them choose to become clients or customers. That's in a lot easier of a way to go about business than it is to not even have all of your current clients on your email list. You just end up with a ton of holes in your bucket. Because it's hard to stay top of mind with people. If you can't even get to the people that already know, trust and like you, how do you expect to be getting to people that haven't heard of you yet? And this is where building and growing. Why is it so important? It's important because it's been said and it's true. Your network is equivalent to your net worth. And the people on your email list are part of your network. They're part of your sphere of influence. They're part of your health tribe. And if you don't even have your current patients, there's. You're gonna be struggling and you're just gonna have difficulty building, growing, and scaling your practice. I believe that the email list that you have is your most valuable asset in business. Why? Because whether or not you're physically in practice, you can teach and invite consistently. As we say, with the smart chiropractor, you can teach people something. You can invite them with a call to action to purchase something, to subscribe to a service. You can help them live a better life. The other Thing is, it's direct communication. We've all seen the challenges and it's just the way it. But diminished organic reach across all of the social platforms. It could be frustrating and that's, that's okay. But that's the way it is. As they build, grow and develop. They need ad revenue, whereas email, you don't have to mess with that. You have a direct communication line to your patients. So it's what I call a controllable marketing asset. I don't think there's anything more important than building and growing a controllable marketing asset. The other aspect of it is I've talked to plenty of Instagram mini influencers in and around the chiropractor space that have had hundreds of thousands of followers on something like Instagram. And they're stressed day in and day out. Why? Because they're vulnerable. Because they might have an email list. Some of these people had email lists of 200 and they have 150,000 followers on Instagram. Well, guess what? Instagram changes its algorithm. That person's up a creek. So I know that I've talked and I believe that it's great and it's important and it's imperative and to build and grow your health tribe on social, but not at the neglect of your email list. So it's an and conversation, not or now. Why am I so passionate about email and direct communication? Because it's how I've built multiple businesses. It's how we built the evidence based chiropractor. It might be how you heard of this podcast. It's how we built the smart chiropractor. It is how we built, grown and developed multitudes of businesses over time. And why is email so important? Well, 90% of people check their email at least one time per day. There's just a lot of action there. And over 50% of people check their email over 10 times a day. I know I'm definitely falling there and guilty. And that's a lot. So you have opportunities through direct communication. It's a valuable asset that you can bring with you. Whether you again, if you're an associate, it depends on your contract. But if you're a clinic owner, okay, you move locations, you can bring that email list with you. You change buildings, you can bring. It's a great way to make announcements. It's a great way to te and invite consistently. Now I wanna talk about a couple of these mistakes that I see docs making before we get into those three ways that you can build your list. So there's Three big mistakes. And I've been guilty of this myself in the past that docs make when they start thinking about email. So hopefully the why makes sense to you and you're like, okay, I get this. I should have a steady flow of new people on my email list. I definitely should have all of my current and new patients on my email. What are the things I need to avoid? Right? What are those most common mistakes? And there's three of them that I want to talk about. One is not having a weekly email. If you do not have a weekly email, you're missing out on opportunity and you are sub optimized. Now, depending upon who you are listening to this, I know I talk with docs that are like weekly. Can I send more? And I talk with other docs that are like, that might annoy my patients. A weekly email is not overwhelming. Let's just, I want to get that out of the way. A weekly email that actually now if you just sent a weekly email that was all advertisements and junk, you're probably going to annoy some people. But if you send a weekly email, that is the format similar to what we use with the smart chiropractor and we do it for all of our members. That's teach and invite consistently based upon a monthly campaign and a weekly topic. Now you're educating, you're inspiring, you're engaging with people and then your teach, that's the teach part. And you're inviting them, your call to action, to take a next step. And you're doing it consistently. Teach and invite consistently. When you do that through a weekly email, you do a couple different things. And here is why docs miss out on this opportunity is if you're not doing it, you're gonna struggle with retention, you're gonna struggle with staying top of mind, and you're definitely going to struggle with keeping your schedule full. A weekly email to your patient list is so critically important to long term practice success that I cannot overstate it. This is about staying top of mind. It's about keep, you know people, I talked with the doc about this two days ago. You know, patient comes in with a neck issue, they, you know, they do well and then you hear from them two