Wouldn’t marketing and advertising be great if you could consistently get excellent results?

Most marketing campaigns are hit or miss — with many, unfortunately, being a “miss.” Direct-response marketing, however, is designed to do one thing: Get customers now! And unlike most other marketing efforts, direct marketing is designed to get quantifiable results — results you can see, feel, and count.

Imagine being able to choose how many new patients you wish to obtain each month. Increase your business as fast or as slowly as you want — that’s the power of effective, consistent, direct-mail marketing.

Fortunately, there are foundational principles for creating a lucrative direct-response campaign, and if followed properly, every mailing can be profitable.

Successful steps to follow

Step 1: Why are you special? Research key attributes of your practice and find out what makes your practice the best in town. You can even ask some of your patients what they like about your service and what made them choose you over all the other chiropractors. After asking 20 to 40 of them you should see a pattern emerge.

If most of them say, “you really care,” you can use that as your unique selling proposition (USP). More than likely, there will be many other reasons they like your practice, but let’s say for example’s sake that is the main reason.

Step 2: Say it in a tagline. If you don’t have a tagline, create one. You could go with something such as, “We feel better, when you feel better,” to connect with your USP, and you should use it as often as possible.

Step 3: Headline power! This is where most direct-response campaigns mess up. The headline is the first thing patients see when they open the letter, and it can make or break your response rate. Sometimes it’s the only thing they read before deciding to throw it in the trash, so you need to make it a great one.

Your headline has to get the prospective patient to want to read the letter. It has to hit them hard and it has to hit them fast. For the most part, if you talk about the main benefits of your practice, you’ll be OK.

After you come up with a solid headline, add a subheadline underneath it. This reinforces the main headline. For example: The main headline is, “Feel 10 years younger,” the subhead could be, “In only 30 minutes time.” Or, if the main headline is, “Your health is our business,” the subhead could be, “And we’ve been healing patients for 15 years.”

Step 4: Body of evidence. Now that you have a great tagline, headline, and subheadline, let’s add some effective body copy. Here’s the key to good body copy: Keep it interesting.

Give the person a good reason to keep reading. The more they read the more patients you’ll get. It’s a proven fact, long copy gets more response. So if you can write a four page letter that gets read, you’ll get a very good response from your direct-response mailing campaign. Remember, start new paragraphs with subheads to entice the reader.

Step 5: The postscript. Add a great “P.S.” to the end of your letter. Many readers (45 percent) scan the body of the letter and read the P.S. before reading the whole letter. And don’t forget to ask them to take some kind of action, whether it’s make a call to your office, send in a response card, or send you an e-mail address.

Step 6: Hit the target. Find a good target market to mail to — the more specific the better. Some categories you may want to consider are the “Over 50” crowd, martial artists, manual laborers, etc.