The #1 Strategy to Consistently Reactivate Patients | Podcast Ep. 379

Foreign hello and welcome to the Evidence Based Chiropractor. I AM your host, Dr. Jeff Langmaid. On today's episode, we're talking all about reactivations. It's a critical part of scaling a chiropractic practice. You have to be able to consistently communicate with the people you've already built relationships with and drive ultimately a consistent amount of reactivations onto your schedule so that you can grow over time. I want to share with you some of what we've learned about this process as well as the number one way to drive reactivations week in and week out for your practice on today's episode. Now, before we get started, I'll say a few words about Patient Pilot by the smart chiropractor. It's going to tie very closely into this episode. If you would like to generate consistent reactivations, Patient pilot is where it's at. We're going to break down many of the strategies we utilize within Patient Pilot on today's episode. But if you want to kind of skip the line, hop on a demo. The smart chiropractor.com Again, that is the smart chiropractor.com we have a 3x ROI guarantee. Why? Because I know and we know the strategies we're going to talk about on today's episode work time in and time out and they can work for your practice as well. So let's dive into some of those strategies, get super actionable, and I'll also encourage you if you have any questions about what we talk about, hit hit me up. Jeff the evidencebasedchiropractor.com Happy to be a resource for you, but let's talk about reactivations as well as some campaign structures and philosophies that I think are critical to understand and implement if you want to drive consistent reactivations into your practice. So why are reactivations so important? Well, they're so important because it takes five times more spend to acquire a new patient than to keep an old one. When I say keep an old one, I don't mean keep anybody hostage or do anything. You know, try to convince anybody to do anything. What I mean is consistently communicating with the people that you've already built relationships with. And there are far too few chiropractors or anybody that's actually doing this and it's absolutely nuts. You probably have in your ehr right now an email list of hundreds if not thousands of people that you don't communicate with enough. Now what are some signs of that you don't communicate with them Enough. Some signs of that are you've been in practice for years and you still rely on a lot of ad spend to drive new patients into your practice. Some other signs and symptoms of that are this classic story I've had and I think everybody else has had as well. You know, patient comes in with, let's say, a low back issue. You take great care of them, you don't see them for a little while, they come back with a low back issue. Hey, you did a great job. The first time you're chatting with them, they say, you know, a couple months ago I had a neck issue, but I know you're a low back doc, so I went somewhere else and you're like, oh my gosh, I can't believe this is happening. And yes, it happens to every chiropractor. That's because you're not consistently communicating. They didn't know how to choose you in that case. And that's just a couple. Also, if you're just, you feel like you're on the roller coaster month in and month out. Schedule's up, schedule's down, schedule's up, schedule's down. Consistency is the key to success and automation is the key to consistency. That is something you have to keep in mind and it especially holds true when we talk about reactivations. Reactivations are critical because they help you save money on some of that ad spend. They also help keep your schedule full with more people who know, trust and like you. Why wouldn't you do that? Old saying, you acquire new friends, but keep the old, keep the old is all about reactivations. Now let's talk philosophically. What is so critical here? We have a strategy within the smart chiropractor that we've utilized for years. It's called teach and invite consistently. And this ties into your reactivations because we'll talk about. Let me dive a little bit deeper in this in a moment. But number one way to drive reactivations is a weekly email newsletter. Weekly's a lot. Oh my gosh, what am I going to talk about? Or everybody's going to unsubscribe. I can't believe it. That's way too much. Hold your horses on that. We'll get to the intricacies of it. But it starts with the philosophy of teach and invite consistently. When you are mailing people as often as you should, you can notice it didn't say discount and bully every now and again. It's teach and invite consistently. You don't need to deep discount your services to the people you already have relationships with by any stretch of the imagination. But what you do need to do is teach and invite consistently. That's the heart of it. Now let's break that down a little bit and make it actionable. Teach, educate, inspire, engage. That is all teaching. And not surprisingly, this could take the form of social media videos, email campaigns, pretty much everything in your marketing. We're going to focus on the email automation specifically relative to reactivations today. But teaching is a core philosophy. Teacher educator, doctor, Teach, inspire, engage, educate, entertain. That's what you want to think about when you produce content. Teach first. Second is invite invitation. That is your call to action. Share with a friend, click to call, click to schedule. Those are the key components there. Now, if you followed somebody, a marketer like Gary Vaynerchuk, you might have heard this described as jab, jab, jab, right hook or deliver value, deliver value, deliver value and ask. In the chiropractic space, we think of it as teach and invite consistently. Teach. That affords you the opportunity for a call to action