Let’s talk about how to make your email newsletters more effective, so you can get more patients on your schedule each time you send one.
The two most common questions I get from my marketing students are:
- How often should I send my email newsletter?
- What am I supposed to keep writing about in each email?
I know that a lot of people are worried they’re going to be annoying people if they send emails too often. But I find that most acupuncturists aren’t sending nearly enough emails to their subscribers as they could be, to get the most benefit out of this type of marketing.
Like all marketing, email marketing requires consistency to be as effective as possible. And don’t worry – consistently sending an email newsletter DOES NOT mean being spammy. We’ll talk about the difference.
And I’ll share my favorite easy hack for finding what to write about in your next email newsletter.
Listen in for all the details!
🎙️ Episode #8: How Often to Send Your Email Newsletter and What the Heck to Talk About:
Show Notes:
- Sign up for my email newsletter for updates on the upcoming ADA course and free social media templates
- [Coming Soon] Laura Gage’s ADA Compliance for Acupuncturists Online Course
- [Coming Soon] Freebie Mini Pack of Acupuncture Social Media Templates
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Transcript:
Hey there, welcome back! Today’s I want to talk about two things to make your newsletter emails more effective so you can get more patients on your schedule every time you send one. And at the end I have an assignment for you, some super easy homework.
The consistent feedback that I get from my marketing students is that they know they need to send a regular email newsletter to their subscriber list, but they typically avoid it because they have no idea what to say and/or they’re worried about bothering people by sending emails too often.
We’re going to address both of those things today – how often to send emails, and what the heck to write about.
My first recommendation is to send more emails to your list. Specifically, I recommend sending one email every two weeks. And don’t worry, this is not too many, and we’ll talk about it in just a moment.
I know everyone is on a different journey, so to speak, with their email marketing. Some people are consistently sending a monthly newsletter, some people say on their website that they have a monthly newsletter, but they very rarely send it. In my experience teaching marketing to fellow acupuncturists, I find that we are not emailing our lists often enough to get the most out of this type of marketing. Email marketing, like any other kind of marketing, requires consistency. The more often you show up, the better.
The purpose of your email newsletter is to stay top of mind with all of your subscribers, as well as to build trust and to educate people about acupuncture. But staying top of mind is paramount. It’s likely that most of your subscribers are going to be current patients or past patients, right? And then hopefully you’ll have a pretty good number of people on your subscriber list who came from your newsletter sign up on your website or your lead magnet on your website, if you have one.
So every time you send a newsletter, you’re basically reminding all of your subscribers that you exist. Wherever they are on their customer journey with you – established patients, forgotten patients, potential patients – sending an email every two weeks is a great, low-pressure way to remind them, “Hey, I’m here, and you might really need this. Acupuncture might really be able to help you.”
Hopefully people who are already your patients will see your newsletter and think to themselves, “Oh right, I’ve been meaning to make an appointment.” And then of course with people who are not yet your patients, your goal is to teach them about acupuncture and how it might be able to help them.
To get really good results from your email marketing, I recommend consistently sending an email every two weeks. This seems to be a sweet spot based on feedback from my students. It’s a good balance between being able to come up with content every two weeks, and staying in front of your audience so they don’t forget about you. And again, don’t panic. Every two weeks is not too often.
If your goal is to stay top of mind with your subscribers, you really don’t want to let a lot of time go by between emails. I actually think that a monthly newsletter is not often enough. Four weeks is a long time between reminders, right?
You’re trying to stay at the forefront of someone’s consciousness. Four weeks is plenty of time to forget to make an appointment and to move on to something else. But two weeks is a good balance, from what I’ve discovered sending my clinic newsletter every two weeks, and from feedback from my marketing students.
If you’re feeling right now like every two weeks is slightly more often than is comfortable, again, don’t panic. Think about how many marketing emails you get on a daily basis from, for example, your favorite clothing store. I’ve had clothing stores send me four or five emails a week, let alone a month, and even more if they’re having a sale. So if that makes you feel cringey, just know – you’re not going to do that! Compared to the volume of emails the average consumer receives, once every two weeks is really not bombarding people.
This leads me right into tip number two, which is an easy hack for what the heck to write about every two weeks. And before we dive into that, I want to say that I do recommend writing and scheduling your emails in advance. So do this in batches – write 4 four emails, schedule them to autosend in your email marketing platform, like MailChimp or whatever you use, and you’re good to go. I find that this planning and scheduling of emails in advance is what really helps people show up consistently in their email marketing. Or any kind of marketing, really.
If you have no idea what to write about in your email newsletters, here’s an easy hack you can use right now. This works really well in my practice and I’ve had a ton of great feedback from my marketing students about this as well. The hack is to repurpose content that you’ve already created.
I’m sure you’ve already spent significant time and energy creating content for other platforms, like Facebook or Instagram posts, or blog posts. Instead of reinventing the wheel or writing new content from scratch, you’re just going to reuse that content as emails.
Here’s what I recommend. Log into your Instagram account and take a look at the analytics for your previous posts to see which posts did really well which ones got a lot of engagement – so, likes, comments, shares or saves. And then simply copy and paste that Instagram caption into an email, and change the calls-to-action so they’re relevant to email and make sense as an email. That’s really all “repurposing content” means. And I highly recommend it because it’s very efficient. It saves you a ton of work and it’s effective.
