Do you have a list of patient's emails for your clinic, but don't know what to do with them?

For many clinics it is standard practice to collect patient email addresses when they first attend the clinic. They even make sure the patients know this means that the clinic may contact them with promotional material. They do the hard part, (trust me, this IS the hard part) of compiling a database of people who are interested in their businesses and services and then.... do nothing with them.

You may even have forgotten that you have this list. It's not something to be embarrassed by, the idea of having a monthly e-newsletter or simply a printed newsletter seems easy but the day to day logistics of getting it out there can be surprisingly complicated.

If you do write your own newsletter, the first few editions may feel easy, and the ideas flow naturally. After a few months, this easy feeling starts to slip away and as you've covered the most obvious topics, you find yourself procrastinating, your regular publication becomes a sporadic event. When you do publish, you notice that fewer people are engaging with your content. Social media gurus will all tell you the same thing - people WILL read your emails if you are consistent and provide valuable information.

How are E-newsletters different to other forms of social media?

Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn all have the same serious flaw, while you can have great success connecting with patients, there is nothing to stop them from reducing your ability to reach your followers. The reality is that they own your connections with your followers, not you and their goal is to get you to pay as much as possible to reach those people. A solid email list is the only thing you have any control over. Many people might think that email is outdated and that people no longer connect through this medium, however the truth is that people still read emails, they just don't read emails that don't give them any value. I'm sure you have experienced subscribing to a website and thinking they were going to share helpful information (think maybe a marketing page) only to realise they were simply going to talk around topics hoping to get you to buy something. This is not valuable and you never open emails from that address again, in your mind they become another form of SPAM. There are other people whose emails I know provide genuinely interesting information at least 80% of the time. Those emails get opened.

How can outsourcing newsletters help you?

My experiences working in private practice and knowing the realities of how a busy (or quiet) clinic works, led me to create a tool for clinics that would be low cost, versatile and simple to implement. I wanted to provide a newsletter solution that would still give clinics absolute control of the content that went out and the ability to add those stories about clinic news, staff profiles and changes to opening hours that need to be included sometimes.

What I developed is a newsletter and blog service for physiotherapy clinics that is sent via email, that can be printed, emailed, edited and added to a website blog too. The newsletter is designed so that it really looks like it is coming from your clinic. Physiotherapy clinics are very personal businesses and for your content to connect with your patients it needs to feel as though it has really come from you. I aim to make the emails you send to your patients part of their connection with you and your staff, and you can trust that they are written by a physiotherapist. I have been operating for over three years and have had great success with my subscribing clinics. They have found the newsletter is a life saver to them as it gives them complete control of what is going out to patient and how it is getting out there, as well as taking away the stress of creating engaging content every month.