Patient Email Newsletters - Do's and Don'ts

You're listening to Podiatry Marketing, conversations on building a successful podiatry practice with Tyson Franklin and Jim McDannald.

So welcome back to this week's episode of Podiatry Marketing. With me is my good buddy, Jim. How are doing today, Jim?

Tyson, I'm doing well. I'm happy to be here and talk some podiatry marketing with you today.

I'm looking forward to it as well. And today is basically, you're gonna be doing most of the talking. What are we gonna be talking about?

Today, we're gonna be talking about the do's and the don'ts of email marketing. You know, we've talked a lot about different forms of internal and external marketing over Yeah. Past couple weeks, and now we'll dive into a bit of email marketing.

Okay. I love email marketing. Think it is such a good tool, but obviously, like you you've been doing email marketing probably a lot longer than me. So what what what do you mean by dos and don'ts? Where where do you wanna start this?

Yeah. So we'll just jump into it. I guess we'd start off by saying that like, this is kind of a form of internal marketing that we talked about not too long ago. So that just means that it's something that you've kind of collected already from most of your patients. So you already have this database of patients and emails and people that know, like, and trust you.

Mhmm. So it's something you can continue to build almost for free in a way. You know, whether it's written down or put in the patient chart, you have this kind of treasure trove of data kind of at your fingertips, and some of the software that's involved with it isn't super expensive. You know, it's not thousands of dollars a month, you know, for a good email marketing tool or service. It's somewhere, you know, between a hundred or $200 a month maybe.

So I think that's one really important thing to start off with. And, you know, as far as, like, connecting with with your patients, you also like we talked about, you own this data. Right? Along with the patient's permission instead of, you know, playing with Google or Facebook who are kinda getting more, I would say, like, you know, more of a black box where they don't really want you to know too much about the person that you're either promoting your services to, or you don't really own your data when you're working with some of these other, you know, web two platforms Yeah. That's like Facebook, Google, and other things.

So that's kinda probably where I'd start off with before we jump into, like, some specific dos and don'ts.

Well, I think one big mistake people make first off with email newsletters is not getting your patient's email address or asking for it.

It's a huge mistake. Right? And but I think one caveat is that you need to ask for permission. Right?

So you

need to ask for it, and they need to, like, give you permission to email them. So it's like we talked about it, whether it's, you know, something where you're having a physical paper form, if it's a online form on your website, if it's a patient portal. Once they've given you permission, it's really important that you ask, you know, you ask for it and they they sign off on it. Because otherwise, it's just a loss. Every patient that comes to you where you don't do this, it's a lost opportunity, and you're probably gonna have to find some other way of communicating and connecting with these people that's gonna cost you more money than would have been if you just, you know, made a consistent effort about gathering those patient emails.

Yeah. And and there's different rules in different countries. So you're you're living in Canada and, yeah, you're from America. In Australia, we've got certain rules when it comes to emailing patients. Think the rule over here, as long as you have a relationship with them, know, they're a patient, they've given you the details, it's okay to email them.

If I'm wrong, someone can tell me. But I know in America, the rules are a little bit different. In UK, it could be different again.

Yeah. There's a lot of different kind of regulation and rules around emails, who you can send to, the type of information you need to share on that email, and, you know, obviously, offering an ability to unsubscribe if someone doesn't want to be there.

That's the main thing here.

Yeah. So, like, I know in Canada, least, there's a think it called the CAN Spam Act. I'm trying to remember the name of it in The US, but that being said is that, you know, just like you don't wanna receive emails from a bunch of companies or service providers you didn't ask for

Oh, yeah.

It's never it's never alright to go buy a list or cold email or just, like, you know, buy a list of, emails with potential patients and just blast people with that. You're gonna basically be damaging your brand as opposed to really building the brand of your clinic, because people aren't expecting it. It's an interruption. You're lucky if they just delete it or ignore it and don't report you as spam. Because if you do get reported as spam, there's kinda like these invisible grading or, ways to you know, if it's being sent from your email domain name.

So, like, let's say it's proarch podiatry dot com

Yeah.

That's sending out these emails. And they're, they're they're basically being flagged in the background as being almost like a spam provider. The more people noted that it is spam. And it can really hurt your deliverability the deliverability of your legitimate emails if you're kind of if an email if it's not you, if it's someone that's doing on your behalf, under your domain name, spamming people can be a really negative impact on your domain domain name and just your professional reputation in general. So don't spam.

Ask for permission. Also, it's important like I talked about, make the unsubscribe very easy to see. We all know businesses or people that are sending out, you know, kind of emails that hide it with a color of text. Yeah. They hide it in the, like, read more area of an email.