years later with a new neck issue. And in the meantime they had a back issue and they're like, I didn't know you took care of backs. I just thought you took care of necks. That's a communication problem. A weekly email based upon monthly campaigns allows you to circumvent that problem and it allows you to keep fill the holes of your bucket. These are people who already know trust and like you. The your best next new patient is keeping your current patients. So a weekly email is imperative and most docs are not doing that. And if you are not, that is something you need to take very, very seriously. If you don't have the bandwidth, check out the smart chiropractor. Number two mistake is no automations. Automations are campaigns. You think of them like that. That means somebody comes in and takes an action. Maybe they sign up for your email, maybe they are a new patient, you enter their email and they get a series of emails that don't require you to send each and every one. Automations are clutch. They are how you save time, they are how you are effective and they are how you are efficient. If you try to individually send emails every single time, you're going to last about one day because it's impossible to do so. But you can literally send thousands of emails each and every month without having to click a button. This is automations work for you 24 7, 365. So we build all the automations within the smart chiropractor. A new patient campaign automation, a lead magnet automation as we'll talk about in a moment and also our weekly email newsletter automation. You don't have to do anything that is clutch. That is critically important because if you need to send every email every single time, you're not gonna do it. And finally it's pushing. What's the other mistake? Pushing this to staff or your ehr? Your EHR is responsible for sending transactional emails. Hey, you missed an appointment. Hey, it's your birthday. But it's not marketing. And a marketing email channel needs expertise and it needs a robust portion. It doesn't mean you need to know every single portion of it. You should be delegating this task. But if you're relying on your ehr, it's not going to work. And if you're pushing it to a staff member, there are people within large companies that have entire email divisions. So this is an important. This is the lifeblood of your practice revolves, I'm going to say, around email and your ability to communicate. So don't push it to a staff member and hope for the best. This is where subject line expertise, body copy expertise, the ability to understand calls to action, the all of this stuff is critically important because it's gonna determine whether or not your campaigns are successful or not. Now let's get into those three ways to build your email list. Three simple ways you can build your email list starting today is get it on your intake form. Make sure your new patients are filling out and putting in their email and ensure so step number one is get it on your intake form. Every new patient you should have an email for and if you notice it's blank, hold somebody accountable in your practice to asking the patient hey, I noticed you left this blank. We love to have that information to communicate. Kind of coordinate your. Do you mind if we have your email address? You need to get it on all the new patients. So that is step number one, get it in your intake paperwork. And step number two with that part, part 1B is to ensure that somebody is accountable to ensure that it's there. Don't let it only go filled. Get filled out half the time then you're defeating the purpose of having it there way. Number two to build your email list easily is with your what I'm going to call active patients. So you might get, I don't know, 10, 20, 30 new patients per month but you might be seeing 80 to 100 visits a week. So step number two is your active patients go through next week literally ask. So your front desk staff should be bringing up their chart for every, every patient that comes into your practice over the next make it a 30 day, you know, a 30 day program. So over the next 30 days everybody, we are going to bring up the chart for every patient that comes in. We're gonna make sure we have an active email address on file and how we're gonna do that is just simply ask them. Hey John, great to see you today. I you know Doc will be with you in just a moment. Before he comes out I just wanted to verify that the best email address for you is still blah blah blah blah blah or hey, great to see you John. Doc will be out in just a moment. I noticed that we don't have an active email address for you. Do you mind if we have one so that we can communicate updates in the practice. It's how we can keep you informed and ultimately help you get better results by keeping you engaged with what's up to benefit your care. I'm butchering that a little bit but the bottom line is ask people make sure that you are getting updated over the next 30 days with every active patient in your practice. New patient step number one, active patient step number two, simple ask. And number three is email opt ins. On your website I might put this number one but we'll go with it on number three here. If you do not have an email opt in on your website, Yowzers. The average chiropractic website is 500 to 1 visitors each and every month. And these are high intent people. As we've discussed on this podcast in the past, nobody except for me is cruising chiropractic websites for giggles and for fun. So if somebody visits your website, they're there for a reason. They have high intent. They're looking to take action. If you're getting 500 to 1,000 website visitors each and every month and you're getting 10 new patients, you got a couple holes in your