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Disclaimer: The following is an actual transcript. We do our best to make sure the transcript is as accurate as possible, however, it may contain spelling or grammatical errors. Due to the unique language of acupuncture, there will be errors, so we suggest you watch the video while reading the transcript.
Hi there, my name is Michelle Grasek and I am the host of the Acupuncture Marketing School podcast, and today I’m looking forward to talking with you all about effective email strategies to get more patients on your schedule. And before we dive into this, I’d like to take a moment to thank the American Acupuncture Council for the opportunity to be here with you today.
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I absolutely love teaching marketing, so I am thrilled that I can have this opportunity to teach you for free. So let’s get into the slides. Alright I broke this talk into two segments. So the first segment is really about why email marketing is worth your time and your energy. And then the second segment is ideas for making your emails more effective so that they actually work to get new patients on your schedule.
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So let’s start by talking about the goals of email marketing and really why does email marketing work? What are we doing that makes it effective in getting people to take an action? So the most important thing, I actually put it third on this list, is that email marketing is a reminder that allows you to stay top of mind.
So every time you send an email, you hope that people who are reading it, sit up and take notice and say to themselves, That’s right. I’ve been meaning to make an appointment with this acupuncturist, right? It’s just a reminder. And I find that’s a really nice way for people to think about it. If they have some reluctance to send emails, if they’re worried they’re going to be annoying their audience, you’re really not annoying them, but I know it’s a common concern.
Just remember that email is a simple and easy reminder that you, your business, And your practice exists. Okay. So then the second reason that email is so effective is it’s a really nice medium for teaching people about acupuncture and how it can help their specific symptoms. And it also allows you to talk a little bit about your clinic so that people get to know you and the way that you practice.
And that really leads into the third purpose of email marketing, which is to build your know trust factor. So in marketing, we. We know that people like to buy things from people they know and trust. You’re probably familiar with this concept. And the way that you write an email newsletter, the way that you teach people concepts or share information will allow people to buy things.
understand, what kind of person you are how you approach this medicine, what it might be like to work with you, and that builds trust, right? It’s building up that know trust factor. So we are going to talk about each of these in a little bit more detail. But first let’s talk about why email marketing is worth your time.
The first is that you own your list of email subscribers in a way that you can never own your social media subscribers. Now I have seen a lot of small business owners put an enormous amount of energy into social media and growing their following. And that’s why You know, there’s really nothing wrong with that, especially if you enjoy social media a lot.
I say go for it. It can be a really nice opportunity to get in front of, real life people in your community. But, I think that if you are on the fence about social media, or feel like you don’t have enough time to be consistent with it, email is a really nice alternative. And this is one reason why that’s the case.
So if you think about Instagram, for example, there have been several instances in the past couple of years where Instagram just stopped working. It went down for a day and all of the influencers on Instagram who have built their business model around selling something to their followers. They panicked because they didn’t know if or when Instagram was going to come back up.
They didn’t know what their income dip would be like based on how long Instagram was going to be out for. And at this point we know Instagram came back, obviously, right? It was only a day each time, but it’s it’s not the best business model if you’re only focusing on growing followers because you don’t have that control over these people that you are making such an effort to build with, right?
By contrast, you own your email subscriber list, and you can really control the way that your message is delivered to them. So we know that the social media algorithms change all the time, and you can spend a lot of energy creating Reels, for example, but then have only a very small portion of your followers actually ever see that content.
Whereas at least when you send an email, you know that it landed in the person’s inbox. And of course, there’s a certain small percentage that might end up in spam. That’s normal. But at least 95 percent of the emails you send are going to be they’re going to arrive at their destination. Okay. And I think that is building your email list is a good way to build stability in your marketing in a way that social media is not because social media can be unpredictable.
And again, you don’t get to control the way your message is delivered or whether you will even have followers in the future. Okay. So that’s one thing to think about. The second reason email isn’t a really good choice is that it is so low cost in the marketing world. You almost, you can’t find anything to beat it.
