5 Physical Therapy Private Practice Marketing SOPs for Online Marketing Success

In today’s fast-paced digital landscape, having effective marketing strategies is essential for the success of your practice. To ensure consistency and efficiency in your marketing efforts, it is crucial to implement standardized operating procedures (SOPs).

In this blog post, we will explore the importance of SOPs and delve into five essential SOPs for your physical therapy private practice’s online marketing success.

What is an SOP and Why is it Important?

Standard Operating Procedures (SOPs) are documented guidelines that outline step-by-step instructions for various processes within your practice.

SOPs ensure consistency, streamline operations, and facilitate training for your team members.

By creating SOPs, you establish a framework for successful marketing campaigns, minimize errors, and maximize your practice’s potential.

Now, let’s dive into the five SOPs for your physical therapy private practice’s online marketing success:

1. Building an Email List SOP (E-rehab offers 2 ways to do this):

 

Building an email list is the cornerstone of effective communication and patient engagement. Implementing an SOP for collecting or importing email addresses into a marketing system will allow you accomplish a number of key marketing objectives like:

  • Building a targeted list,
  • Communicate with past patients,
  • Share information about the practice
  • Educate patients about current services, and
  • Stay connected with them in the future.

Ensure your SOP includes clear instructions for logging into secure accounts, processes for collection of email addresses, and segmentation to match the message with where patients are in the buyer’s journey.

E-rehab offers this functionality and it requires no more than 8-seconds per patient.  So, make sure you are using email marketing and have an SOP to implement this strategy.

2. Asking Patients for Ratings and Reviews:

97% of consumers read ratings and reviews and they read your reviews too.  Patient testimonials and reviews are powerful marketing tools that establish trust and authority for your practice.

An SOP for requesting patient ratings and reviews is essential. This SOP should guide your team on how to set expectations that you are going to ask patients for a review, the appropriate timing for requests, provide them with clear instructions on where and how to leave reviews, and how to use technology to connect your patient with a review site like Google or your website.

By incorporating ratings and reviews into your marketing strategy, you can enhance your online reputation, boost search engine optimization (SEO), make your practice look more attractive for potential new hires (after all, who wants to work at a clinic with no reputation), and leverage social media to attract new patients.

3. Establishing Review Goals and Incentives:

One way to ensure success of your reputation marketing program is to have the right SOP to make sure you are capturing reviews over a long period of time.

Here’s what this SOP should include:

  1. First, create monthly, quarterly, and annual ratings & reviews goals.  This crucial for tracking and measuring the success of your practice’s online reputation management.
  2. Aim for at least half of your patients to be able to write a Google review.
  3. To encourage your staff to follow the SOP, incentivize them by offering a $10-$20 bonus for each review they generate.
  4. Celebrate each employee’s success at company meetings to reinforce the importance of reviews and foster a positive culture of engagement and excellence.

4. All of Your Staff Need to Know – Who You Serve, What You Do, How & Why You Do It

You need an SOP for informing and testing everyone in your company about who you serve, how and why you do it, and what your ideal target market is.  From here, you can create messaging – an elevator pitch/one-liner/or talking logo.

Define your unique value proposition, articulate your core values, and what messaging you’ll be using to position your practice in your community and deliver it through your website, social media, and patient communication materials.

Where should you start? Follow Donald Miller’s concept of a Brandscript, as outlined in his book “Building a StoryBrand”, to craft a captivating practice mission.

By effectively sharing your mission, you establish an emotional connection with patients and differentiate your practice in a crowded marketplace.

IMPORTANT: you need to periodically test your staff – ask them to deliver your elevator speech/one-liner/talking logo to you.

5. Monitoring Key Performance Indicators (KPIs):

To gauge the effectiveness of your online marketing efforts, it is crucial to regularly monitor KPIs and metrics. Schedule monthly meetings with your digital marketing agency to review these metrics and discuss strategies for improvement.

Key metrics to monitor include website traffic, email open rates, the number of appointment requests from digital directories, and the effectiveness of Google and Facebook Ads.

Action Item:
Block out 15 minutes every month to review this data. If you notice anything unusual, find out from your marketing agency (e.g. E-rehab) what might have caused the change.

By analyzing these metrics, you can identify areas for optimization, measure the success of your campaigns, and make data-driven decisions to maximize your marketing ROI.

Wrapping It All Up

Implementing standardized operating procedures (SOPs) for your physical therapy private practice’s online marketing is a fundamental step towards achieving long-term success. By following the five SOPs discussed in this blog post, you can build a targeted email list, establish trust through patient ratings and reviews, set review goals, craft a compelling practice mission, and monitor crucial metrics.

Click the link to book an appointment with David Straight, DPT, and co-owner of E-rehab, who can help you implement these vital SOPs and take your practice to new heights!