bucket, right? What's happening to those other 490 people or whatever it might be, the delta on that is huge. So how do you rectify that? You rectify that by having an exit intent email pop up on your website. That means it doesn't make your whole website go away. When somebody goes on, it's super annoying. No, have a pop up appear when somebody is moving their cursor. It's called an exit intent popup. We build these for our docs with the smart chiropractor. Somebody moves their cursor up to the left hand side of their screen and they're gonna back, you know, go away from your page, navigate away from your page. A little pop up appears that asks them for their email address in exchange for something of benefit. We call that a lead magnet. That could be a video or a PDF, but that's a lead magnet. That is imperative to have this because you can convert 1 to 10% of your traffic onto your email list. So you could or should be. I don't want you to cry right now, but you know, if you've been having hundreds of visitors per month and you've been in practice for, I don't care if it's a couple months or a couple years, you could probably miss out on 25 to 50 minimum email addresses to your book leads each and every month for X amount of months or years. You could have an email list in the thousands at this point of people who might not have ever made it into your practice yet, but could in the future. Getting back to where we started this conversation about 15 minutes ago, this is how you build a business. Once you have active lead generation on your website, and this is what drives me nuts, is that so many docs out there, and this might resonate with you, you know, they're paying, you know, 50 bucks, 500 bucks a month for their website and it's not optimized. They don't, you know, it's like you're spending all that time, effort and energy, you're, you're, you're, but you're all the benefits in that last 10%. You're not going that last 10%. An email opt in on your website is critically important to ensure that your website's optimized, that it's working the best it can and that you're getting the most out of it. If you're already spending money there, you want to ensure that you're getting the most out of it. Now, one piece that I want to note here on step number three of getting that email opt in on your website is it's not just the opt in, but it's the follow up. So this is where the automation, as we talked about, mistake of not having an automation comes in. You want somebody to put in their email address and you want them to get a series of emails over the next week or so that you don't have to mess with at all. That should all be set up. This is exactly why I talk so much about chiro emails within the smart chiropractor is we've built all of this out for our docs. So if you want to take advantage of not having the mistake of no weekly email, not having the mistake of not having automations, not having the mistake of trying to do this through an ehr, then come on board with the smart chiropractor or at least take what you've learned today on this episode and put it into action. I'm gonna warn you, it's not easy. We have an entire team that does this day in and day out because it is critical to practice operations. So build that email list the three steps and the three ways to build it. Make sure you're asking your new patients on the intake form. Ensure that your active patients over the next 30 days make an earnest effort to update everybody. There should be nobody that walks in your front door that you don't have an email address on. Step number two and step number three is get an email opt in on your website. If you want to go about doing it yourself, fantastic. If you want it done for you. In a way, I think we're sending somewhere in the vicinity of 550,000 emails per month on behalf of our smart chiropractor members. What does that mean? It means we have great data to understand really what's working and what's not. It's not a guessing game. We can really zero in on subject lines, we can really zero in on calls to action, we can really zero in on what campaigns are working the best to help more of your traffic get into your practice. These are high intent people, but you need to make sure that you have your systems and processes in place that it's not what do I do today? Systems and processes are what help you build and grow and I think on the marketing side we can definitely help you. Now, before we wrap up, I'll say a few words about Cairo Matchmakers if you are an associate in the making. If you're looking for a job out there, we have over a hundred active jobs open@chiromatchmakers.com please check that out if you're looking to hire an associate. If you're looking to hire a new team member, please head over and part of this is involved with the coverage side of things as well. So if you want to provide chiropractic office coverage, get great experience or you might be out with an injury, maternity, paternity leave, you're going to go on vacation, don't close your practice and lose revenue. That's absolutely crazy. Visit us@chiromatchmakers.com for the covered services as well. So hopefully this was helpful. If you have not left this podcast a rating or review on itunes, I would greatly, greatly appreciate it if you do so that helps more and more docs find out about it. If you have any questions or comments, you know where to reach me. Jeff the evidencebasechiropractor.com I hope you have a fantastic week in practice and I will talk to you soon.

Thank you for joining us on this episode of the Evidence Based Chiropractor. If you want to grow your practice, come back for next week's episode. If you want to grow faster, visit theevidencebasedchiropractor.com and join our MD Marketing membership today.