One of the best and least expensive tools in your marketing “tool box” is the newsletter. A newsletter is a tool that can be used to reach not only existing patients/clients, but potential patients/clients as well. As an internal device, it is an excellent way to stay in touch with your patients/clients and keep your name, your practice and your brand in their mind on a regular basis.
A practice newsletter provides advantages for the practice that other promotional and marketing methods don’t always offer. It provides a simple and compact way to communicate a longer message and can easily be put onto your website as well. It also creates a perfect forum for continuing education.
In years past, creating a newsletter involved costly printing and postage. In today’s computer driven society, most of us have a home computer allowing for email newsletters to be used. Email newsletters have a much higher likelihood of being seen and read by your intended audience as it shows up right in front of them when they open their email program. It’s simple math: they more of them that are seen, the more of them that will be read.
Here are two other major advantages of regular newsletters:
- The more contact you have with your current patients/clients, the more likely they are to respond to recall reminders and schedule appointments. Familiarity breeds response.
- Email newsletters give you the opportunity to market for referrals and generate new patients/clients.
Here are a couple of inexpensive but feature rich services we recommend for email newsletters.
Constant Contact: www.constantcontact.com
Campaigner: www.campaigner.com
Neither of these services requires any kind of programming knowledge. They are very simple to use. You simply create a user account and then log into it. You can then pick from hundreds of pre-made newsletter templates which also allow for customization with your own graphics. You can cut and paste your own content into the template and save.
The maintenance of the database is simple and automated. You can upload your email data base list as a Microsoft Excel spreadsheet or as a comma delimited text file. Once the newsletter is sent, the people on your list have the ability to remove themselves from the list with just one click if they don’t want any future emails. If there are any bad email addresses on the list, they will show up in the statistics as “bounced” emails and you can remove them.
Both of these services offer good statistical tracking of the emails you send – i.e. how many were opened, what links people clicked on, etc. so you can see what people find of greatest interest. This is useful in tailoring future newsletters.
The cost for these services is extremely low. They both work on a sliding scale, depending on how many email addresses you have in your database. The starting range for up to 500 email addresses is only about $15-20 per month! That’s a far cry from only 10 years ago when putting a hard copy newsletter together and mailing it to your patient/client data base could easily cost more than $1000.
If you aren’t now sending out regular (monthly or quarterly) newsletters, we highly recommend that you begin doing so. If you do so you’ll find greater patient retention and more referrals walking through your front door.
Ken DeRouchie
The practice Solution Magazine is published by www.silkinmanagementgroup.com