Physical Therapy Newsletters Can Help You Earn Loyal Patients

physical therapy newsletters

If you’re not already creating and distributing effective physical therapy newsletters, it’s high time that you start. Newsletters have the power to transform new and possibly reluctant patients into loyalists that support your physical therapy practice with their repeat business and spread the good word regarding their positive experiences with you.

Establish Your Expertise

Using newsletters, especially when they are coupled with a strong online presence, will make you look like an authoritative expert in the field of physical therapy. The more you build this sort of presence, the more patients will come to you to learn about the latest treatments and solutions to their physical problems.

[highlight4]Newsletters are one easiest and most effective ways to establish your expertise. [/highlight4]The average web user is bombarded with advertisements and white noise on a constant basis, but you can break away from this buzz by utilizing effective and engaging newsletters on your blog or website. Newsletters are not only a means to encourage patients to come back to your clinic, but they are also an opportunity to educate, inform and advise. Here are some tips to help you implement attractive physical therapy newsletters to keep your patients engaged:

Many Recipients Open Emails Because of Catchy Headlines

Emailing effective newsletters does not have to be complicated or obtrusive as a busy physical therapist. Action words, verbs, and catchy headline can bring about positive results. Try to incorporate these in each of your headlines and ask yourself if it sounds like an email you’d want to open if it arrived in your inbox. If the answer is “no,” you should change the headline to something more appealing.

It’s All in the Name

Email marketing agencies and software allows you to create highly-personalized emails with each patient’s name and information. Studies have shown that click-through rates are actually much higher when your patient’s name is in the subject line. This sort of lead generation is a powerful way to keep patients coming back in the long term, which is much easier to do than reeling in new patients. As a form of lead generation, email newsletters are a highly effective form of patient retention.

Newsletters Allow You to Segment and Maintain Relationships with Your Patients

Segmenting is the process of breaking up your subscribers into smaller subgroups, creating highly engaging newsletters with a relevant call to action. Email marketing agencies can help you build and create sign-up forms that allow you to monitor who signed up to your newsletters, which can effectively track their interests. You can use segmenting and specialized subgroups to create highly appealing emails pertaining to recent news, upcoming events or the impact that you have in the local community.

[pullquote2 textColor=”#000000″]You don’t want to be the type of business that reaches out to patients only in times of need; instead, you want to bet he omnipresent physical therapist that is willing to advise and is the go-to person for the latest in your medical community.[/pullquote2] As a physical therapist, your focus should always be on maintaining relationships and underlining the importance of physical health. You don’t want to be the type of business that reaches out to patients only in times of need; instead, you want to bet he omnipresent physical therapist that is willing to advise and is the go-to person for the latest in your medical community. The key is to providing email newsletters that are valuable and different than other written content. Newsletters should be unique and related but a separate identity from your blog and website.

Importance of Mobile-Optimized Email Physical Therapy Newsletters

The amount of emails opened on smartphones has jumped from 8% in 2011 to 53% in 2014, and that ratio increases every year. It’s important to consider the mobile friendliness of your newsletters. Email-responsive designs will future-proof the promotional aspect of your career. With only 19% of marketers utilizing a responsive email design, it’s integral that you utilize this sort of technology. Make sure to work with an agency that understands the importance of using mobile-friendly newsletters to distribute informative content.

[info_box]To learn more about how E-Rehab can jump-start your website SEO, physical therapy newsletters and social media marketing, contact us or follow us @erehab.[/info_box]

Physical Therapy Mobile Marketing: Capturing First-Time Patients with a Compelling App

physical therapy mobile marketing

Physical therapy mobile marketing has grown to become an essential process that all private practices need to take advantage of. This is the result of more people spending more time on mobile devices, as well as the increasing competition of the medical industry.

In the world of physical therapy, evidence has shown that the industry is continually growing in demand as the population ages, especially baby boomers. With awareness of this reality, your own physical therapy practice may be starting to feel the pain of local competitors taking away your old patients and not know how to react.

Why Your Practice May be Struggling

If you’re beginning to feel like your practice is struggling or slowing down, there may be good reason for this. You possibly have dozens if not hundreds of competing physical therapy clinics within your city or state. With that in mind, you may be realizing how much more marketing you need to do in order to stand out above the rest of the herd.

Marketing physical therapy can sometimes turn into an uphill challenge because some believe that marketing content can only be general. If you think you don’t offer anything different from all of your competitors, try analyzing your practice a little more thoroughly.

Rather than focusing completely on you and your physical therapy practice, it’s worth remembering that paying more attention to the patient is now more relevant than ever.

