Grow Your PT Practice
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Essential EMAIL TIPS Every PT Owner Needs to Know
Neil Trickett, PT
Inside:
• What and When to Post Online for Maximum Impact • 4 Summer Marketing Mistakes to Avoid • Why it Pays to Automate Your Marketing
NEIL’S MARKETING CORNER
4 Summer Marketing Mistakes PT Practices Must Avoid to Beat the Summer Slow-down
are already out of town or have made plans for August by mid-July and thus, won’t be around to take advantage of the special. Instead, start marketing August promotions aggressively in June to gain enough interest through traditional channels and word of mouth referrals to get more patients. Mistake #: Failing to plan ahead for fall sports Most fall (even winter) sports have off-season training in the summer. In addition, families tend to start prepping for return to normal work and school activities in late August. From camps to weekly practices to pre- season warmups, fall athletes do not take the summer off. Promote injury prevention and performance training in the summer months to get your athletic patients safe and in game day shape. Network with local recreation leagues or schools and provide PT at camps and clinics. Offer discounts on special services, such as kinesiology/taping or TENS, for athletes when they wear a team shirt to the clinic. Or, set up a pop-up clinic at tournaments to provide onsite care and PT counseling. Mistake #4: Ditching your marketing plan Seasonal impacts can effect on the number of patient visits and referrals. So, it can be very tempting to cut expenses by decreasing or stopping your monthly marketing campaigns. By skipping a summer print newsletter, you will save some money to offset the lost revenues due to the summer slump right? Wrong! The #1 rule of successful marketing is consistency is key. It took your monthly
newsletters, blogs, physician mailers, emails or postcards, several months to gain ground and start generating consistent results. Stopping for even one month can set you back and undo months of work. Also, you want the number of patient visits to swing back up in September. So, you need to mail your newsletters through the summer to get those fall patients back to PT. In fact, you want to be very well prepared and aggressive in marketing to your past and current patients now to jump start the fall season. Keep doing your successful actions and you will weather the seasonal effects. Seasonal marketing is about using targeted promotions, analyzing last year’s data, marketing for future needs, and following your plan. If you do this, your physical therapy practice will continue to see results throughout the seasons. Some times of year might still experience a drop in stats, but that is ok—every business, from Wall Street to the corner shop, sees seasonal fluctuations in volume and revenues. You need to be the seasoned marketer by anticipating the changes and proactively improving the results.
CONNECT With Neil Trickett, PT Offer a serious incentive to your past patients to come back in for the historically low month and start hyping it early! Promote screenings and check- ups or wellness plans. Waiting until mid- July to unveil a big August promotion is a serious gamble that most of your patients Summer time is here…schools are about to get out, families are going on vacation, work days feel shorter. Summer might be the best of all worlds for many of us, but a lot of physical therapy practice owners feel differently especially when it comes to their businesses. Depending on where you live, a physical therapy clinic in the summer months can be a ghost town. Peak vacation season and school breaks disrupt the family schedule, resulting in less patient visits and fewer referrals. Avoidthese4summermarketingmistakes to get more patients in the office to offset the summer slow-down: Mistake #1: Not using targeted, seasonal messaging Don't miss out on targeting what families do this time of year. Can you promote to local swim clubs about protecting shoulders? Play up the sports lingo in your marketing! For example, offer a “swing special” for golfers or host an open house focus on “safe swimming”. You can even push getting in shape and out of pain for the summer to enjoy vacation. The main point is to push your patient’s buttons on what problem they want to solve and use seasonal lingo to get their attention. Mistake #2: Not reviewing stats and data from last summer Each practice and local community has a slow month in the summer. Failing to anticipate seasonal slumps only leads to history repeating itself.
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Practice Promotions
Practice Promotions Physical Therapy Marketing
1. Be more effective No matter how large or small your practice, you have a finite amount of resources to grow your business. Marketing automation enables you to squeeze more juice out of the hours available by reducing repetitive tasks and scheduling your marketing in advance. 2. Higher patient satisfaction When you replace manual repetitive work with automated marketing campaigns, you naturally free up your staff’s time to focus on servicing patients. The more time focused on the patient experience, equals higher patient satisfaction. 3. Target patients across multiple media One of the powerful benefits that marketing automation offers is the ability to reach your patients across different online and offline media channels. For example, by having prescheduled direct mail as well as custom audiences scheduled to receive Facebook ads you’re now able to target past patients via print and social media with ease. 4. Refine your marketing processes Running a practice that has marketing systems in place makes it easy to hone in on what’s working, and what’s not, easily repeating marketing actions that were successful. Howmuch easier would your monthly marketing be when there’s no need to re- invent the wheel because you have processes in place that work month after month?