So for example, if you have 250 email subscribers on your list and you’re paying about 20 a month for something like MailChimp or Constant Contact that, and you send one email a month, that is 0. 08 per email, and It’s really hard to find another marketing strategy that only costs eight cents a person.
So your investment is low, right? There’s you just, you don’t have that much to lose. And another reason that email is a great choice is that it’s a very low pressure way to educate people and to get visible. So especially if you are an introvert, or if you don’t love the idea of learning to dance on TikTok, then email is a nice alternative.
I always tell my marketing clients that they get to write their email newsletters at home, in their pajamas, on their with their cats, whatever suits you, right? And especially if you already enjoy writing, email is a great medium for it’s like an opportunity to be visible in front of a lot of people while you actually get to be behind the scenes.
Okay. I hope that makes sense. And that is a much more comfortable way for a lot of people to do marketing. So I always say that if that We’re not consistent with things that we don’t like. It’s really hard to do marketing over the long term if you don’t enjoy it or it’s not a good fit for your personality.
So choose something that is a good fit. And for many people, email marketing fits their strengths. Very well. And then lastly, email is much cheaper or has a higher ROI, forgive me, than social media. So for every dollar that you spend on email marketing, the return on your investment is around 38. So that is 3, 800 percent return on your investment.
That’s outrageous. And that is partly because it’s so low cost to begin with, but also because it is very effective. at the same time compared to social media, which generally if you spend a dollar on social media, your return would be about 2. 80, which is a 20 28 percent ROI. Okay. So for all of these reasons, email is just a really good choice.
for reaching your patients, converting them and getting them on your schedule for a very low cost. So let’s switch gears then and talk about some tips and strategies for effective emails. So I have been teaching marketing in our industry for about a decade and have been doing marketing coaching for almost five years.
And I find that most acupuncturists have an email newsletter opt in. on their website, something that says, you know, sign up for our monthly email newsletter or something simple like that. But they very rarely or never send the email newsletter, right? So you’re collecting the emails, but you’re not sending them.
And remember, email is this beautiful opportunity to stay top of mind with people just to remind them they meant to make an appointment, if you’re only sending a quarterly email newsletter, for example, I find that most people send something maybe once every three or four months. If you’re sending a quarterly newsletter, that is a lot of time for people to forget about you and your practice, to forget their intention to make an appointment.
So I recommend sending emails twice a month. That is a sweet spot. Now, don’t panic. Whenever I say this, people’s response is immediately, I don’t have time to write content for one email a month. How am I going to write two emails? So we will talk about that in a moment. I have some really effective, helpful ideas for that.
But they’re also worried about annoying people by sending emails twice a month. So the reality is That twice a month is a polite volume of emails to send. It really is not too often and I find that it’s just enough for potential patients. and regular patients to remember that they meant to make an appointment, right?
You’re staying top of mind just often enough that they’re not forgetting about you completely. And I find that is a number of emails that is actually doable for people if they’re using the tips that I’ll share in just a moment, okay? And think about your favorite clothing brand. When something is on sale, they will email you multiple times a week.
Sometimes they’ll email multiple times a day. So we are not doing that. We are As I said, we are sending a polite number of emails at just twice a month, okay? So don’t worry that you are annoying people. You’re really not. People opted into your email list for a reason. They want to learn from you about Chinese medicine and how it can impact their health.
They want to hear from you. And I have a little note down at the bottom of this slide that I want to point out because this is pretty common experience. If you have not been sending emails and then you start sending, people are going to start unsubscribing. And this is totally normal. You actually want the people who are not a good fit for you to unsubscribe from your list because you don’t want to pay for them to be on your list.
So most email platforms like MailChimp will unsubscribe. It’s like a free monthly subscription until you hit a certain number of email subscribers, whether it’s 300 people or 500. If there are people who read your emails and they say, Oh, I don’t think I’m actually going to see this acupuncturist, and they unsubscribe, that’s fine.
It’s better to just let them go, to not take it personally, because it’s almost always going to happen. Every time you send an email, you’re going to get a couple unsubscribes, but you don’t want to have to pay for them to have this bloated email list filled with people who are not going to become your patients.
