It’s not too late to start marketing your practice for the holiday season. (Honestly, you know how I feel – it’s never too late to start marketing. 🤣) But for real, there’s plenty of time.

There are simple things you can do to get in front of your audience this month that don’t require a ton of planning in advance, including sending short and sweet email newsletters. 

Today I’m sharing the emails I’ll be sending to my email subscribers for the month of December. 

I’ll be sending one email per week for four weeks, between US Thanksgiving and the final week of December. 

I hope this inspires you to send your own emails and helps make the process streamlined and easy for you!

And before we dive into today’s episode, I want to invite you to join me for a New Year Business Planning Workshop on Sunday, December 11th, at 11:00 am Eastern Time!

In this goal-setting and business-planning live workshop, we’ll be reviewing your 2022 – what worked well, what didn’t, what were your big and small successes.

Then you’ll be setting your BIG goals for 2023 and walking through a 90-day planning workbook to outline your next steps to achieve those goals.

When you walk away from this event you’ll have your first steps lined up, and lots of fresh new motivation, to pursue all the amazing things that you want for your work and your life in 2023.

I’d love for you to join me. It’s a 2-hour workshop and it’s $47. 

Come together with other acupuncturists and experience a little bit of community. 

There will be lots of quiet journaling time, some fun surprise giveaways, and overall really nice energy. 

If you can’t attend live, no problem. There will be a replay available for 30 days for anyone who registers.

>> Click here to register for this event.

And – if you’re a student and you want to join us, feel free to email me michelle@michellegrasek.com for a half off discount code.

Show Notes:

– Register for the Acu Biz Planathon on Dec. 11th (2 NCCAOM PDA credits)
– One Year of Acupuncture Email Newsletter Templates
– Acupuncture Marketing School digital program (15 NCCAOM PDA credits)

🎙️Episode #47: Last-Minute Email Newsletter Ideas for the Holidays

Subscribe to the Acupuncture Marketing School podcast on Apple Podcast, Stitcher, or Spotify

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Transcript:

[MICHELLE GRASEK] (00:04)

Welcome to the Acupuncture Marketing School Podcast. I’m your host, Michelle Grasek, and I’m here to help you get visible in your community, take marketing action with confidence and get more patients in your practice and more money in your pocket every week. We both know you’re a talented, passionate acupuncturist and that acupuncture has the power to change lives. So let’s dive right into this episode and talk about how you can reach more patients.

(00:34)

Hi there. Welcome back to the Acupuncture Marketing School podcast. Thank you so much for being here with me as always. Let’s talk about some last-minute email newsletter ideas that you can use to market for the upcoming holidays. Before we even get started, I want to say that it is not too late to start marketing your practice for the holiday season. There are still some simple things you can do to get in front of your audience this month that don’t require a ton of planning in advance, and we are going to talk about those. Before we dive in, I want to invite you to join me for a new year business planning workshop on Sunday, December 11th at 11:00 AM Eastern Time. That’s right. This is the third year running of the Acupuncture Biz Planathon, and this year it’s worth two NCCAOM PDA credits for the first time, high five.

(01:27)

So this is a goal-setting and business planning live workshop. We’ll be meeting on Zoom and I will be walking you through the process of reviewing your 2022 and then setting your goals and making a plan for 2023. So we’re going to take a look at what worked well and what did not work well in growing your business this past year and we’re going to celebrate your big and your small wins together and then we will take a look at what are your big goals for 2023? I have this amazing workbook, it’s a 90-day planner that helps you really get some clarity on your most impactful goals and prioritize them, as well as outline a plan for the first 90 days of 2023 so you can hit the ground running and just get started making strides towards those goals right away.

(02:27)

The idea is that this is a really nice low-key community event. I always tell people if you’re into it and you want to share a success from this year or a goal for next year, you can turn on your video and you can share that quickly with everybody else. Or if you want to just stay in your cozy planning cocoon and never turn your video on the whole time, that’s okay too. It’s generally a small group of us has great energy and I’d love for you to join us. It is a two-hour workshop. We’ll probably end a little bit early. It’s $47 and the link to reserve your spot because seats are going to be limited, is in the show notes. There will be some giveaways as well, you know I love surprise giveaways in my live classes. So overall, again, it’s going to be a small group and some really nice energy. I hope you can join me. If you can’t attend live, that’s no problem. There’ll be a replay available for everyone who registers for 60 days after the event. Last thought, if you’re a student and you’d like to join us at the planathon, you can feel free to send me an email at michelle@michellegrasek.com and I will send you a discount code for half off.

[MICHELLE] (03:43)

All right, so let’s dive in. Today, I’d like to share with you exactly what emails I’m sending to my subscribers this year in the four-weeks between US Thanksgiving and the big holidays at the end of the month. So at the end of December, we have Christmas on the 25th, we have Kwanzaa on the 26th, and Hanukkah is the 18th through the 26th, so basically connecting with people four times in this space before the final week of December. I always think of this four-week period as a really great opportunity to show up in your subscribers’ inboxes a little more often than usual because people are looking for gifts and there’s a lot of activities, things are happening. It’s just a really great opportunity to share what you have going on and be very consistent with it.