[pullquote2 textColor=”#000000″]Rather than focusing completely on you and your physical therapy practice, it’s worth remembering that paying more attention to the patient is now more relevant than ever.[/pullquote2]

This is where physical therapy mobile marketing can work well in capturing a prospective patient. Much of this comes in integrating technology with marketing so they coalesce into something different and informative. At the same time, you want more direct communication with future patients to make your marketing a more personalized experience.

Integrating Apps into Your Physical Therapy Mobile Marketing

There isn’t any denying that using apps in the medical community has the potential for exponential growth. Apps are used in a variety of ways, some of which involve usage directly in the medical facility itself. However, they’re just as useful as a form of marketing on mobile devices.

A perfect way to provide both information and personal connections with your future patients is to provide a free app on your website. When people search for physical therapy on their mobile devices, they want information immediately. A free app is one way for those people to find that information and to refer to later for details.

[highlight3 textColor=”#000000″]The key here is to make your app as simple to use as possible. Simplicity in app design is peaking now for good reason. [/highlight3] A case in point: mobile users want info in seconds before moving on. Here are some other tips to keep in mind when creating your app:

  • In your app, provide the most essential information users need, including content about your practice and what services you offer
  • Analyze all of your procedures and find something different from what your competitors are doing
  • Incorporate some educational content into your app so users get a sense of worth after downloading it
  • Another advantage of an app is that you can even integrate contact methods, including some in real-time; if possible, provide this through your staff so you can answer questions in real-time if a patient needs an answer to something they didn’t find on the app

Having a portal to social media through your app also allows conversations with users in a more personal way. Natural conversations that don’t use hard-sell tactics are the best way to prove your expertise without looking like a spammer.

Providing Directions on How to Find Your Facility

Another huge benefit of physical therapy mobile marketing is the ability to have GPS-like maps available so that patients know exactly where they are in relation to your clinic. By incorporating this into mobile ads on your website or app, patients who need to find a place in a hurry can do so in seconds.

More localized marketing is worth doing on the mobile platform to help you move to the top after possibly losing business to a physical therapy practice in your local area.

[note_box]For additional guidance on physical therapy mobile marketing, contact us here at E-rehab.com, where we can help you find new marketing strategies for growing or recharging your practice and attracting new patients.[/note_box]

Improving Your Physical Therapy Newsletters Open Rate

physical therapy newsletters

As a small practice, physical therapy newsletters are a great way to share news, explain your expertise, and provide offers to your patients, but what happens if your analytics are telling you that no one reads them? Here are our top strategies to increase the open rates for your physical therapy newsletters.

1. Personalize, Personalize, Personalize.

There are many things that you can personalize in order to encourage click-through rates.

First, personalize the “From” field by including your real name. People are more inclined to click an email coming from a real person (you), not just the name of your practice. In addition, having your name in the “From” field dissuades spam filters from blocking your email. This also helps build your office as a people-friendly one, when people can recognize you as the sender.

Second, personalize emails by addressing your subscribers or patients personally. If you have the data to apply your subscriber’s name to the subject line or preview to the body of an email, use it. According to research by Hubspot with Market Domination Media, open rates increased by 1.2 percent when the first name of a subscriber was included in the subject line. By addressing a recipient personally, you‘ll draw their attention more so than not using their name.

If you don’t have the data to address your recipients with their names–maybe due to online sign-up forms versus patients who have already visited you—you can still market to them personally by using “you.” In the same study, addressing the receiver as “you” and telling them what they will receive increased open rates. Thank yous are also effective in increasing the click-through rate.

Overall, personalization is a helpful strategy in improving your email open rates. If you aren’t doing it, it’s time to start incorporating it into your emails. Just remember to do it sparingly; overuse can decrease curiosity, so rotate this strategy with other tools.

2. Pay attention to the subject line.

Getting someone to open an email is largely dependent on how the subject line grabs the reader’s attention.

The same tricks to writing a headline for an article applies to an email’s subject line. Keep your subject lines short (around 6 words), use eye-catching adjectives and phrases (such as “strange,” “essential,” “against all odds” etc.), and avoid spammykeywords (such as “cash” or “save”). By spending time on crafting an interesting headline, you‘ll have a better time convincing readers to click on your email, before they decide to avoid or trash it. You can find the research that backs up these tips over at Entrepreneur.

3. Make sure your emails are mobile responsive.

As statistics have shown, checking and opening email on mobile devices have grown. About 74 percent of mobile users check their email, and while open rates vary from one industry to the next, everyone can benefit from responsive email design. Simply making sure your campaigns are visible on a smartphone or tablet can increase your open rates drastically, especially if your email newsletters don’t currently support responsive design.

