Just sending out newsletters? 7 tips for better chiropractic email marketing

Better chiropractic email marketing through knowing your end-goals and customers

When it comes to marketing, it can sometimes be difficult to tell exactly what type of return you’re generating on your efforts.

However, for email specifically, one particular report found that this return is generally around 38:1. In other words, for every dollar spent on email-related strategies, the average return on investment (ROI) is $38. For one in five companies, this ROI exceeds 70:1.

Yet, the reality is, if you’re just sending out newsletters as a way of keeping in touch with new and prospective chiropractic patients, your ROI may be lower than it could be. How do you maximize your returns?

Know your end goal

One of the best things you can do when creating an effective chiropractic email marketing strategy involves understanding what it is you hope to achieve by reaching out electronically. Or, as Becah Kaplan, Vistaprint’s Global Email Marketing Strategist, says, it’s important to think about the desired end goal of your marketing emails.

“The great thing about email marketing is that you are working with a captive audience,” says Kaplan, “so you can accomplish many types of goals.” If you’re unsure what your final goal is, a few to consider include:

• Awareness, which you can increase by promoting an event or business initiative;
• Consideration, by promoting your services or products; and
• Conversion, such as by promoting an offer or sale.

Essentially, once you decide what you want out of your chiropractic email marketing efforts, you’ll have a better idea of what your emails need to promote to reach that end goal.

Know your customer and act accordingly

“Knowing customer names, locations, ages, or general interests as it relates to your products and services will allow you to send personally addressed and customized messages to groups of like-minded customers based on their preferences,” says Kaplan. “The more personalization and customization you can achieve, the better your email campaigns will perform.”

This requires learning as much as you can about your email recipients, increasing the likelihood that you’ll send them the right messages. In addition to collecting their name and email address, take the time to understand more about who they are as a person. For instance, what are their likes and dislikes? What topics or interests do they tend to care more about? Which ones don’t seem to faze them at all?

Collecting this type of information enables you to send more targeted and more personalized messages, content and offers, says Kaplan. This will yield a higher click-through rate — which refers to the number of people who click on the links you include in your emails — an action that ultimately leads to more potential sales and increases engagement with your chiropractic brand.

Personalize, but only with accurate information

While it’s important to personalize your emails, “no personalization is better than bad personalization,” says Kaplan. “If the data you are working with isn’t clean or isn’t suitable to be populated and sent to any or all subscribers, then it could render a poor customer experience, which results in increased email opt-outs.”

An example of this is if you send an email and, instead of showing the patient’s first name in the subject line, it shows their last name instead. “This shows sloppiness and lack of care,” says Kaplan. “If you don’t care, why should your customer?”

Look at your email list and ask yourself how accurate the information is. If you have any concerns about this at all, skip personalization until you can get it straightened out.

Utilize time and cadence

In addition to personalizing your chiropractic email marketing, Kaplan stresses that maximizing your email marketing efforts involves using time and cadence to your advantage. What does this mean?

If your goal is to obtain optimal results, it helps to know the best time of day to send your emails, the days of the week that get the highest click-through results, and how often the emails should be sent to keep recipients interested, but not wanting to opt out.

You can obtain this type of information by paying attention to your email analytics, says Kaplan. Look for any trends that increase or decrease recipient engagement.

Be seasonally relevant

Have you ever been searching for the perfect Christmas or Valentine ’s Day gift for someone, only to receive an email with an offer that was just what you were looking for? If so, you’ve already experienced the value of sending emails that are seasonally relevant.

“When it comes to best responses, we find that messages and offers that are relevant to your customers based on time of year and seasonal trends tend to yield the best results,” says Kaplan. So, think about any upcoming holidays or events before sending your emails and include offers appropriate for them.

Help customers answer, ‘WIIFM?’

WIIFM stands for “What’s in it for me?” and this is the number one question your patients will want to know the answer to when reading your emails. Help them easily find that answer within the context of your email.

“Messages that are positioned in a way to show the direct benefit to the customer will yield more favorable results,” says Kaplan. Keep this in mind when crafting your emails because, if you can’t immediately identify the direct benefit, they likely can’t either.

Test your strategies

“Each audience is unique and will respond differently to different tactics and strategies,” says Kaplan. Therefore, when trying new email strategies, it’s also helpful to test different options so you know how to get the best results.

For instance, play around with your subject lines and email headlines and see if one type draws more engagement than another. Sometimes just changing imagery within the emails or altering the call to action is enough to improve your ROI.

One last piece of advice

In addition to these seven tips, Kaplan has one last piece of advice for chiropractors looking to grow their practices via chiropractic email marketing.

“As a marketer, try to put yourself in your customer’s shoes,” she says. “Try to understand how they will perceive, interpret, and act on the email and message you are sending them.”

When you can do this, you’ll create a much more effective and personalized marketing campaign.