Email marketing is an inexpensive and effective way to keep in touch with your existing patients and educate new patients about the benefits of chiropractic.

There are some great resources available to people interested in taking advantage of the power of this new marketing method. For instance, Constant Contact is a popular email marketing service, and the company provides free seminars throughout the country on how to get the most out of email marketing. You can see availability for these seminars here.

There are also some good books on email marketing, available here.

Here are some tips to get the most out of your email campaigns:

• Use a catchy subject line. DON’T do this: “August Newsletter.” That’s not very exciting and is less likely to get opened. Instead, use something like, “Study finds chiropractic beneficial for chiropractic.” With that subject line, you’re going to get the attention of patients with sciatica AND mention the benefits of chiropractic.
• Don’t make your email messages too long. Marketing guru Guy Kawasaki wrote that the optimal email length is five sentences. That’s perhaps a bit extreme for a patient newsletter, but it’s good to keep in mind.
• Don’t send attachments. There are a few reasons for this. First, you don’t want to irritate your recipients, and attachments can be a pain. Secondly, a large attachment is going to get you in trouble with your email service because of bandwidth issues.
• Link to your site! Instead of attaching newsletters, link back to articles and videos on your website. The goal is have your patients interact with your site, and so tease them with something interesting and then link to your site for more information.

And, of course, include good content! Give your patients something interesting to learn about or think about, or something they’ll forward to a friend. With our chiropractic email marketing system, we provide a library of ready-to-send emails that you can use.

Email marketing can be a powerful tool, if done right. For more information about using email in your chiropractic marketing, email me at mike (at) chirohosting.com or give me a call at (800) 295-3346.

Mike Melton