4. Use segmentation.

Segmenting your email list is a great way to improve your email open rates, since it allows you to get the right content to the right people. Basically, after studying your lists and finding out what people want, you can send emails with differing content, based on the receiver’s personal interests or challenges. In a study by Marketing Sherpa, using segmentation strategies increased their open rates from 20% to 40%, and clickthrough rates from 2% to 6%. For your office, a segmented list can look like one group who wants special information and tips for physical therapy after work-related problems or injuries, and another segmented list could be for sports or active bodies that could see you for sports-related pains.

5. Share Something of Value

Offering diverse content that is worth reading is the holly grail of email marketing. When your emails don’t apply to your patients are are simply about musculoskeletal conditions that your patients don’t have, you‘re likely to see a drop in open rates. You can spice them up by adding videos, photos,infographics, and links to valuable, useful content on your blog or website. In addition, changing your email’s layout might do some good as well.

E-rehab’s Newsletter Strategy

[info_box]Since 2003, E-rehab.com has provided its PT customers with patient and physician newsletters.   Originally, we would send out information about conditions that PTs treat.  After a small patient focus group, we switched our message.  We now send out information about wellness topics that are more interesting, patients report they are more valuable, and we’ve repeatedly heard positive feedback from our customers.   You can check out some newsletter examples here. If you need help developing your physical therapy newsletters, contact us. We’d love to help you with your newsletter marketing.[/info_box]

Stop the Lead Generation Madness

Each day I speak with a client or prospect that wants to generate more business from the web.  They are overwhelmed, confused, have been burned and simply don’t know what to do.

It’s not surprising when you consider all of the possible forms of advertising communication as diagrammed here in The Conversation Prism:

JESS3_BrianSolis_ConversationPrism4_WEB_1280x1024

 

Your head really starts to spin when you think of social media:

By Brian Solis and JESS3 (https://www.theconversationprism.com/) [CC BY 2.5], via Wikimedia Commons

Here are E-rehab’s Physical Therapy Online Marketing Recommendations

1. Make sure you have a great website – it’s one of the most trusted forms of advertising according to Nielson.

2. Make sure you have a mobile optimized website.  30% plus of your physical therapy website viewers are going to visit you on a smartphone.

3. Send out an email newsletter (examples here).  It is the cheapest, fastest, and easiest way to welcome, communicate, and stay in touch with past patients.

4. Ratings and Reviews – online reviews are the second most trusted and actionable form of advertising according to Nielson.

5. Create videos about your practice, your expertise, about patient reviews, and patient testimonials. Here are examples of reputation videos at Terrapin Physical Therapy’s YouTube channel.

6. Use Facebook and Twitter to communicate social signals to the search engines and to demonstrate your expertise and credibility.

7. Create a blog and optimize the posts to rank for common conditions you treat like MBF Rehab has done.

Invest in the Hub & Spokes

physical therapy online marketing hub and spokes

[info_box]You can spend hours every week chasing after the latest tech that might generate new patients. Our advice is to stop the madness and create a solid online marketing platform that includes the seven components above. We call it the Hub & Spoke Model. Your website is your hub of online marketing and the other components are the spokes. Invest in these and you will build your brand and develop more business from community members that have a need for PT.[/info_box]

Three Ways to Use Your Newsletter to Market to Doctors

Marketing to Doctors

Marketing to doctors is especially challenging. They are a very busy bunch that tend to be quite skeptical of marketing materials. You can overcome these obstacles, however, with an effective newsletter strategy. Newsletters are an excellent way to position your physical therapy practice as a true resource. Here are three ways to accomplish this.

Be Informative

The less “salesy,” the better. You want your physician readers to feel you are a trusted resource. You want them to feel your newsletter contains information useful to their practice, not just content about your product or service. Secondly, quality content in your printed newsletter can be recycled into quality content on your blog or website. By posting an electronic version of your newsletter on your website, you open your potential audience up to any physician performing a search engine query about a topic you have covered. In fact, according to American Medical News, 86 percent of physicians use the Internet to gather health information. Once you’ve created quality content, integrate your printed newsletter with your electronic formats to reach both audiences. Here’s a sampling of what you might consider including in your newsletter:

  • Features from industry blogs (doctors want to know what their peers are doing)
  • Recent studies and research (clinical trials and surveys)
  • Tips and how-tos
  • Valuable resources (include website addresses to other online resources)
  • Company news (feature expansions, new hires, awards and new products)
  • Educational opportunities

Be Scannable

The average person spends 51 seconds reading a newsletter. Every article is not going to interest every reader. Have a format that is easily scannable, so that doctors can quickly glance through the content. Use bullet points, brief summaries or call-to-action boxes. Use images, but not too many. Keep the layout clean, with straight lines. Give readers an option to find out more by directing them to your website or blog. Be sure your web addresses aren’t complicated with multiple backslashes. Long web links can easily be given a short URL for printing purposes. Technology issues are the quickest way to lose a reader. You don’t want them to get frustrated when trying to type in a really long web address with a lot of signs and symbols.

