Direct Mail Strategy for Your Practice
Physical mail sent to your patients and community is a successful strategy for many chiropractors. I am a bigger fan of direct mail than most, but I do appreciate the concerns related to cost.
I do believe you can dip your toes into direct mail without too much expense and then grow from there. I know some offices have a comprehensive direct mail strategy and see a high return on investment.
I am going to discuss what I think are all the reasonable direct mail strategies a chiropractor should consider. For some businesses with high ticket items can invest much more capital into fully involved journals and long-form newsletters and magazines than we as chiropractors can.
New Patient Marketing Strategy
Mailers around your community. You can target very specific zip codes and neighborhoods with postcard offers for your clinic. You routinely get these from dentists and other businesses in your community in your very own mailbox. You may even get some from chiropractors, but it is rarer. I personally do not use this type of campaign because the cost is high, and the effectiveness is relatively low.
The Patient Experience Strategy
Sending welcome letters to all your new patients. We have developed a template where we plug-in certain pieces of information tailored to that patient. Our doctors fill out a simple sheet that gives the patient’s diagnosis, concerns, goals, and opportunities. Quick and to-the-point pieces of information unique to that patient. Then our CA plugs that info into the template, prints the letter on our letterhead, and mails it to the patient. They get the letter and feel that we have listened to them and are important.
Inactive Patient Marketing Strategy
Thank You Letters: We send a thank-you letter to any patient who refers us a new patient. We don’t mention any names, and if we notice if someone has referred multiple people in a short period of time, we don’t send them many letters, just one.
Birthday Cards: Our EMR allows us to print out all patients who have a birthday in that month. We then send a nice but general birthday postcard to them early in the month. All patients in that month get the postcard. Postcard postage is cheaper than an envelope.
Physical Newsletters: If you are going to do a physical newsletter to your patients, you need to follow a specific plan and feel comfortable with the cost. If you follow a strategic plan, and you have the initial marketing budget, you can feel comfortable that your newsletter is increasing patient retention, reactivations, and referrals.
I recently interviewed one of the foremost authorities of physical newsletters, Shaun Buck of The Newsletter Pro. Shaun’s recommendations for a physical newsletter that performs the best are:
It needs to be monthly. Anything less is not effective, and anything more will most likely not have the return on that added cost.
Sharing some aspects of your personal life builds a relationship with the reader.
Patients that have been in your practice in the past 18 months should be mailed too. Anything longer than that starts to significantly lose the return on investment.
Your newsletter must have great educational content.
Your newsletter needs to be designed well to stand out in the patient’s mailbox.
You need to be consistent for at least 6 months before you really start to see the results you desire. Stick with it!
Top Strategy for Direct Mail: Inactive Patient Marketing
Affordable Direct Mail
Depending on the size of your mailing list you choose, the investment can be anywhere from $750-$2,000 per month for a monthly, physically mailed newsletter. That may not be in the budget for everyone, but if you follow the Roadmap, you will start to see higher revenue and profits and you will be wise to reinvest some of that into more marketing. You can eventually get to the point where this investment makes sense for your practice.
The good news is you can start direct mail now and at a low monthly investment. My strategy for getting started with direct mail on a limited budget is to use Birthday Cards, Welcome Letters, and Thank You Letters. There is no reason you can’t implement those immediately. This will be a great addition to your community outreach and total web presence.