Don't be that person. Like, you know, if you're working with a provider, let them know that you wanna make it as easy as possible for for somebody to unsubscribe if that's what really what they wanna do. Don't hold these people hostage. It's just not, gonna be, like I said, a negative user experience, and it could lead to, like, negative Google reviews, a lot of negativity in other places if you're just not upfront with people.

Yeah. Well, especially when when people go to join, let's say, the podiatry business owners club group are set up on Facebook. When they join that, I ask for their email address. I get their email address, and I do. I add them to my newsletter, but it's really clear.

If you wanna unsubscribe, just unsubscribe. And Yep. Majority, thankfully, do not. But the occasional person does unsubscribe, and I go, you silly bugger. You're missing out on so much goodness from me.

But anyway but, obviously, they don't wanna hear what what I have to say in a newsletter. So is there when it comes to newsletters, how often should people be doing it? Is there a do and don't with that as well?

Yeah. I mean, it really depends on kind of, you know, the the theme of your newsletter. We can talk a little bit about content Yeah. Here. Just one quick thing I wanted to add about the kind of rules and regulations that you do need to make sure you put your your, physical address of your clinic on the emails because that's just kind of a something that's important as far as the rules go.

As far as, like, content creation and emails, you know, generally, for most clinics, I think something along the lines of monthly, is kind of like the standard, I would say. Yeah. And then, you know, maybe if you if you have a big clinic, if there's a lot of stuff going on, if you have, the bandwidth, I don't think it's horrible to do it every two weeks. But, generally, for most clinics, I would say, you know, a monthly email is is pretty good as far as a cadence for newsletters being sent out to your, you know, your patients.

Yeah. But we our podiatrist used to do it monthly, the first Wednesday of the month at exactly the same time. And it was surprising the patients that would come through, and the the articles that they enjoyed the most were the ones that you least expected. And our our recipe that we used to put in there every month in our rum reviews. So I had a had a friend called the rum wench, and she used to do rum reviews.

It was my friend Nikki, actually. She was the rum wench. And, anyway, so she would do these rum reviews, and they were we get patients coming and go, oh, it's my husband's birthday. I've got your newsletter. I read that rum review.

I know he likes rum. I went and bought it. So, yeah, it it's quite funny. But the reason we did it the first Wednesday of every month is people were expecting it. And we have other than when we first did the newsletter that you get people unsubscribed pretty early on, but once we were just consistently adding patients and getting their permission to add them, rarely did we ever get anyone unsubscribed because we weren't sending any email newsletter every day or every week.

No. That's a huge like, I think like, that's a good point because you just don't wanna be just sending it, you know, weekly is gonna just turn people off big time. I mean, I I was hesitant to even say every two weeks because, like, you really have to have some valuable offering. You know? It has to be helpful content.

I think you touched on a a good point too there is that there's kind of different content you can provide in these newsletter. I think it is an opportunity to kind of help educate your patients about all the care you provide in a very non sales y way. Like we talked about previously, you know all the care that you wanna provide, but even your established patients probably don't realize that. So having a you know, and this is not we're not talking about a long email. We're talking something more about in the lines of, you know, some small paragraphs with a link to to a page on your website.

So they are landing on your website and maybe spending more time on that website. I think but I think you also bring a good point is that, you know, showing some personality, you know, whether it's the run reviews or other aspects of their clinic, you know, that's a really important component as well as, like, having that personality there so you're not just something that's something they're not looking forward to or something they wanna unsubscribe or even flag a spam that's so bad. So I think that's important.

If I was doing the newsletter now, because I'm into smoking meat, probably once a month, would be showing showing a photo of what I smoked. You know? The best thing of that. So if I show you this picture, like, that were my my ribs that I did.

There you go.

And oh, that was spectacular too. So, you know I I think that's a really good point is bringing your personality so people can go, oh, Jim likes to smoke meat or, yeah, Jim's a bit of a boozer. But every now and then, we mixed up the rum review, like, leading up to Valentine's Day, for example, we may have done or Mother's Day, a champagne review because we knew that, okay, let's just tailor it towards that way. But also in our newsletters, we were able, depends probably on the program, but we could split certain things. So we could have the males would get this newslet the newsletter that have this in it, and the females would get a slightly different one.

Yeah. Tailor making it to your patient client health can be a helpful thing if you have that bandwidth. Mhmm. You know, doing some a b testing is something you can do as well. Yeah.