So just know that it’s going to happen. It’s totally normal. It doesn’t mean you’re doing anything wrong and it does not mean you’re annoying people. Okay, so let’s talk about two things that allow you to send two emails a month. Like, how can you be that efficient? And the first the first perspective is that you can send very simple email newsletters with only one message in them.
So you only need one reason to send an email in order to hit send. And we’ll talk about that in a little bit. But do you remember? And I don’t know I graduated about 14 years ago, so these kinds of email newsletters were very popular at that time. But it was very common for an email newsletter to have multiple different parts, like three or four different sections, and they usually had a theme like the liver in springtime, something like that.
And they were long, and they were complex, and they took a long time to put that content together. So There’s nothing wrong with that type of email newsletter. It’s very effective, but I don’t think it’s any more effective than just having one section, one message. And what I have found over the years with those long, complex email newsletters is that most people who intend to write them, they never finish writing them.
And then they never hit send. So it really is a barrier to actually doing the thing and sending the email. So when I say you only need one message, I am referring to, you could have one research article that you want to summarize briefly and share with your audience, and then have a call to action.
If the research is about acupuncture and knee pain, At the bottom of your summary of the research, you could say, as your call to action, If you are struggling with knee pain, we would love to help. Click here to schedule now. Okay, so it can be very simple and brief. And then the second concept that will really help you in putting these email newsletters together is the idea of repurposing content.
So I can almost guarantee that you have written or created a lot of content already. over the years for your practice, you do not need to keep writing that content from scratch. So if you’re not familiar with it, repurposing content is when you take something that you created for one platform, for example, Instagram, and then you copy and paste it and you make some edits so that it makes sense for another platform, which in this case would be email, an email newsletter.
And I really believe that repurposing content is the only way to maintain your sanity in digital marketing. If you are trying to create brand new content every week for eternity, it’s just too hard and you just don’t need to. It is totally acceptable to copy and paste and kind of reconfigure content you already wrote so that it makes sense for whatever platform you’re copying and pasting it to.
So people often ask me, what can I repurpose? The answer is everything. Anything you’ve created in the past can be cleverly repurposed so that you don’t have to write it from scratch again. And I recommend starting with what’s often called evergreen content on your website. It’s sometimes also called core content or pillar content.
You may have heard of that, but this is These are usually the pages of your website that people are reading or skimming when they are making the decision about whether or not to come see you for acupuncture. They’re deciding if you’re a good fit for them. So if you have a specialty, for example, then the page where you describe how acupuncture works for your specialty, like Fertility, Orthopedics, Cosmetic.
That page is going to be core content or evergreen. And it’s called evergreen because this is the kind of information that doesn’t change very much, but it is always relevant. It’s always helping people make a decision about whether you’re the right acupuncturist for them. So repurposing evergreen content is always a good choice.
It’s a nice place to start. If you’re thinking about planning your email newsletter several months in advance. I would begin with evergreen content. And your frequently asked questions section on your website, if you have that, is a type of core content. I also recommend incorporating that into your email newsletter.
Each Q& A, can be its own email. Okay? If you have written blog posts in the past, you can repurpose that content. If you have published Instagram or Facebook posts and they got a lot of good engagement, like your followers ask questions, they were curious, they were sharing a lot, then that could be really great content to repurpose for emails as well.
And you could either You could just copy and paste the caption, for example, from Instagram, or we’ll talk in a second what to do if you have a lot of video or visual content. So a couple examples of repurposing if you are the kind of blogger who writes like 3, 000 word blogs because you like to be really thorough and we know that Chinese medicine is complex.
So we like to explain everything. I’m one of those people. I’m a long form blog writer. You don’t want to copy and paste the whole blog post into an email. That’s a little too much for an email. So I recommend breaking it down into three or four sections or concepts and then send each as an email, right?
And You could send it as a series of related emails where you are teaching your audience something about acupuncture for this particular topic. So that’s one idea. I mentioned copying and pasting an Instagram caption. Of course, you could also do this with Facebook. Again, if you have social media content that people engaged with, that is a good trigger for you to know that this might also make a really good email content.