(04:41)

Again, in this four-week timeframe, I am sending one email a week to my subscribers. Now don’t panic, this is not too much. If you’ve listened to my email marketing podcasts in the past, or if you are a student inside the Acupuncture Marketing School digital course, then you know that I recommend sending emails to your subscribers twice a month. So bear with me for a moment. The goals of email marketing are to stay top of mind, to remind people that your practice exists, to teach them about how acupuncture might be able to help them and to remind them that they’ve been meaning to make an appointment with you. I think that your patients and potential patients who are on your email list have really good intentions of making an appointment when they see an email come through from you.

(05:33)

The standard for most acupuncturists in terms of email marketing seems to be a monthly email newsletter. Unfortunately, in my experience, once a month is two infrequent to have a big impact on our subscribers or get them to take a lot of action. It’s too easy for people to forget their good intention because everyone is so busy. And I just feel really strongly that one email newsletter a month is not enough to stay top of mind with your patients. Four weeks between emails is plenty of time to forget about you and your practice. So that’s why I advocate sending an email newsletter every two weeks. It’s just often enough that you don’t completely fall off of people’s radar in their email inbox.

(06:23)

If this sounds like a lot, I really get it. Remember that you don’t have to write big, long, complex emails to your subscribers with multiple parts and multiple articles. You only need one message to share with your subscribers in order to have a reason to send an email. Just one message, for example, updating people about your office hours or introducing a new staff member or sharing a recent article you found about acupuncture research, sorry, about research on acupuncture for your specialty. So each of those topics merits an individual email. The longer and more complex and time-consuming we make an email newsletter, the less likely we are to be consistent with it on a regular basis. And consistency is essential for success in marketing, which we talk about all the time on this podcast. So scale back and think about sending shorter emails more often so that you can be top of mind with your subscribers more often and stick to doing it regularly without the overwhelm.

(07:32)

If you don’t want to write these emails from scratch or simply do not have time, I’ve put together a package of over 30 emails that I send to my patients that you can, the purpose is literally for you to copy and paste, make a couple edits so they match your clinic and hit send. And I’ve recently added new emails to this package, so if you purchase this group of email newsletter templates in the past, log back into your account on my website and download the package again so you can access those five new templates. I’ve added three Black Friday email examples and two more holiday season email templates. So that’s everything that I’ll be talking about today in this episode. They’re all in there so you don’t have to write these emails from scratch. And sometimes it’s, I think it’s nice to just see how simple email marketing can be when you can take a look at how someone else is doing it. Again, that I think will help you really avoid that overwhelm.

[MICHELLE] (08:37)

All right, now let me share the emails that I am sending to my list in this four-week period after US Thanksgiving, so it’s one email a week. I am recording this in the first week of December so one email has already gone out to my list. This first email lets people know that my office hours will be a little bit different in December because I’m taking time off for the holidays. Now, why would I send an email letting people know this? They could just pop onto my online schedule and see that the week between Christmas and New Year’s is blocked off. They could figure it out for themselves. The reason I send an email, this specific email to my list is because, A, it reinforces that I follow my own advice about taking time off to rest and rejuvenate and B, it creates a sense of urgency and scarcity that makes people bite the bullet and get on my schedule in a gentle way. I’m just sharing this information with them, but it really is very effective.

(09:44)

In this email, I say to my subscribers, we have limited hours in December so if you want to get on the schedule before the holidays get crazy before the new year, you need to reserve your spot now. I also make it clear, as I mentioned, I’m taking time off to rest and rejuvenate, and that they still need to take care of themselves as well in December, which can be very hectic and stressful. They might feel too busy and overwhelmed to make an appointment, but they really should take the time to do this, that idea that I am taking my own advice and asking them to plan ahead with me because I am taking this time off at the end of the month. And this is going to be a theme that you’ll see throughout my emails in December, this idea of acupuncture being a really essential piece of people’s self-care in this hectic and busy time of the holidays. Okay, so that is the first email.

[MICHELLE] (10:41)

The second week I send out an email that’s all about acupuncture, helping patients manage increased holiday stress. I have this really nice email where I talk about the research behind how acupuncture reduces stress hormones. And then of course, I relate that back to the stress of the holidays and in this email, I also talk about how important it is to continue to, sorry, guys, to continue your self-care routine, especially when people feel too busy to do that. The moment that they feel like I really need acupuncture or yoga or a massage because my stress is through the roof, but that also means I absolutely do not have time for that and I’m going to cancel my appointment, the moment they feel like that, we know this as practitioners, the moment they feel like that is the moment that they really, really need that treatment and they need to either keep their appointments or get on the schedule.