Gather Input

The best way to start any conversation is to ask a question. An effective marketing strategy involves gathering input. If you were selling a product in-person, you would not jump right into talking about what you have to offer. An effective salesperson gets to know their client. They take a few minutes to ask the physician about his or her needs and challenges. Then, they craft their message based on how their product can address those needs and challenges. While not in-person, newsletters can do the same. Use surveys to gather data. The result is two-fold. First, your physician readers will perceive you as interested in the success of their practice. Go beyond asking, “what articles interest you?” Ask about the techniques and strategies they find effective. Summarize the results in future issues. Doctors will see your publication as a way for them to share information and learn about what their peers are doing. Secondly, you’ll receive valuable data on which to base future newsletters. Don’t frustrate your readers by making them search for a way to contact you. Give options for paper and online submission. Make submission very easy with a pre-paid, tear-out card. Each issue, whether it contains a survey or not, should contain clear contact information, via phone, e-mail, website or mail.

E-rehab.com specializes in helping physical therapists market their business to physicians. Let us help create your marketing strategy. Contact us for more tips about creating an eye-catching newsletter.

Why an Email Physical Therapy Newsletter Should be a Priority

physical therapy newsletters

Physical Therapy Newsletters are a No-Brainer

As the owner of a private physical therapy practice, there are numerous ways to increase your patient volume. One of the affordable ways to stay in touch with patients is with an physical therapy newsletter.

Online marketing is a must for anyone who owns a practice. After developing personal relationships with referring physicians, the internet is the second most productive way to get your clinic recognized.

One way to accomplish this with physical therapy newsletters delivered via email. Email marketing is effective for a number of different reasons. Email marketing:

  • Allows you to reach many people at once
  • Gives you an unlimited number of contacts
  • Is more affordable than regular mail
  • Is easy to update

These facts are very important for small practices like yours. Let’s talk about the first point. Email marketing allows you to reach a number of people at once.

Allows You to Reach Many Patients at Once

Let’s be clear here. When we say “A number of patients,” we don’t just mean ten or twenty. It can literally be in the thousands. For example, you might have a hundred email addresses to work with and email marketing will instantly help you reach a large percentage of them (note: some will unsubscribe, some email addresses will change and no longer be valid, some email addresses will be input incorrectly into your system, and some patients will give you a bad email address).

It’s not just the fact that you can email many people; the great thing about email marketing is also that you can email many people at once and say the same thing to them at the same time. In other words, you don’t have to rewrite the email over and over.

Compare this to how direct mail used to be done. You don’t have to worry about photocopies and buying stamps, all you have to do is write an effective newsletter and send it through with an email marketing program like Constant Contact, Mailchimp, or iContact.

Email Addresses vs. Snail Mail Addresses

That brings us to the second point. Email lists can be unlimited. Yes, physical addresses of your patients can be unlimited as well, but emails are so much easier to keep up with and organize. You don’t have to worry about losing your address book or having one of your important patients moving and not having their new address.

Keeping your email list organized is also much easier than you think, in fact, most providers keep your contacts organized systematically.

It Is So Affordable, Why Wouldn’t You Do It?

Email marketing is almost free. It really doesn’t get any better than that, does it? When it comes to marketing, very few things can be considered affordable. After all, marketing, when done right, costs a lot of money. When you market physical therapy practice, you have to keep up with your competition.

Not all practices have a big marketing budget, so most clinic owners affordable and effective marketing resources without it breaking the bank.

This is why email marketing is so important for a private practice like yours. Let’s look at the cost of postage for a moment. When you send a letter, you’re paying for the price of the paper, the envelope, the stamp.

Those are just the outside costs. Creating a direct sales letter campaign also means that you’re paying for your time or the time of a staff member. Writing one effective sales letter can take anywhere from an hour to a few days. Copying that letter hundreds of times will take even longer. Clearly, this can be a time-consuming task.

Emailing your clients takes away all of that extra time and money you would have spent on sending those newsletters through the mail.

It’s Easy to Update

One of the most difficult parts of regular mailings is keeping all of your information updated, as any major change or update will require a new mailing. That notification takes you back to square one of your mailings. Why would you want to go through all the trouble of having to mail out numerous newsletters when you could just email all those updates for free and instantly? For example, let’s say you moved your practice location to a new address. You can easily see the advantage of using email marketing to communicate this to your past patients.

One of the best things about having an email list for your online market is that not only can you write to your patients and keep them up-to-date on any important developments at your practice, but you can also email newsletters with wellness advice and helpful tips on how to avoid injuries.

