Why Chiropractors Must Use Email Marketing | Podcast Ep. 237

Foreign hello and welcome to the Evidence Based Chiropractor. I AM your host, Dr. Jeff Langmaid. On today's episode, we are going to talk about your most valuable asset that you have in your practice. We're going to talk email. I'm going to break down really what you need to know to get your email campaigns moving in the right direction. What the heck even is a campaign? And and how do you craft emails that get results? It is critically important. We'll talk about why and much, much more before we get started. If you have not left a review, a rating or feedback for this podcast on itunes, I'll please ask you to do so. Scroll down, tap that button and let us know how we are doing. Additionally, if you want to automate your marketing, please check out the Smart Chiropractor. We are helping docs add on Facebook five figures plus to their practices each and every month. Not as an anomaly, but very, very consistently. If you want to streamline and automate your marketing, have it accomplished and automatically done for you, check out the Smart Chiropractor. Com. Within the Smart Chiropractor we have Cairo emails. This is a lot of what we're gonna be talking about today, which is email marketing. I've also recently put together an email marketing guide. It's kind of the ultimate strategy guide. It takes what we're gonna talk about in this EP gives it to you in a hard copy form or digital form for that matter, so you can review it and look at it. I'll leave a link to pick that up in the show notes. So head to the show notes and be sure to pick up the ultimate email strategy guide because it'll really walk you through the entire process, A through Z. So, you know, if you've been in practice a while, maybe you've used email, maybe you haven't. But this is not just about hitting the send button individually on emails or even worse, sending sending a monthly quote unquote practice newsletter that nobody cares about and or nobody reads, or only sending appointment reminders. If that's all you're doing, you're not doing email marketing, right? Email marketing is about consistency. It's about having campaigns that drive results for your practice. It's not about, as Kevin Christie would say, a random act of content. It's about really being consistent with things. But a lot of docs just, they're not. You just don't know, right? I mean, I didn't know anything about email marketing until I really got into it now. I mean, I send personally about 50,000 emails per month, which sounds like a ton. But the goal is not to berate people with emails. It's to deliver value consistently. I think we send somewhere upwards of over a half million through Cairo emails for on behalf of all of our docs each and every month. So we get a lot of data and we really have this really, really dialed in. So there's a couple campaigns that I'm gonna kick off with that you really need to engage with and activate for your practice. Number one is a new patient onboarding campaign. It's so important. If your onboarding consists of the report of findings and then hoping for the best the next time they come in, you are missing opportunity. You're probably not maximizing retention. You're certainly not giving the best patient experience that you can. A new patient onboarding sequence is designed to give the patient an unbeliev, to guide them towards referring people, to guide them towards leaving reviews and ratings for your practice so more people come in and to improve their retention. That is really the key components of a new patient onboarding campaign. We have the whole thing built out within Cairo emails done for you, but please check out the ultimate email marketing guide if you want more details on that. The second piece of it is having an activation campaign. You might hear this in the email world as like a long term drip or nurture campaign. This is something that goes out one time per week. An activation campaign one time per week delivering education and information that people actually care about and then having a call to action to help them take the next step. So if you download the, if you download the guide, you'll see exactly how we do it. At the bottom of every single email that we send through Cairo emails for our docs, there are two buttons. One, one that directs them to Facebook to improve the engagement on your Facebook page. And the other one taps right into either your EHR or your website or your online scheduler so that your emails each and every week drive patient activations. What we typically see is with our initial kind of what we call success blast. So everybody that gets started, we do a two email sequence to kickstart things. Most of our docs generate somewhere between 8 to 20 patient activations off of that success blast. Then I would say our average on our weekly emails is three to five patients scheduled off of those weekly emails. I mean, it's the real deal and you really have to take it seriously when you put this and install it in your practice. The third campaign that I've talked about before that I think is really really important is an