What is the best small business email marketing service?

A very good question - and one that we get all the time. 


An active email list is a great communication and marketing tool for small business. Not only can you email appointment reminders but you can send additional emails throughout the year to stay in contact with your patients or customers (and keep your business on the top of their mind.) Email marketing has been a popular and important marketing tool for the last 10 years and is a great way for your company to interact with customers and get your message heard. Most email marketing services will provide you with analytics so you can see what types of emails your customers like the most. You could try sending surveys, electronic birthday cards, an e- newsletter, Tips and Tricks, product reviews, or interesting news stories relevant to your industry. 

Ok, I get it, email marketing is great... but what is the best small business email marketing service? 

Constant Contact seems to be the leader in small business email marketing and is easy to use and relatively inexpensive. Your usage fees will vary with the size of your email list. With the service, Constant Contact helps your manage the email list and offers reports on open rates, click throughs, links, and social sharing stats so you can see how your content is shared on Facebook, Twitter, etc. 

Mail Chimp is another great email marketing service and you can send 6,000 emails a month (to a 1,000 person mailing list) for free! Mail Chimp also offers a list manager, open rate and click through analytics, as well as seasonal templates to give your emails a warm, festive touch.

Mail Chimp holiday email templates 

Need help getting started with an email marketing campaign?  Got a favorite email marketing service? I’d love to hear about it in the comments.

-Sarah

11 Tools to Discover What Your Patients Really Want

Listening to your patients and learning to meet their needs are keys to growing your practice and creating an effective marketing plan. In fact, not doing so handicaps the overall reach and effectiveness of your marketing, communications, and service strategies.

Luckily, there are a variety of interactive media tools that provide platforms for listening to an ever growing sample of patients. These monitoring tools offer doctors opportunities to identify critical conversations and for strategic engagement.

 Here are some of my favorite and FREE social media "listening"tools:

Google Alerts - Email updates of relevant search results
Monitter - Search for keywords in real time on Twitter
Social Mention - Real time keyword search across the web
Twitrratr - Sentiment ratings for Twitter
Backtype - Monitor blogs, blog comments, and conversations
Blogsearch - Find key words in the blogosphere
Evri - Aggregates user generated content
CoTweet - Conversation threading and trend monitoring for Twitter
Collecta - Monitor update streams of news sites, blogs, and social media sites
Klout - Find influencers based on topic
TweetDeck - Organize Twitter seaches by hashtag, brand, etc.

Since these tools are free, I advise searching for your practice or specialty on multiple sites so you don't miss potentially valuable information or feeds. Your practice's needs will be unique so select the tools and services that best fit your processes.

Do you have favorite tools for monitoring your practice or brand? Share them here in the comments :)

How 4 Quick Fixes Can Make Your Event a Success

Hosting an informational seminar or event is a great way to introduce your community to your practice.

Here are our four of our favorite suggestions to help "punch up" your event and make the most of your effort:

1) Choose an event theme that corresponds to an upcoming holiday For example, if you want to offer an oral cancer screening, choose cancer awareness month.

2) Host giveaways. Give away free screenings or elective services – it’s a low risk way for people to experience your care and a great way to generate lots of interest.

3) List your event on as many online event calendars as you can find. Not only are you likely to create more buzz, but local publications will often republish your events.

4) Invite relevant bloggers or media contacts to attend an event for free. Check out your local news sources to find influential writers or those that cover health care topics. Make sure you have future events already scheduled so they can promote them or provide links in their write-ups.

If you’ve got any killer tips to add, we’d love to hear from you!

Email Marketing

WOW! Talk about a good return! According to the Direct Marketing Association, email marketing generated an ROI of $43.62 for every dollar spent on it in 2008!

Email marketing can involve new patient acquisition, lead nurturing, patient reactivation and retention, and of course increased treatment acceptance, which means that there are a lot of processes and services are potentially involved.


Many practices choose to have their administrative staff handle their email marketing in house. If you do, here are some considerations to help get the most out of your communication with your patients:

• Strategy & Research
• Promotional Planning (do you have a calendar of events?)
• Copy Writing & Content Development (content provides value so don’t let it be an after thought)
• List Growth & Community Building (are you sure that all new patients are added to your list?)
• List Segmentation (how can you segment your list to better target your messages?)
• Cross-channel Integration (do your emails connect to your website and blog?)

If the list above encompasses more than you’re doing, this may be a strong indicator that you’re under-utilizing this lucrative channel. It may be time to reevaluate your process or get some additional training so you can get your systems running in top form. 


If you are interested in a recommendation for an email marketing training course, email me at sarah@npressnewsletter.com and I can help you find a program that suits your needs.


- Sarah Nelson 
sarah@npressnewsletter.com 

What's in your new patient packet?

I always remind myself that new patients don't know how good the practice is or the clinical skills are- they only know how good the marketing is. Given that, have you looked at your new patient welcome packet lately?

The new patient welcome packet is the patient's first experience with you after their intake phone call which makes managing the details very important. A new patient welcome packet can be an excellent way to build value and start a relationship before your patient walks through your door. Not only does the patient receive the medical history forms and practice information they will need for their visit, but they can get a sense of your practice personality and feel good about the decision they've made to come see you.

I just remade a dental practice welcome packet to be sent to new patients before the first visit. Here's what we included:

1. Glossy print out and bio with a photo of the dentist, team, and practice
2. Q & A sheet about what patients usually ask at the first visit
3. A "What to expect at your first visit guide"
4. 8 pages of handwritten patient testimonials that we photocopied
5. 3 pages of recent press clippings (from the PR campaign we had been running for the past year)
6. Professionally produced patient testimonial DVD
7. Medical History Form and privacy policies
8. Financial arrangements form
9. Copy of latest practice newsletter

All of these pieces were sent in a glossy logoed folder. Think about how long it would take to get through all this material. That is a lot of time for a patient to spend "getting to know you" before they enter your practice.

If you would like a FREE new patient packet critique, send an email to sarah@npressnewsletter.com

Email Marketing - try it today!

No matter what type of practice you have, you should be collecting your patient's email addresses. Simply add the prompt to your new patient information form, medical history sheet, or ask them directly during your initial phone call. If you start doing this, you'll open the doors to inexpensive ways to stay connected with your patients and educate them about your products and services.

Once you've collected a few emails, you can use a service like T-Link or Mail Chimp to send special announcements and promotional emails. These services will protect patient confidentiality by keeping the lists private.

Before you get started with email marketing, here are a few things you should know:

* Not all of your patients will want to hear from you. If they receive an unwanted email from you, make it easy for them to get off your mailing list. Most email services will have an unsubscribe feature that allows them to select out automatically. If yours does not, and the patient calls your office to be removed from the list, do it right away. Unwanted email can be really irritating to those patients with busy jobs and schedules.

* Have a reason to send an email. There's a saying that if you have nothing to say, you shouldn't be advertising. Make sure when you do email your patients you are saying something new, engaging, or interesting. If you send emails everyday, you'll notice that people will tend to ignore them. Try to send them only when you have something cool and exciting going on or something to offer.

* DON'T SHOUT! Using all caps in email headlines is the equivalent to yelling your message in your patients face.

There are tons of ways to use email to market to your patients without spending a ton of money. If you have some success stories or ideas, please share them here!

- Sarah Nelson
Sarah is the President and founder of Npress. She works with health care providers who struggle with marketing and attracting new patients. Npress makes patient newsletters that are customized to look like they are straight from the doctor's desk! Check them out at: http://www.npressnewsletter.com