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

Marketing Revolution Contest

What you will win:

An hour long Marketing Revolution session with me, Sarah Nelson. In this session I’ll help breakdown your biggest marketing challenge and determine 5 leverage points for you. After we decide those things, I will put them into a customized marketing strategy just for you. 

How to Win:

Write one paragraph about your biggest marketing challenge and post it on your blog, or facebook with a link back to http://practicemarketingrevolution.blogspot.com 

Then email mrktngrevolution@gmail.com with your entry, OR just email your entry to mrktngrevolution@gmail.com

Contest Rules:

Three winners will be chosen at random on 12/9/10. You’ll be contacted by me to schedule your session right away.

Email me with any questions! I look forward to hearing from you!

- Sarah 

Awkward Facebook Situations

With more users than the population on the US (550 million users) Facebook is an amazing tool, but its ease of information sharing can cause some really awkward situations for its users. This morning, I woke up to a gentle reminder of Facebook’s power over my relationships.

My boyfriend and I have decided to spend Christmas together, apart from our families, and are planning a holiday trip to Panama. We’ll be meeting up with several friends and today, my mom found out about the trip through a friend’s Facebook post. Normally, this wouldn’t be a big deal except I hadn’t had the chance to tell her about the trip. Now, I feel terribly guilty that I didn’t get to tell my mom properly that I’d be missing a family event. 

If you have a personal or brand Facebook page, make sure you stay engaged with it. Monitor your connections and remember that they are tighter than ever.  Anything you, or anyone else posts about you or your brand on Facebook is in the public domain. 

Have you had any awkward situations thanks to Facebook? Share your stories in the comments; I’d love to hear from you.

-Sarah

Looking for a great digital marketing strategy? The Practice Marketing Revolution can help! Email sarah@npressnewsletter.com today. 

Why I love Listorious

I’ve recently started using an awesome Twitter tool called Listorious. I love it so much that I want to share it with you. 

Twitter Lists

If you aren’t using Twitter lists yet, I highly recommend that you take some time to explore them. Twitter Lists are a feature of Twitter that allow you to organize the people you’re following on Twitter, or find new people. They offer a way for you to bunch together users (or patients, friends, etc) on Twitter into groups so that you can get an overview of what they’re up to. When you create a list, you see a stream of the latest tweets from a specified set of users. For example, you might consider making a list of your patients, local businesses you like, or people in your community. By viewing or following this list, you easily see what all of patients or people in your community are tweeting about. 

Now... onto Listorious 

Listorious is a third-party site that has a categorized directory of Twitter lists. Basically, its taken all the great lists that Twitter users have created and made them available to you in one place! You can search or browse through lists by category or find the most popular lists. 

Below is a sample of a search for dentists in the Listorious directory: 

I use Listorious as a targeted search tool to find health care organizations who are using Twitter. I also look at the list streams to see what popular topics are, who the key influencers are, and to find people who might fit my audience. 

Listorious has lists for almost every topic, region, or profession so you can use it to find prospective patients, who are people talking to, what they are talking about about or what are they retweeting.

Start by asking yourself: Who do you want to reach on Twitter? Be specific and enjoy the search! 

Got Twitter questions? Need help creating a Twitter List? Email me 

-Sarah Nelson

How FarmVille Teaches You To Be A Better Marketer

If you have a Facebook page, you’ve probably had a friend’s FarmVille update streamed across your newsfeed or maybe you play FarmVille yourself. This popular online game boasts 85 million active accounts and has been advertising in real life (IRL) through a partnership with 7-11.

Today, I just "hid” a friend on my Facebook newsfeed. I like the guy and all but he was sending FarmVille updates 20 times a day - super annoying.  I really don’t care how many virtual lettuce patches you just harvested or how many pigs you have. 

However, it did make me think about how many social media posts/tweets are enough to reach our target patients ... or when does it feel like too much? You certainly don’t want your practice to be “that annoying Farmville guy.”

You have to know where your audience is, and where you need to reach them in the locations they like to be reached. If you are able to engage regularly with patients on Facebook, that is a great place to be. If you feel all alone in the Twitterverse, you may want to ask your patients what social networks they like, and meet them (and others like them) there. 

As to how often you should reach your patients, that’s totally dependent on them – If I start to see people unfollowing, or not replying, I know to back off. The thing that makes social media different from all types of media before is the INTERACTION. Social media is not a platform for broadcast but of genuine interaction with others.  Treat your social networks like you would a cocktail party. If you only talk about yourself, eventually, you will be talking TO yourself. If people stop conversing with you or "hide" your posts and updates, they will miss all the good stuff you have to say.  I believe that in social media, you always want to UNDER-push than OVER-push.

How often do you interact with your patients? Let me know in the comments! 

- Sarah 

5 Easy Ways to Use the i-pad for Health Care Marketing

The i-pad has been on my mind a lot lately. Not just because I was just in the store playing with one, or in the first month they sold over 1 million units, but because I think they could be an excellent tool in health care marketing.  

Let’s take a look at five ways you can spark interaction with your patient that increases engagement by using an i-pad.

1. Load it with before and after pictures, articles, and testimonials.
2. Make your social media pages available so patients can "check in" at your practice on social location sites (Gowalla, Foursquare, etc). 
3. Create a referral program so patients can email an invitation from your practice to their friends while they are still in your office.
4. Show educational videos to your patients when explaining treatment or while they wait. 
5. Present treatment using the i-pad to show mock ups, design, or function. 

What am I missing? How would you use an i-pad in your practice? 

Does your practice's online reputation matter?

Absolutely!  It’s one of the first steps to earning trust and building a relationship with new patients. For most new patients, a google search of your practice is their first impression. In fact, a recent Pew Research Center Project study showed that 44% of online adults say they have searched online for information about someone whose care or services they seek in a professional provider, like a doctor, dentist, or chiropractor. 

If you haven’t recently done a search for your practice, yourself, or the names of your key staff or care givers, now might be a good time to do it.

Here's what to do:

* Start your search with Google, Bing, and Yahoo, yelp.com, and Angie's List.

* Document sentiment, practice brand mentions, and patient concerns

* Share feed back with your team 

* Decide follow up strategy as needed 

You can also use some of these free tools to search for your practice and find real time results in social networks, blogs, and forums. 

Remember, its often the patients who never give you feedback that can be the most vocal online. Take some to see what your current reputation is and identify areas for improvement.  

- Sarah