or an invitation. Invite and then do it consistently. That's key as well. You cannot do this once a month or once a quarter or hey, we make recalls once every 90 days. Keep doing that, but lay some automation and architecture underneath it so you actually get better results. Why wouldn't you do that? This is one of those holes in the bucket as we describe within the smart chiropractor. I think the bottom of the bucket, you got water going in the top of your practice. That's water in the top of the bucket. You want more of that, then you want to patch the holes in the side. Those are retention issues when you have holes in the side of your bucket. But most practices have no bottom of their bucket. They have no reactivations, except maybe recalls every now and again. That means as much water as you pour in the top. If there's no floor, there's no bottom of that bucket. It's just falling out. That's where we tie it back to symptoms like a schedule that's never full. Overreliance on the paid ads component, that those are all symptoms of having huge holes in your bucket. Reactivation automations and specifically weekly email newsletters that drive consistent reactivations each week. That is how you start to patch the hole in the bottom of your bucket. Well, guess what? That means the bucket gets more full with water. The other side of this coin is when you do that, you can rely less on paid ads. You don't need as many new patients and you start to see your schedule remain much more full than if you're not doing it at all. And I've talked on stage and I've jokingly said, like, what's the alternative? Just to not do it? It just, it doesn't make any sense. Like this is a time tested and proven strategy. Not only teach and invite, but the weekly component. And when I say it's time tested and proven, just use our own experience. We work with over 300 practices. We send about a million.25 emails per month. That gives us exceptional data to know really what's working and what doesn't work. So when we are able to dial in our subject line, our body copy our call to action, that's key, right? Because that is how you keep people engaged with those emails over time. And it's how you drive. Great result. Time and time again. I was speaking with one of our members a week or two ago and he was saying, well, we do a lot of this on our own, which is awesome. He had done a lot of it on its own. But, but when I started using your, he was actually sending weekly email newsletters. And he's like, but when we use your campaign, we're getting 10% better open rates. And I'm like that's incredible. Like that is, you know your money is right there because that open rate is going to translate to a click through rate. Even if it's only 1, 2, 3 more people per month that click over. How big is that for your practice? Over time, those incremental gains are where you want to focus as a business owner. That's what gives you leverage. And when you can have a 10% improvement. Now he was already sending weekly email newsletters. If you're not at all, you're leaving it all on the table. And I'll put that into super perspective. I'll talk about the email in a moment. Specifically the copy and the email. How to write a great subject line briefly. But let's talk about sheer numbers because I think that's. Well, how many people do I need? Do I have a big list or a small list? I'll be very transparent. Our average document has a list size of about 1200 on their email list. Now we work with some practices that have literally 20,000 plus contacts and some that are 3, 400 contacts. But the average that we work with and you average out all of our members, it's 1200 contacts. What we have found in what we drive is an average of 26 Click to call or click to schedule. Reactivations per month for every 1200 contacts. So that's 2.6 per 100 per month. So you think about how big your list size is, you can expect every hundred email subscribers about 2.6. Now there's some variability there, of course, but that is important to keep in mind. Now, if you're curious about open rates and specifically relative to what's good and what's not good, I'll be very transparent. Again, we have some docs in our system that are getting 50% plus open rates. Our average is a shade over 32%. So that is really, really, really good. And that is a testament to doing this so many times, just like adjusting. We have a team of 10 people that work full time on this project. So that gives you any insight into what it takes to really accurately and effectively run these campaigns. Outsourcing your email marketing to the front desk person because they know how to log into an email program is not a good strategy. Maybe it's better than nothing, maybe not, but it's definitely not going to get you optimal results. This is skill and it's learning and it's understanding. How do you create great subject lines week in and week out that stimulate curiosity, that gets the open and then the body copy teaches and invites so that they are apt to raise their hand, so to speak figuratively, and click to call or click to schedule. And that is an art and a science combined. There's no question about it. Maybe there's even a little bit of philosophy now that I think of it, with the teach and advice strategy. But when you put all those things together, a weekly email newsletter is the number one way that you can consistently drive reactivations. Should you do recalls? Absolutely. Should you have appointment reminders that maybe your ehr are sending, you know, some missed appointment reminders? Absolutely. But that's not email marketing. That's transactional communication. Transactional communication is important. Texting or emailing, missed appointments, appointment reminders, super important. But don't sleep on the marketing component. That should lie underneath and power all of it. Especially if you have an online scheduling