Top Tips to Make the Most Out Of Email Marketing

  • Make your email subject line captivating to increase open rates. The first thing your subscribers will see other than who the email came from is the email subject line. Don’t use all caps, which can look like you’re shouting, but instead utilize certain techniques such as the power of specifics.
  • Another great way to increase open rates is to ask a question. Here’s an example: “Did you receive your our wellness report?” Subscribers will most likely open it out of curiosity and to make sure that they didn’t miss out on anything.
  • Be consistent with your broadcast emails. The last thing you want is for your subscribers to forget about who you are and why they subscribed to your list. It’s a good habit to email on a consistent basis. Subscribers want to know when to expect to hear from you.
  • Use email as a way to drive traffic to your website. For example, you could write a really long email about a special event, grand opening, new program, community presentation, etc.; or, you could simply tell your subscriber to click on the link to view the message on your physical therapy website.
  • The idea is to get your subscribers to visit your website, and you could include rich media like a video, interactive blog post or a page with more information on your practice, so that they can interact with in your content. With email, your subscriber would only be able to reply to you via email.
Using an Autoresponder Service to Build Your Email List
[info_box]One of the easiest and most convenient ways to build and maintain a list (called a database) of your subscribers is to use an email autoresponder service.

One powerful feature of using an autoresponder service is that you can schedule messages to broadcast on specific days after someone subscribes to your list. This makes an effective sales tool to welcome patients to the practice, thank them and follow up with them by simply entering their email address into the autoresponder service one time.[/info_box]

How Often Should You Contact Subscribers?

When it comes to contacting your subscribers, how often should you contact them? On the one hand, you don’t want to be in their face every week. After all, physical therapy is a service no one wants, they only need it when they need it. On the other, your message to be so infrequent that they forget about you.

So what’s the frequency that works best?

The simple answer is: when we asked a small focus group, most recommended that PT practices contact them via email once per month.

What’s important to take note of is that you need to set your subscribers expectations from the start when they are opting in to your newsletter. Tell the subscriber exactly what they can expect from subscribing to your newsletter.

Do you need assistance?

As you can see, a physical therapy email newsletter is a great way to reach patients and remind them that you are the best choice and should be the first choice for the treatment of movement disorders.

Most big-box corporations (Select, ATI, Benchmark) do it and even as a small private practice, you should be collecting your patients’ email addresses and be ready to send mail to them too.

A carefully planned email campaign can:
1.  Remind patients you are still there for them
2.  Sell additional services to existing customers
3.  Promote brand awareness
4.  Convey important health and wellness information

[titled_box title=”Give Us a Call at (760) 585-9097″ bgColor=”#000000″ textColor=”#000000″]We have designed, built and delivered many successful physical therapy newsletter campaigns for 12 years now, and we can help you create an affordable email marketing campaign for your practice too. Please don’t hesitate to contact for more details.[/titled_box]

How to Use E-Mail Lists as a Beneficial Marketing Tool

email lists and newsletter tips
As a private practice owner you’re probably always looking for better ways to bring in new patients and market your business in the most effective way possible. New patients are essential to keep your practice growing, and the best way to draw them in is to have a strong presence in a number of different web formats. Among all the options out there, it turns out the most cost-effective and profitable marketing strategy is actually e-mail marketing.

 

E-mail marketing can help your practice in a number of different ways. For example e-mail marketing:

    Allows you to reach many people at once
    Gives you an unlimited number of contacts
    Is much more affordable than regular mail
    Is easy to update

All of these points are very important for any business, but especially for small private physical therapy practices such as your own.

Let’s look at each of these points in more detail to see why you should implement e-mail marketing for your practice.

E-mail Marketing Allows You to Reach Many People at Once

When you read that statement, it is important to realize that this literally could be hundreds and thousands of real people, all of who could be current or potential patients.

[note_box]For example, you might have a hundred e-mail addresses to work with and e-mail marketing will allow you to send a targeted message to all of them at once. That is the beauty of e-mail marketing: not only can you e-mail many people, but you can e-mail them all at once with the same message and at the same time, no matter how many people are on your mailing list. [/note_box]

Gives You an Unlimited Number of Contacts

E-mail lists can be unlimited. There are many tools that will make it much easier for you to manage your list of contacts – from getting your site visitors to subscribe to your mailing list to easily sending out a newsletter or e-mail to literally thousands of interested people.

It is More Affordable than Regular Mail

The cost of postage for regular mail may be cheap, but if you’re a small practice, sending out one mailing to all of your contacts can quickly add up and get expensive. However, when you send a letter it’s not just the price of a stamp; there are other costs to also consider like the paper and envelopes.

Those are just the outside costs. Mailing a letter through the posts incorporates many other costs. For example you will have to make multiple copies of the letter, which you might do yourself on your printer or if there are thousands you will outsource it to a printer. All of this costs time and money.

Then you need to address the envelopes.