WHY IT PAYS TO PUT YOUR MARKETING ON AUTOPILOT Why Successful Companies Use Automation Generally speaking, marketing automation takes a task you would traditionally complete step-by-step manually and well, automates them. By automating your marketing, you give yourself the ability to use your marketing dollars more effectively, all while increasing your new patients and physician referrals. 79% of top-performing companies have been using marketing automation for more than 2 years, with the Health and Pharmaceuticals industry having one of the highest rates of adopting these types of marketing practices. Whether you have one location or ten, there’s no reason why you can’t put more of your marketing on auto-pilot. Here are the top four reasons successful companies are making the switch to marketing automation.
HOWOFTEN SHOULD YOU BE POSTING ONLINE? The PT’s Guide to What and When to Post for Maximum Impact
Blog
1-2 POSTS/WEEK
2-4 POSTS/ MONTH
2-3 POSTS/WEEK
3-5 POSTS/WEEK
IDEAL TIME TO POST 5-6 PM
IDEAL TIME TO POST 8-10 AM
IDEAL TIME TO POST 1-4 PM
IDEAL TIME TO POST 1-3 PM
WHAT TO POST: LinkedIn is a great place to showcase your practice’s specialties and updates. This will help strengthen your network with local physicians and increase your reach when it’s time to hire.
WHAT TO POST: Your practice’s blog should be a mix of content that is both educational and informative, such as articles on back pain or how to avoid injury when exercising. These posts should highlight why your practice is the place to go for PT care.
WHAT TO POST: Marketing content, such as services and practice news, helps to add personality to your brand. Promotional posts need to be clear and pointed, without losing your brand voice or being too “sales” oriented.
WHAT TO POST: Share something new or interesting happening at the clinic. Use hashtags where appropriate for visibility. When you post a new blog to your website, share that link with your Twitter followers. You can also RT another user’s tweet that you find engaging.
Inside This Issue:
Marketing Newsletter Powerful marketing to build your practice
• 3 Essential Email Tips You Need to Know • Put Your Marketing on Autopilot • 4 Summer Marketing Mistakes to Avoid • What and When to Post Online
3 Essential Email Tips Every PT Clinic Needs to Drive Appointments
Click-Through Secret Weapon There is one trick that will improve email performance every time – choosing your audience. An email about sports injury recovery is not likely to be opened or clicked by my grandmother. In the same way, an email about avoiding back pain while gardening gets ignored by a single, athletic 20-something. Both of these could be great emails! That said, if you want the best results from each you should choose who your emails are sent to based on factors including: • Condition treated (Try to keep these to a few basic categories such as chronic, sports, surgical) • Therapist seen These factors can be kept in your database and/or tagged in your email service. If you’re having trouble sorting them, try exporting to Excel, sorting by column, and uploading different lists from there. If you use MailChimp, learn to use custom fields here. • Age • Gender
1) Use a Grid If your email list isn’t broken into groups based on conditions or age, a simple layout using a grid allows you to include content for several ages and pain points – increasing the chance of relating to the reader. 2) Create a Quiz Thanks to social media, quizzes are a very popular, highly-engaging content piece. You can use a free quiz creator to make simple quizzes that ask about pain or well being and gently direct towards having their problem evaluated or getting advice from your website or blog. Some examples might be:
Victoria Marcouiller Director of Websites and Online Marketing
Are your emails driving appointments?
If you’ve been email marketing for any amount of time, you know that one of the main statistics to judge your emails is Click- through Rate. If this area is low, that’s an instant opportunity to increase your new patients per week! You already have their contact info, you just need new email ideas to engage them better. To improve click-through rates you need to engage with the reader and pique their interest just enough to want more information. The email also needs to be easy to read on any device and be about something the person expected when they joined your list. Below are some examples of companies doing it right. Try some of these email ideas in your practice this year!
Is Your Back or Leg Pain Actually Sciatica? Is Your Foot Pain Plantar Fasciitis?
3) Focus On an Event Button Hosting a workshop or other event? Don’t drown out your message in a sea of text. Few things get the point across as well as “Register now”. Feel free to support your event with more information below, but keep your main message clear.
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