And then Let’s say that you are less comfortable writing, but you are pretty comfortable on video, or maybe you have a podcast, something like that. You can use free software online to make a transcript of the video or the podcast, and then you can use that text that you just transcribed, make some edits, and then send that as an email, okay?
Because people who often have a really library of Instagram Reels will say, I didn’t write a lot in the caption. How am I supposed to transform this content into an email? You can transcribe it for free. Okay, so that’s one idea. And then again, I really encourage you to take a look at your Frequently Asked Questions page and consider sending each of those questions and answers as an email, because that is really the information that people need to help them decide if they want to make an appointment with you.
And a really good example of this is how many treatments do I need for, and then your specialty, right? So how many treatments do I need for fertility? How many treatments do I need for cosmetic acupuncture? That is really important. Question and answer makes a really beautiful email newsletter. Okay, so just a couple of tips for writing effective emails so you can get better results for your efforts.
In any marketing, you always want to write from the perspective of your potential patient and think about questions they are subconsciously asking, which is, why should I read this? What’s in it for me? Why should I get acupuncture? What’s in it for me? Think about the benefits from their perspective.
And Angle all of your writing towards that, okay? So that’s number one. And then most email newsletters are successful when they focus on content that the audience would find useful in some way. So teaching and educating your audience is really great. Answering questions. I’ve mentioned the FAQs multiple times already, but that’s a great option.
Solving a problem. So a good example of an email that you could consider solving a problem would be, um, how to reduce abdominal bloating with Chinese medicine. That could be your subject line. And then the email talks about avoiding ice and raw foods, maybe avoiding smoothies, those kinds of things, teaching them something about Chinese medicine that they can put into action at home, get good results.
And then of course you have a call to action. If you want more help managing your digestion with acupuncture and the wisdom of Chinese medicine, click here to make an appointment. Okay. So that’s like a solving a problem that the patient has email. You could also think about what might be the doubts or the barriers that prevent people from making an appointment with me right away.
And then answer those doubts in an FAQ format. And then of course you can always share an email. If you have an announcement about your clinic, maybe you hired a massage therapist, you have a new receptionist, maybe you’re hosting an event that you want to invite people to. Maybe you’re just going on vacation and you want people to get on your calendar before you leave.
Okay, so all of those are just one single message that you are sharing that is a good enough reason to send the email. And I mentioned call to action several times, so before we end I just want to define that for you. So a call to action is when you tell people what you want them to do and how to do it.
Click here to schedule now. Schedule now is what you want them to do and click here is you telling them how to do it. You could also think of a call to action as letting people know what is the next step they need to take if they’re ready to work with you. Okay? So in email, really in all marketing, it is very important to include calls to action because that is literally the part that makes people take action, right?
It gives them the initiative. It turns a little light bulb on their head like, okay, I am ready. and I’m going to click the link. So I recommend having three repeating the same call to action in your emails three times. So have a button at the top and the bottom of your email that’s very simple that just says, ScheduleNow or call for a free consult, something like that.
And then you can also have a call to action in the text or in the body of your email. So if your email was about knee pain, for example, you could say, If you’re struggling to manage your knee pain by yourself, we are here to help. Click here to schedule now, and then you have the hyperlink. Okay? The idea with The frequent calls to action is that people do not like clicking around on the internet trying to figure things out by themselves.
They get distracted. They end up watching cat videos for 30 minutes and they forget their intention. So we just want to make it super obvious, no matter where they are in the body of the email, we want to make it quick and easy for them to find a link so they can schedule now or do whatever your call to action is.
Okay, so that’s a very important piece for making your emails effective. All right, so if you have any questions with me, you are more than welcome to send me an email. My email is michelle at michelleGrasek. com. You can send questions about your email marketing or just marketing questions in general.
And I’d like to thank the American Acupuncture Council one more time for the opportunity to be here with you teaching marketing. I absolutely love teaching marketing and I genuinely believe that it’s just a tool that allows us to reach more patients. So it’s always a pleasure to be here with you.