event campaign. So if you're doing like webinars, I mean, you're probably not doing too many workshops right now based upon the state of what's going on. But if you're doing anything in person or online, you want to drive attendance towards those things. And an event is a great way to do it. Right? Announce that you're gonna do it, remind them, and then if there's like a replay or something, be sure to send it to those individuals who click through those campaigns. Again, I want to be really, really clear, that's not three individual emails. It's each campaign has a series of emails within them that once the patient gets email number one or the buttons kind of clicked to start, you don't send individually after that. It happens automatically. That's the beauty of automation within your email campaigns, is that you have one trigger and then it goes through the entire process. So for instance, in a new patient onboarding campaign, this would be activated or triggered when a patient comes into your practice. And the goal then would be to gain consistency when onboarding, increase retention, provide a better experience, and get better engagement on your Facebook page and generate some reviews in the process. Let's go back to that activation campaign or the drip campaign. What's the trigger? Well, patients either completed your onboarding sequence. So in Cairo emails, as soon as somebody completes the onboarding new patient, they automatically trip into the activation weekly campaign, or they're not just yet a patient. Right. Inactive patient, maybe not yet a patient. So the goal of this is to nurture the relationship to teach and invite consistently. As we talk about this is Content Marketing 101 Teacher gives you the opportunity to invite. Vaynerchuk calls this jab, jab, jab, right hook, teach, provide value, invite, call to action, do it consistently, teach an invite consistently, and then generate new patients and reactivations. Absolutely, consistently from that drip sequence. That's really what it's all about. So let's talk a little bit on subject lines, body copy and then call to action. Because this also trips up just so, so many docs. So when we talk about subject line, it's like the title of your book. It needs to be punchy and compelling. If your subject line is totally weak, nobody's going click and your open rate stink. And they clearly can't take the call to action. They're not gonna be able to do anything if they don't open the email. So how do you write an awesome subject line? Number one, you keep it under 50 characters. Don't get Crazy. And it's a dissertation. It's not a dissertation. So, like, you know, don't write the next great American novel in your subject line. Keep it short and punchy. Use personalized content. If you have their first name or last name, use a merge field and get it in there. Use power words, right? And write in the second person. So how to reduce low back pain by 80%. Could be how to reduce your low back pain by 80%. So now it starts to get more personal to them. Just some tips on subject line. When we talk about body copy, how do you write great body copy? Well, that's kind of. The email itself is keep your paragraphs short. I see so many people, they're writing like, you know, textbook. It's just like paragraph, but there's no end to the paragraph. It's like 20 sentences in a row. Keep your paragraph short. Keep it under four sentences. No one wants to read like a wall of text. So I'm gonna enc you to keep those paragraphs short and use formatting in your emails. Right? Headings, bold, underline. It helps break things up. And it's just way easier to read and deliver on your subject line. Don't be like a clickbait artist and have some, like, weird, you know, subject line that ties nothing to the body copy. Great way to get a ton of unsubscribes. So keep it congruent and do the right thing. Third part about an email is your call to action. This is where the rubber meets the road. If you've done a great job with your subject line, they've opened the email. They've sort of started to look through it. The call to action, your invitation, that's the opportunity. So how do you deliver a great one? You keep it short, keep it short, and don't put a million options. You don't want 75 links in your email. Specifically on a. On a drip sequence, one or two options. So don't make them choose. If there's too many choices, they'll select none. So keep it at one or two. So for instance, I just told you with us within Cairo emails, we have directed to their Facebook page and then we have a direction to schedule an appointment. So those, because those are the actions that we want, right? We want to reward that behavior that we're looking for. So we make those super, super clear. So with that, these are just the. This is like this. This is the, you know, just skimming the surface on email again. I'm going to encourage you if you want to step up your email, Download the email marketing guide that I'll link in the show notes because in that we go through also like open rates, click through rates, list size, unsubscribe rates, what you need to be on the lookout for as well as