As far as like changing a headline, there's some software that allow you to say, you know, ProArch podiatry number one podiatrist in in cans versus some other headline. You know, there's different ways to test those things to see what really resonates with your audience. So utilizing not only the written content within the newsletter, but the headlines, the imagery.

The headline's important.

Yeah. For sure.

And then but we're not talking about the name of the newsletter. Are we talking about the the subject line that will actually Well

come to see something that's boring in their inbox that has they have really no interest in clicking, you know, you can at least get them to click by having something that's providing value to them or sparks an interest. Yeah. The head the headline or the subject line of that email can be pretty important.

Wanna be your best newsletter that got opened was one it was titled bunions and onions.

Well, in French, that's what they call it. I don't know if you knew that or not. Living in Quebec, I know that now that in Quebec, in French, it's called an for your bunions. So, like yeah. One one of the aspect I think I relate as far as content goes is, you talked about, you know, smoked meat, barbecue, and booze.

And if you there's an area of practice that you wanna get into. Like, you know, I was kind of a big sports medicine guy, I'm I'm a runner. You know, I I used to like to work at marathons in the medical tent. Those are great opportunities too to, like, put that into a newsletter. You know, I ran the what you know, the Petit Train in North marathon or something like that and a picture of you running.

It just it's kind of a subtle clue to patients about who you are and also kinda maybe what the type of patients you wanna see in your practice. So those those are the things you can do as far as content goes.

And you see you giving back to the community.

I think that's a huge opportunity there to really show that you're an engaged member of the community. It's not about just, like, you know, printing dollar bills, you know, or Bitcoin or Ethereum, whatever you charge your patients in. But it but I think it is your opportunity to, like, just show that you are out there for the betterment of the health of the community. And and, like, I I think this is a good nice transition, though, too, into, like, what we what you don't wanna do with the content. I think you do need to have your contact information visible, and I think it's okay somewhere within the body of that newsletter, you know, to have a button that says, like, make an appointment or contact the clinic.

I think that's totally fine. But if you have three or four sections of your newsletter and, you know, more than 25% of that is this kind of call to action about make an appointment Yeah. Or you're trying to get tricky with, you know, urgency tactics or scarcity tactics. You can do what you wanna do with your marketing. It's up to you.

But in my in my experience, the newsletter is more a chance to build trust, show that you're available, and people will know how to get in contact with you if they want you to be seen for the things you're talking about in your newsletter or if you build enough trust with them to to call the clinic. I don't think you necessarily have to beat people over the head with multiple calls to action, kind of using these tactics of scarcity. You'll hear a lot of marketers talk about it. Yeah. And they sometimes will work in the in the short term.

But for people trying to build trust, build long term businesses, it's really about more relationship building it than it is than really, like, just going in for an appointment whenever you can. So I think that that's how I would say, you know, on the side of kinda 80% information helping people, that stuff. And if you wanna make 20% a little bit of a a plug or a a call to action to make an appointment, totally fine. But just be wary of that ratio a little bit.

Yeah. I have seen newsletters where it comes through and after every section is make an appointment, book here, and it's it does get a little bit sort of repetitive. So in what about adding testimonials in newslet? Like in Australia, we're not we can't use testimonials. So but in other countries where you can, we'd suggest that's a good idea to have a testimonial from a from a a certain type of patient.

No. I think that's a huge opportunity. I think there's some different ways to approach that. Right? Depending on what kind of practice you have.

Obviously, like you talked about, if there's a certain type of patient you want to treat, and they say something nice about the way you treated them, or they mentioned, let's say, want to do surgery.

Yeah.

And they say, Doctor. Tyson Franklin is the greatest surgeon in Australia, or they have high praise for the type of

that's the rumor, isn't it? No. It's

Well, I I know that things are a little bit different down under than they are in The US. Yeah. But having those really relevant patient testimonials. You don't want just like, doctor McDaniel was great. Like, that's that's not bad.

I mean, that's better than like, doctor McDaniel's horrible.

Yeah. I was gonna say something else, yeah. I'm glad you got him before me.

Yeah. So am I. So am I. But but I think you wanna have it a little bit more specific to the type of patient you want to come see you. Right?

So if you can have something patients leave a nice paragraph, you know, put that whole text in there so it really relates to, the type of care you wanna have come back to you. And like we talked about previously, it's pretty easy to talk about, like, how good we are, how we think we do great care. You know, us kind of like pumping ourselves up, anybody can kinda gas up their own tires. Right? But, like, when it's on authentic review from somebody in your community, I think that's hugely important.