You can either do this by hand which would take hours or you could do it on your printer. However, you would need to type and enter the address data before printing it on to special sized labels. Again, all of this takes time and money.

When you break it all down, sending out hard mail to multiple contacts is time consuming and expensive.

On the other hand, sending an e-mail to a modest sized list is free. It doesn’t get any better than that does it? When it comes to marketing campaigns there are not many things that are free or as cost-effective as e-mail marketing.

E-mail marketing eliminates all of that extra wasted time and money you would have spent on sending your letter or advertisement to your clients through the post.

It’s Easy to Update

One of the most difficult parts about regular mailings through the post is that some details of your practice or services are constantly changing.

Whenever some aspect of your product or service changes, it’s always good to be able to notify your customers and mailing list so that they are aware of the changes.

Doing it the old way through regular mail as we discussed earlier is time consuming and expensive. However with an e-mail list, you write to your patients and keep them up-to-date on any news or developments within your practice without having to send out a single piece of physical mail.

Using an Autoresponder Service to Build Your E-mail List
One of the easiest and most convenient ways to build and maintain a database of your subscribers is to use an autoresponder service.

There are many autoresponder services available and they all vary in price and capability. Contact us at E-Rehab to find out which one we recommend for your specific practice.

In most cases they are an all-in-one solution to building, maintaining and e-mailing your database.

In addition, you can personalize your e-mail correspondence with your subscribers’ details such as their first and last name as an autoresponder collects those details for you when they subscribe.

An autoresponder allows you to put attractive forms on your website so visitors can enter their details to be updated with news about your services, get tips, download a report and so on.

If you have a special message or offer that you want to send to your e-mail list, simply send a broadcast message and they will receive it instantly no matter where they are.

An especially useful feature of using these types of autoresponder services is that you can schedule messages to broadcast on specific days after someone subscribes to your list. This makes it a very effective sales tool.

Top Tips to Get the Best Results from E-mail Marketing

E-mail marketing can have a huge impact on your business. Here are some great tips to help you to get the best results:

Use the Split-test, click tracking and open rate features to maximize your results. Most major Autoresponders have features that allow you to see which e-mail gets opened the most and how many clicks each post gets. You can even test two versions of the same e-mail to see which converts best. Monitor the results of each e-mail to get great results.

Have attention-grabbing subject lines: You want your e-mails to be opened and read, so it’s important to have a captivating subject line to increase open rates. The very first thing your subscribers will see other than who sent the e-mail is the subject line, so it needs to arouse their curiosity and engage with them in order to get them to open your e-mail.

One autoresponder site gives this expert advice: “The best e-mail subject lines are short, descriptive and provide the reader with a reason to explore your message further. Trying to stand out in the inbox, by using splashy or cheesy phrases, will invariably result in your e-mail being ignored. In short, keep your subject lines simple and to the point.”

Be consistent: The last thing you want is for your subscribers to forget who you are and why they subscribed to your list in the first place. It is a good habit to e-mail on a consistent basis. That could be once a month or once a day. People will want to know when to expect to hear from you.

Segment your list: It is a good idea to segment your list so that you can laser target your content. You will get a much better response from subscribers who are actually interested in a specific topic. Segmenting your list helps you to send the most relevant e-mails to your target audience.

Use e-mail to drive traffic to your website: E-mail marketing makes life so much easier and helps to convert sales. For example, you could write 1,000 words and make your subscribers read a long e-mail or you could simply tell to click on the link to view the message on your website.

The idea is to get your subscribers to visit your website. You could send them to a blog post or a page with new information. You want them to engage with your content so that it results in them considering your practice for their business.

How Often Should Your Contact Your Subscribers?

This is the dilemma that most business owners face. When it comes to contacting your subscribers how often should you contact them? You don’t want to leave it so long that they forget about you but then you don’t want to bombard them with e-mails either.

So what is the right frequency that works best? The simple answer is there is no one rule that fits every business model.

It depends on your own practice and how you actually use your e-mail marketing.

A simple tip is to let your subscribers know what to expect right from the very start when they opt in to your mailing list. If for example they are signing up for your newsletter, tell them what day you publish your newsletter. You could also tell them that you will be sending them other news and updates that you think will interest them so that they know to expect other e-mails from you too.

We Believe In Doing Things Right

[colored_box bgColor=”#788794  ” textColor=”#ffffff  “]Whether you need a little help getting started, or you just want to enhance your existing e-mail campaigns, here at E-Rehab we want to help you make your e-mail marketing a successful component of your private practice.