Repurposing content means writing copy for one marketing outlet, for example, Instagram, and then copying and pasting that content, and editing it slightly so that it makes sense for a different platform.
So in this case, on Instagram, where you originally wrote the content, the call to action is usually going to be, “Click the link in my bio to schedule now,” or “Click the link in my bio to read the full article,” etc., depending on what action you want people to take.
So, if you’re repurposing an Instagram caption as an email newsletter, then you’d simply change the call to action and include the link right in the text. So in your email, you’d probably say, “Click here to schedule now,” or “Click the button below to schedule now.”
So take a look at your Instagram analytics and see which posts did well. Then copy the caption and paste it into an email, edit it slightly so it makes sense for email, and then schedule it to go out in two weeks.
And it doesn’t have to be Instagram. If you don’t do Instagram but you have Facebook, for example, you can absolutely do this with Facebook posts as well. Or blog posts.
But really I just want you to think about the content you’ve already written and send it out as an email.
And don’t overcomplicate this. We really only need one thing to share with our subscribers as a valid reason to email them. It could be sharing an office update or teaching them something. It could be sharing (in laymen’s terms) a quick summary of a research article you found supporting the use of acupuncture for a condition you really love to treat. One paragraph is fine for the body of your email newsletter.
I think a lot of us put off sending our newsletter regularly because we think it needs to be this big, comprehensive collection of articles that have a theme, like Springtime or other change of seasons. That’s totally fine, but not necessary on a regular basis. And if you feel intimidated by putting together all that content for every newsletter, and it’s holding you back from actually sending newsletters regularly, then I’m here to tell you, you don’t need to do that. An email every two weeks with one piece of information that you’re sharing is perfectly sufficient.
For example, last week I sent out an email newsletter answering the question, “What should I wear to acupuncture?” which was originally an Instagram post that did really well and I’ve actually republished that post on Instagram several times because it does so well. So I knew it would be a good choice as an email.
By the way, my answer to that question is always, don’t wear leggings or skinny jeans, pajamas are just fine. It’s an unexpected answer and I get the change to explain about distal points, and how acupuncture often uses points around the knees or elbows and so we need to access them. I also ask people not to wear leggings or skinny jeans, and that really surprises people usually makes them comment or DM me letting me know they never thought about it before. So that’s why it’s a good choice for an email – because I already know that my target market finds this content both interesting and helpful.
Alright, I want to finish up today with some homework for you, a small challenge to do this TODAY. And I bet you can guess what it is already. If you haven’t sent an email to your list in three or more weeks, send an email today. It’s time. Your subscribers are on your list for a reason, which is that they want to hear from you.
So I want you to visit your Instagram or your Facebook account or your blog posts, wherever you’ve spent time creating content in the past, and I want you to pick a post and copy and paste it into an email. Then repurpose it by adjusting the calls to action so they make sense for email, and hit send.
That’s it! I want you to send an email to your list if you haven’t done it in a long time. Remind them that you and your business exist, and that acupuncture might really be able to help them!
Before I sign off, I want to answer a really common question that I get from my marketing students, which is, “I haven’t sent an email in a really long time. Can I just start emailing my list again or do I have to give a reason or explain myself or say, heyyy, I’ve been away but now I’m back?”
So I think the answer to this is no. If you haven’t sent an email in a long time and you’re ready to start sending them again, you do not have to acknowledge to your audience that you were away or justify why you’ve returned. You can if you want. But if the idea of doing that is holding you back from just sending the email, I would say don’t worry about it. The same goes for if you’ve been away from social media for a long time. Your first post doesn’t have to be, “Hey, I know I’ve been MIA but I’m back again and things are going to get back to normal.” You can do that if you feel compelled, but it’s not necessary. Just start posting again.
Okay, really my goal for this is for you to sign off and take action this week. I hope it motivates you to repurpose your pre-existing content, go with something super simple and send it to your list. If you’re feeling really jazzed up, and I always hope this is how you feel about marketing, then I encourage you to pick 4-6 Instagram posts and repurpose that content as emails, and schedule them to auto-send over the next 2-3 months. And then it’s done and your email marketing will function without you and get the job done on autopilot.
Before I go today I wanted to mention that coming up in the next two weeks I have some super exciting new courses and marketing templates for you. My amazing friend Laura Rose is an acupuncturist and a website developer for other acupuncturists and she’s putting together a course that will walk you through how to make sure your website is ADA compliant.
I know that lots and lots of people are worried about this right now for good reason. Laura has been building website for our industry for a long time and she’s has always said that it’s actually very easy to get ADA compliant. So she’s going to walk us through those steps in this course. So we’ll will be releasing that very soon, within a week or two.
And I’m also putting together some really beautiful social media templates for you to use, to make your social media marketing easier. I’ll have a little starter pack of free templates available to anyone who wants them within a week, so I’m very excited about that. These templates use beautiful acupuncture and TCM images from the Acupuncture Photography Project, so I think you’re really going to love them.
Definitely get on my email list so you can stay updated on the release of both the course and the templates. I’ll put the link to sign up for my email newsletter in the show notes.
Okay, my friend, until next time! Thank you so much for being here with me, go forth and email your subscriber list!