The way they they talk about you, the the specifics about the type of care they receive you they receive from you. But also it can be helpful if you have where that patient is from in the review. Local is huge. You'd be surprised. And, you know, if you're really targeting a specific neighborhood or a certain town, you know, having, you know, Tyson Franklin from, you know, Cairns in there, or if you're allowed to do that, where you're based at, it can be hugely beneficial.

I think it's, run into problems if you don't make things specific. If we make things very vanilla and generic Yeah. We try we assume that patients know everything that we do. We assume that, you know, they said I'm great, so I'm just gonna put that in there. When you start assuming too much and not getting specific or tactical about things we're sharing within the newsletter and other forms of external marketing, that's when things just kinda like feel like white noise.

People will unsubscribe, ignore, not open your email, put it in their trash. You have to have something somewhat memorable, a little bit catchy in a positive way that provides value to them.

Yeah. And I think another positive with email news is I've had people where they started them, and they went, oh, but only about 20% of people opened them. They might have say a thousand people in their database. They send it out, but only 200 people opened it. And they get sad, and they didn't click on any links.

And I go, well, how many people unsubscribed? Then I go, oh, yeah. Two unsubscribed. They go, but 998 didn't. And they're like, that's right.

I said, so I said, even if they don't even if they just delete the email, this is where I see the real benefit of newsletters. Yes. You hope people click on things. You hope they make an appointment. But I think the the key part to it, every time once a month your business name pops into their inbox, and even if they delete it, it's 12 reminders a year that you're still open, that you're still there for business.

So when they need you, they have to go, oh, who was that podiatrist I saw three years ago? If they've had 36 emails from you and they haven't deleted it, they're gonna remember who you are.

Yeah. That top level awareness is really, really important, and it can't be understated. And let me talk about at the beginning of the podcast. This is something that is not a tool where you're gonna spend like $5,000 a month or even a thousand dollars a month. This is generally a tool that's gonna be in the probably $200 range or so depending on the size of the list and how often you're sending out messages.

So keep that in mind. And like we talked about, you you own this data as well. It's not like Google or Facebook own it in their black box where they're gonna make you pay for it to get it out there. You own this, and if let's say you have a bad email service provider, you take your list and you go to a different tool, and you just, you know, just kinda keep on building it as you go. You don't get to do that same thing with Facebook and with Google.

Do you have certain any programs that you recommend that people start using?

Yeah. There's some different ones that are HIPAA compliant. I would say, you know, like, if you're sending out you know, we're talking mostly about these kind of monthly email blasts. So, you know, things like Mailchimp or Entrapore or as long as you're not, like, collecting patient, like, medical information, you can kinda use any service provider that that's reasonable. But, you know, kinda Mailchimp, Entrepore, Convertkit is another one that I've used in the past.

I used when I had the clinic. I still use it now. Campaign Monitor.

Because I've used ActiveCampaign as another one

Oh, I've heard

of that. Past. So so there's also different ways. You know, we talked a lot today about more, I would say, like, your monthly email newsletter or kind of your your email I would call it like an email blast because it's something you're sending out, like Tyson said, like 12 times a year. And I think those are good to be personal, like, you know, show some personality, educate patients about what you do.

But there's there's a lot of other topics within email marketing that Tyson and I will get to in in further shows. We just don't have the time Yeah. To do it today. But things like patient recall emails, you know, obviously, doing things like, let's say, you do an orthotic for somebody, having a kind of a sequence of emails where it's someone gets an email a week after to ask them, you know, how are things going with their orthotic. A month month out, how are they doing?

Do they have any problems? They need to be seen back. And then these kind of reminders. So you set these things on a schedule so you and your staff don't have to, like, be looking through a patient's chart wondering how long ago did we send that person that that orthotic? You know, it's probably a time that we send them a reminder.

It's been two years for them to have them reconditioned. There's ways of automating and programming those emails to save you and your staff time so you can focus on other things like a great in clinic patient experience. Obviously, there's some aspects of personalization and be authentic that are important for certain types of emails, but we'll get into more of these tactical recall and automated email sequences in the future.

Yeah. I think that'd be great topic because even I know with campaign monitor, you can set certain things up that, that you just go at a certain time. So it takes away it takes away the time and effort you have to put into it.

No. For sure.

Okay. Jim, got anything else to finish up with or we're gonna we're gonna call this episode over and out?

I think we're good. I enjoyed this conversation with Tyson, and I'm looking forward to the next one.

Yep. Me too. Okay. I'll talk to you next week, Jim.

Bye, Tyson.

Thanks for listening to Podiatry Marketing with Tyson Franklin and Jim McAnnold. Subscribe and learn more at Podiatry Marketing. That's the website address, podiatry.marketing.