(11:41)

And so just bringing that to the forefront of their awareness that acupuncture is backed by research to help reduce stress hormones and that they should make an appointment because the holidays can be both joyful and enormously stress producing, okay? But they can manage that sense of overwhelm and busyness better with acupuncture. So if you send nothing else this month, I hope you at least send an email that talks about the incredible research behind acupuncture for managing those stress hormones. And this is one of the emails that’s included inside that package of email templates that I mentioned earlier. It’s written for you so you don’t have to write it from scratch or spend time digging into that research and figuring out a way to explain it to people that makes sense to them and makes them want to take an action.

[MICHELLE] (12:32)

The third email that I’ll be sending is a reminder that gift certificates are available. By the way, you could rotate the order of any of these emails. It doesn’t have to be, one is changing office hours, and week two is acupuncture for stress during the holidays and week three is gift certificates. You can change these around as you see fit. This just happens to be the order that I am sending them this season. This third email about gift certificates is pretty brief. It simply lets people know, A, I do offer gift certificates because I get this question all the time, B, exactly how to purchase them online, and C helps people understand who might be a really good fit for a gift certificate and how much to spend to cover the cost of a treatment. So the subject line that I love to use for this email is give the gift of stress relief and deep relaxation.

(13:30)

I think sometimes people might wonder who to give an acupuncture gift certificate to. Who needs it and who will actually use it? There are people out there who might think of buying a gift certificate for a friend or a family member, but it’s usually something very specific. For example, if they have a family member who has knee pain and they’ve always wanted this person to try acupuncture for their knee pain, then they might buy them a gift certificate. And that’s super. But I want to expand people’s awareness of who could really use an acupuncture gift certificate, which in my humble opinion is everyone, but I have to make the case for that. That’s why I’m emphasizing give the gift of stress relief and deep relaxation because especially this time of year, or honestly any time of year, we know this, almost anybody can use stress relief and genuine relaxation.

(14:28)

In this email, I also try to help people know what dollar amounts are useful to buy a gift certificate. Because for me, if I’m going to buy someone a gift certificate, I want to make sure that I’ve covered the entire cost of a service or a treatment. And I don’t want that, not knowing the cost of a treatment to be a barrier to people purchasing a gift certificate. And I don’t want them to have to spend time searching for that information on my website because then I could easily lose their attention. They’ll end up on Instagram watching golden retriever videos or something like that. So in the email, I try to provide all of this information so they don’t have to do any searching. I say, need help selecting a gift certificate? And then I tell them the price of a general acupuncture treatment and I mentioned this is commonly used for stress relief, relaxation, pain management, digestion, anxiety. Then I also tell them the cost of our upgraded acupuncture cosmetic treatment so that if they are looking for something with more of a spa vibe to give as a gift, then they know exactly how much that treatment costs and therefore how much that gift certificate should be for. Even though this sounds like a lot, I’m explaining all this in detail, this is still a very short and sweet email. It’s maybe three paragraphs.

[MICHELLE] (15:48)

Then the last email in week four is a reminder of all of these things. In email number four, I remind people of my limited holiday hours and encourage them to get on the schedule ASAP, and I remind them that digital gift certificates are still available and make an excellent last-minute gift. There are always people out there the day before who are searching for a last-minute gift, always. I’ve been one of those people myself. Some years I plan ahead for gifts, sometimes I just drop the ball, but I want to get those last-minute people. So my subject line for this email is last minute, still thoughtful gift certificates for acupuncture or gift certificates for deep relaxation and stress relief. I’m emphasizing that this is a really easy, thoughtful, and unique gift that they don’t even have to leave their house to purchase.

(16:50)

All right, so these are the four emails that I like to send at this time of year. I hope this is really helpful for you. And I want to add that I think some of these emails might feel really obvious. Letting people know that you have different office hours at the end of the year and reminding them that you sell gift certificates may seem basic. And it is, but I think that we often ignore the simplest marketing advice because it sounds too basic to be effective. So we don’t even make the effort to do something that should be considered foundational because we’re thinking, well, I’ve heard of that advice already. People do this all the time. It’s nothing special. But simple can be very effective. And my question will always be, as a marketing strategist, as a marketing coach, are you doing it, and are you doing it consistently?

[MICHELLE] (17:49)

I hope that you’ll consider sending out some of these emails, if not all of them. And again, if you don’t want to write these emails from scratch, but you understand how effective email marketing is, take a look at those email templates that I mentioned. It’s over 30 emails in that package, enough for your entire year of email marketing. I’ll put the link in the show notes.

(18:12)

Before I sign off, don’t forget to register. If you’d like to join me for the Acu Biz Planathon on Sunday, December 11th at 11:00 AM Eastern. That link is also in the show notes. It’s going to be a really fun, quiet event. Wear your PJs, bring a cup of tea, and your favorite colored pens. I absolutely, absolutely, woo, talking today, guys, wow. I really can’t wait to join you. This is probably my favorite live event of the year. And don’t forget, students, if you would like to attend the planathon, I would love for you to come and set your goals for the upcoming year with us as well. Send me a message, michelle@michellegrasek.com and I will send you a coupon for half price. Please send me your questions if you have any. I love to hear from you. Have a wonderful week, and I can’t wait to talk to you next week.