We can help your e-mails to showcase your brand, company and messages to increase open rates and resulting in sale. Contact E-Rehab for more information.[/colored_box]

Get Patients to Read Your Physical Therapy Newsletters

newsletter tips

Smart Phones Have Transformed the Way We Communicate

If you haven’t already noticed by now, smart phones and tablets are drastically changing the way that we interact with the world. Currently, 9 out of 10 new phones being sold is a smart phone, and if you happen to one of the minority that doesn’t have one at the moment, chances are likely within the next 12 months your contract will expire, and the next phone get will likely be a smart phone.

Taking note of this fact and capitalizing on it can change the way you communicate with your patients, and if it’s focused on carefully, can actually improve your web presence and improve the business of your practice.

When It Comes to Physical Therapy Newsletters, a Typical Viewer is a Smart Phone User

To illustrate how important communication with your patients is, try and picture an average smart phone user:

Rachel is in her mid-thirties and she has owned a smart phone for 8 months. She uses it every day for things like changing her Facebook status and to Tweet about the movie she saw the evening before. She will check the weather, text her friends, watch a funny YouTube clip, read her e-mails and take a photograph, all while she drops off the kids to school, picks up a latte, walks to the office, and buys her lunch.

There is so much information on Rachel’s smart phone fighting for her attention. In fact, there is so much competition that nothing wins her undivided attention for long. So if you want your message to grab her attention, you need to use smart tactics.

The rules have dramatically changed and you need to know them in order to win and get someone like Rachel to visit your practice. Here are some winning tactics to help you to do that:

Winning Tactic Number One:

Come Up With a Strong or Catchy Pre-header
When Rachel receives your e-mail on her smart phone, her eyes will quickly scan her inbox and she is going to see three things right away. The first is who the email is from (you), the second is the subject line and the third thing she is going to see is your pre-header. The pre-header is the first few lines of your e-mail, and it’s this section that will determine whether or not Rachel is going to open your e-mail or not. In fact, if it doesn’t grab her attention or interest her, she might even decide to delete it without opening it.

Your goal is to get Rachel to open your e-mail based on what she reads in your pre-header. To achieve this, you need to come up with something catchy and interesting. It doesn’t have to be cute or too clever for its own good, but it should be inviting. It should make Rachel want to open up the e-mail to see what else you have to say.

Winning Tactic Number Two:

Make Sure it Looks good on Rachel’s Smart Phone
Your e-mails are not going to look the same on everybody’s smart phone. In fact when Rachel opens up the e-mail, she might find that the image in your e-mail has not loaded properly, or you have used a double columned newsletter format that is difficult to navigate on her phone because it has been shrunk to fit on to her screen. Perhaps you put three links in your email and they have stacked one on top of the other, making the middle one impossible to open. This can be frustrating to someone like Rachel.

You don’t want Rachel to encounter any of these problems, so the best way to avoid them is to check what your e-mail will look like on a variety of mobile devices beforehand. Your web site designer or offline consultant will know how to do this, and will provide demo versions for different mobile devices. This will ensure that your e-mails are understandable, readable and clickable, no matter what screen Rachel uses.

Winning Tactic Number Three:

Make it Short, Sweet and Easy to Share
Rachel never stops. She is always on the go. This means she won’t have time to read your e-mail if it is the same length as War and Peace. You need to keep your e-mails short and sweet. The best way to do this is have a tightly focussed call to action in the e-mail that makes it easy for Rachel to respond to. Briefly state a bit about your practice and how you can be of service to Rachel if she happens to have an injury or has been experiencing any nagging pain that she’d like to get checked out.

Remember, Rachel, like so many of your other potential patients, is part of a highly connected network of people who are all within a click of her phone. She might even be one of those who is addicted to Facebook and Twitter and posts regularly, which can be of a great benefit to your practice.

By reaching Rachel with your mobile marketing campaign, you can reach all of her friends and family too, but only if you know how to play the game and employ the tactics revealed here. Hone in on your e-mail marketing skills, target smart phone users, and you’ll be sure to bring in more business to your private practice.

Winning Tactic Number Four:

Make it Transactional
Think about how you can use email to complete something that will improve your customer service.  Here’s how we approach it.  The E-rehab.com Physical Therapy Newsletter System is designed to help educate and improve the customer experience.  Newsletter 1 is a welcome message with links to downloads and patient education.  Newsletter 2 is a thank you message and addresses some of the most common concerns patients have with billing and scheduling.  Newsletter 3 can be a survey to gather customer feedback.    Newsletter 4 and beyond helps our clients stay in touch with their customers/patients.

Make sure you take advantage of rich media as well.  For example, provide them with a high-quality video that enables social shares, offers great interactivity, and the make sure the message can be re-purposed across multiple marketing platforms like G+, Facebook and Twitter.

[note_box]The popularity of smart phones and tablets means that we rarely read our e-mails on our desktop or laptop computers anymore. Instead, e-mails are usually read right at our fingertips due to the convenience of a smart phone.[/note_box]