'Tis The Season (For Marketing Your Practice)!

Friday, December 11, 2009
Posted in: AcuBase and Trigram Stuff, Practice Management

By Jason Luban, L.Ac.
Founder, Trigram Software LLC

As the holidays fast approach, many of us notice that our practices may begin to thin out.  Children get out of school, friends and family show up, vacations are taken, and medical appointments become a distant priority.  Rather than slink about waiting for the action to return, why not take action?  The holidays are a perfect time to hone your marketing skills by using some time-honored techniques to build the momentum of your practice into the new year. 

Those of us who have been in practice for some time now know the 80/20 rule well:  80% of your business will come from 20%...of your existing or past, satisfied patients.  Mining the resources of your database full of past and current patients is an excellent way to get more people coming in to see you, and during the holidays, there is no better, and lower maintenance, way to do so than with holiday cards.  

In the recent past, holiday and birthday cards, and nearly any communication with patients through the mail, were a less-than-palatable experience.  We’d have to buy the generic cards en mass, print out labels or hand-write addresses on each, sign each card, and stamp and send it.  At the very minimum, an all-day process.  And while the Internet now allows us to collect patient email addresses and send mass emails or newsletters online, snail mail is still the best way to truly reach out and touch someone.  Fortunately, you can do so with custom cards, mass mail, and do it all with the click of a mouse in under an hour.  Photo sites like Kodak and Shutterfly.com, among others, allow you to upload your own pictures, easily create your own cards from their templates, import your names and addresses, and have the cards addressed and sent out in the mail.  Use AcuBase to go to your list of patients, then go  to File/Export, and choose the fields First Name, Last Name, Address, City, State, and Zip, and save the file to your desktop.  Then upload (import) the list to your favorite card-making website, and you’re all set.

At the time of writing this, my research has found that ordering over 100 custom-made cards and having each addressed and sent by mail costs about $2/card.  By picking only your ‘favorite’ referral sources and patients who are still active or recently active, you will reduce costs by targeting your market, and tickle their brains when they get your card.  If even just a few of them remember you and send themselves or someone else your way, the exercise will have more than paid for itself.

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