So, you have set-up your physical therapy clinic’s website and have graphic designers and writers on staff to craft a branded, visually appealing newsletter that is valuable content-wise to any patient who would open it. You have probably also heard that email marketing is among the most effective ways to get your message out to your audience and attract potential patients. However, your team’s efforts seem to be yielding feeble results. What’s wrong?
According to statistics, the newsletter open rates for healthcare-related newsletters lies between 18% and 25%. That means that it is all a game of numbers and if your physiotherapy clinic’s email subscriber list is sufficiently long, the chances of a patient reading through your newsletter increases. However, if your subscriber list is modest at best, an open rate of 18% may amount to only a couple of patients actually reading through your newsletters, which automatically makes your email campaigns a waste of time and resources.
In order to achieve substantial returns on your email marketing investment, you need higher numbers of email subscribers. So, how can you turn casual readers of your physiotherapy clinic’s website into subscribers? Here are a few ideas to get you started.
The opt-in widget lets visitors to your physical therapy clinic’s site enter their email address in order to subscribe to your newsletter. If you only have the widget in one or two places around your website, chances are visitors might have a hard time finding it. For instance, if your opt-in widget is only located on your homepage, a patient browsing for information and ending up reading one of your blog posts will never see the opportunity for a sign-up. Ideally, you should place the widget in the site’s side bar, the footer (the bottom section of your site) and under each of your blog posts.
In addition, don’t forget to use the good, old, traditional methods for capturing existing patients’ emails. You can add an opt-in section in all your registration forms your clinic’s patients fill out at the front desk, as well as on any pamphlets and leaflets you distribute to them or leave around your examination and waiting rooms. Don’t forget to mention what benefits an email subscriber will receive in order to stimulate their interest and prompt them to sign up for your newsletter.
As much as these might be extremely annoying, pop-up boxes prompting a visitor to sign up for your physical therapy newsletter actually work and you shouldn’t hesitate to implement them. Besides the usual “Never miss a post” message, you can amplify the number of subscribers you will get this way by offering a freebie, such as a free visit to your physiotherapy clinic, a product (though this might create a hassle later on when you need to ship it out), or a free e-book for downloading.
The lead magnet is something of high perceived value to the visitors of your clinic’s site that they would receive in exchange for their email address. Your physiotherapy clinic’s current or potential patients might truly benefit from downloading a free e-book or guide on how to prevent sports-related injuries, for example. Putting together a quality product that would seem appealing to subscribers and effectively showcasing it through your opt-in widget or pop-up prompt would do wonders for your email list, since you will already be targeting users who are interested in your clinic’s services.
Another effective strategy is asking new subscribers to confirm their email address in order to receive their download, rather than simply letting them enter an email address for an automatic access to the content.
You can draw in physical therapy patient subscribers by offering a members only area, where you either post exclusive content that is hard to obtain elsewhere on the Internet, or have dedicated staff answer subscribers’ questions. Of course, in order to sign up, a new member needs to provide a valid email address.
Now that you have several strategies to get the attention of your site’s visitors, you will need to start drawing in more traffic, so you can effectively benefit from your efforts. If no one comes to your website, no one is going to see all the premium features you are ready to offer. Start by posting great, SEO-friendly content to your physiotherapy blog that is actually valuable to your readers and cross-promote it on all of your clinic’s social media profiles.
Finally, don’t forget that every great business website out there has started at zero visitors and subscribers, so if you are willing to stick with it, you will invariably start seeing results. If all of this starts to seem overwhelming or if you are short on dedicated staff to help you with growing your PT clinic’s email subscriber list, you can always rely on us to give you a head start with setting up and promoting your email campaigns.