tool, JNAB sched, whatever it might be. You know, there are so many online schedulers. Like you want to drive traffic to those schedulers. That's what we do. These are complimentary. What we do and what an email campaign is, is it's complimentary to text. It's not competitive, it's complimentary. It makes that work better. If you have an online scheduler, email marketing makes it work better. Why? Because now you're driving traffic to it, which is how people schedule, of course. So that is a critical component. And that is why weekly email newsletters, bar none, are the best thing you can do for your practice to consistently drive reactivations onto your schedule. And when done well, these are welcomed. Now let's talk about unsubscribes, because sometimes, like, gosh, that's a lot. It is kind of a lot. It's a lot to create on your own if you're trying to do it. But, but I can tell you right now, I've jokingly said this to a few audiences from the stage, but I'll say it now as well. One email a year is too much if it is a total piece of you know what, it's just too much, right? One email a day is not enough if it actually enhances your life. I have plenty of email lists that I subscribe to and I get once a day emails and I love it. I get some emails I get once a year and I'm like, oh my gosh, this is terrible. And I unsubscribe. So first, we have discovered that a weekly cadence makes the most sense for a healthcare practice. We've tested this outside of chiropractic as well, but it's chiropractic. It falls right in line with it. For chiropractors, a weekly email newsletter is the best cadence. It gives you the most benefit and is not too, too much. Additionally, a weekly email newsletter, actually, if you've been sending monthly or quarterly and you're concerned, a weekly email newsletter, ironically or not ironically, when you really know the business, actually drives higher clickthroughs and higher engagement than only sending monthly or quarterly when done properly. So you actually get added benefit. It's 1 plus 1 equals 11, not 1 plus 1 equals 2. When you start sending weekly, the other component to that is your unsubscribe. So there's two facets of this. There is a normal unsubscribe rate that is normal, it's healthy and it cleans the list. But you want that to be like 1% ish or below. So that's important to keep in mind. But on the other token, you can't be. I can't believe Jim unsubscribed. I'm never going to send an email to anybody because Jim unsubscribed. I thought he liked me, like, cool your chats. Maybe they just didn't want that communication at that time. So of course we build everything totally compliant with all the unsubscribes from list, unsubscribe from campaign so that you have the most opportunity to continually connect in a way that is 100% ethical, 100% nice, and 100% compliant with all email protocols, I guess you could say. So that's an important component that you need to keep an eye out for. But if you're seeing that you have a sky high unsubscribe rate, chances are you need to take a double look at your content. And when you first start emailing a list, you're probably going to see more unsubscribes than as it goes on because you haven't really done it before. And that's a normal part of the process. Nothing to get too uptight about. And again, my example to that is if you have 500 people and 10 unsubscribe or five unsubscribe or something to that effect on that first email, what are you not going to service? The 495 that didn't. That just doesn't hold any weight. It doesn't make any sense. And that is why you need professionals handling some of this for you. Because we know the ins and the outs and it really can set the stage for far more success than you can do on your own. So because we live and breathe it all day, every single day. So if you have any questions about how to send a weekly email newsletter, I'm all ears. I'm happy to answer them. I'm also going to drop a link down below if you'd love to pick up a sample of what a weekly email newsletter would look like. Literally the sample you can copy and paste and use yourself. I'm going to drop it down in the show notes a link. So head on over, click the link, download the sample, you'll see kind of what the campaign flow looks like. Also give you a direct example of one of the emails so you can see exactly what what we do and where we've seen a tremendous amount of success. If you're able to go take it and run with it, awesome. I believe that the best way to do things like this is to outsource it to the experts, but it's totally up to you. So I hope this was helpful. If you have any questions about any of this. Again, I think you're going to find a lot of answers in that download and with the template and everything. But if you have any questions, please, please feel free to hit me up. And before we wrap, I'll say a few words about texting Zynga is an awesome texting solution. Average of 23 Google reviews per month. Patient show rate of 94%. Not only scratches the surface Zingit supports this podcast. You should support them and they're willing to go one extra. They're going to hook you up with a $100 DoorDash gift card for completing a demo. That's@zingit.com offerzingit.com offer I'll drop that link down below. And finally, Power Step Orthotics, developed by a podiatrist 30 years ago. I love them. They support the podcast. My dad uses them. He loves them. Get yourself a free sample pair. You're unsure about it? They're gonna hook you up with a free sample pair. Why wouldn't you do that? Pro.powerstep.com sample pro.powerstep.com sample use the code EBC for evidence based Chiropractor. They'll hook you up with a sample pair. I hope you have an awesome 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 to for next week's episode. If you want to grow faster, visit the evidencebasedchiropractor.com and join our MD Marketing membership today.