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

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]