some best email marketing tools. So you know, you might use something like mailchimp, Aweber, Constant contact, Cairo Emails obviously I think is the best program out there. And then tools for copywriting, things like Hemingway Editor that can improve your copies readability or Grammarly which I use. It's like one of the most powerful grammar tools out there. So you know, try to eliminate any of those spelling errors. Obviously is a, is a, is a good idea. Definitely you don't want to get into buying lists and you don't need to worry also about list size. Right. Sometimes people are like, well my email list is only a couple hundred people. Maybe I should buy or rent a list that I can email to. Don't do it. It's like sleazy, it's cheesy. You're not going to get any great results by renting or buying a list. It's all cold. Audiences just don't do it. Like even if you have a small list. We've seen that even on lists that are only a couple hundred people, if the emails are done correctly and we've just seen it time and time again in Cairo emails, we'll have docs that are able to generate 3, 4, 5 patient activations every week off list sizes that are like 3 and 400. Now, you know, everybody's a little bit different obviously, but those are real statistics and real numbers. And again, when you start looking at that and saying, golly, even let's go low side of that three, three times four weeks in a month, that's an additional 12 patient activations or new patients in the practice each and every month. Like that starts to look pretty good, especially for practices that are either growing fast. And I mean we have docs that are doing, you know, five patient activations, six per week. So they're adding on over 20 new patients to their schedule each and every month, easy based upon just initiating automated email in their practice. It's just such a critical component and it's part of having a great content marketing strategy, right? Content marketing. You want to have a great message, get out there, consistently have a goal in mind and drive people towards that action. Your call to action. And email is a piece of that. So we take this stuff really seriously. We spend a lot of time, effort and energy diving into this if you have any questions specifically around email marketing, hit me up. Jeff, the evidence based chiropractor. I am happy to help. I'm going to also encourage you one more time, be sure to pick up the email guide. This email guide, you know, we've wrote it based on the best practices of what the biggest healthcare organizations are doing and also what we've seen. Again, we're sending like a half million emails each and every month. So we have a ton of data on what are good click through rates, what are good open rates. Should you be concerned with unsubscribes? A lot of docs become super. It's like, oh my God, I got like four unsubscribes. Joe, I can't. Joe unsubscribed. I can't believe I thought Joe liked me. You know, these are things, it's like automatic list cleansing. Unsubscribes are okay, I think so many docs are super sensitive about, about their email list and they've never actually even utilized their email list to any consistent degree that generates results. Now that doesn't mean to be flippant with your email list. It doesn't mean that you just start bait and switching people or sending junk emails or worse, even like spam, no way. But as a chiropractor, you have a ton of educational, engaging content that you can deliver. So start delivering it and get into a weekly cadence if you struggle to find what you should be writing like, these are the two biggest challenges every chiropractor has. What do I write about the content and how do I stay consistent? We'll solve those for you. Come on board with chiro emails. At the Smart Chiropractor, we will absolutely take care of those. We do it for docs each and every week, so we're happy to do it for you. We'll solve the content issue because we build out all the emails. It ties into your monthly campaigns. It's all automated so you don't need to do anything. All of the links are personalized to you. The emails come from you, as your picture, your links, you name it. Your it can drive great results in your practice. But in order to do so, you have to say yes. Or if you are just really into it. If you want to start email marketing, if you think that it's worth your time, effort and energy to come up with the copy, figure out the subject lines, create the systems, have the tools, and then pay for the service on top of it, absolutely, go for it. Hopefully this episode gave you a great head start to do exactly that. If you want to check out the email Marketing guide to dive more in, hit the episode notes down below. But if you want to get really serious and drive results in your practice, hit us up at the Smart Chiropractor. And if you have any questions about that whatsoever, you know where to find me. Jeff@the evidencebasedchiropractor.com Hope you have a great week of practice and I'll 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 go faster, visit the evidencebasedchiropractor.com and join our MD Marketing membership today. Sam.