This week I’m excited to share a new marketing experiment that I’m trying in my acupuncture practice.
If you’re a regular podcast listener, you know I always encourage you to think about your marketing as an experiment. And I definitely love to think of my own marketing efforts this way.
With any experiment, there’s an understanding that it might not work out the way we want. It’s just a fact of life.
Maybe it will work really well, maybe it won’t. But we’ll learn something in the process.
This perspective gives you the space and the freedom to get creative and try new things with your marketing.
It allows you to put yourself and your practice out there with less pressure.
It also allows you not to take the outcome of your marketing personally.
For example, if you have a marketing campaign that’s a flop, that does NOT mean that you can’t learn marketing.
Instead, we recognize that the outcome of any marketing campaign is simply data. Information that you can use to create better and better marketing in the future.
đź’ˇWith that in mind, I’m trying something new at my practice this month!
Listen in for all the details:
🎙️ Episode #38: The New Marketing Experiment I’m Trying in My Acupuncture Practice This Month
Show Notes:
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Transcript:
Hi there, welcome! This week I’m excited to share with you a new marketing experiment that I’m trying in my acupuncture practice.
If you are new here, welcome. If you’re a regular listener, you know that I always encourage you to think about your marketing as an experiment. It takes a lot of pressure off of you and gives you the space and the freedom to get creative and try new things with your marketing. It also allows you not to take the outcome of your marketing personally.
For example, if you launch a marketing campaign and it doesn’t do well, instead of taking it personally and saying, “I’m not good at marketing, I’ll never be good at marketing,” or “I’ll never figure out this business owner thing,” instead of all those negative thoughts that I do hear from my one-on-one marketing clients and my students, you can give yourself the space to say, “Okay, this didn’t work out the way that I planned. And based on the feedback that I’ve had from my audience, why do I think that might be? How can I use that information to be better at marketing in the future?”
This could mean tweaking that marketing campaign itself, and making changes so that it is more effective, or it could be just absorbing that information that you learned, that feedback from the marketing campaign, and applying it to marketing that you do in the future.
I really want you to think about your marketing as an experiment. Give yourself the freedom and the permission to be creative and fail at your marketing.
And when I say this, I do want to just add this caveat – that I always focus on marketing that is either low-cost or free. So I would not necessarily encourage you to get really experimental with expensive marketing if you don’t have the budget for it. I’m not saying drop a huge amount of money on marketing just so you can run it as an experiment and then not care about the results.
What I’m referring to is the marketing that you can DIY that doesn’t cost a lot of money or the buy-in is pretty low. I just want to make sure that you know I’m not saying just throw money at marketing.
Instead, if you focus on the marketing that is low cost or free, you can easily treat it like an experiment and let the results, the data, teach you a lot about how to get better at marketing.
And low-cost or free marketing is really the marketing that I tend to teach anyway, because that’s the marketing that I like to do for my own practice.
I believe that in any kind of marketing, you’re always going to pay in some way. You either pay with your cold, hard cash or you pay with your time and energy.
I prefer to teach the marketing where you put in your own time and energy, because I actually think that in the long run that has more of positive impact on your practice. Free marketing where you do the work tends to be things like building relationships in your community and content creation, like writing blog posts, or curating your Instagram to reflect your brand. It’s the kind of thing that builds your website search engine optimization over time, and solidifies your brand in your community, which benefits you for the life of your practice. It keeps bringing dividends.
Whereas, for example, running a Google Ad works for the time that you’re running the ad, but I don’t know that I would say it’s still building and supporting your business like two or three years from now.
Okay, so in my humble opinion, the marketing that costs your time and energy also has the added benefit, usually, of laying a strong foundation for your marketing that lasts over time.
Okay. Let’s talk about this experimental marketing campaign that I’m trying right now in my practice, which is patient reactivation postcards.
You guys know I love postcard marketing, you’ve heard me talk about it before. I love the graphic design that goes into the postcards themselves, and I also love that it’s a bit of a challenge. Postcard marketing can be hard to get right and I’ll be honest, I’ve yet to have success with it. BUT I won’t stop until I figure it out, and then I’ll share it with you, of course.
Part of the reason I haven’t had success yet with postcard marketing is simply bad timing in the past two years with COVID. Every time my area had a lull in COVID cases and people started to feel more comfortable going back out in 2020 and 2021, I would prepare a postcard marketing campaign, particularly for cosmetic acupuncture, and then by the time the postcards were ordered and arrived and in some cases mailed, our local cases went back up and nobody was going outside again. And in particular, they didn’t want to take their masks off for cosmetic. So I haven’t tried postcard marketing in awhile now, and I’m ready to try again, but I’m taking a different approach for the time being.
The respected wisdom in postcard marketing when you’re trying to reach new patients in your area is that it requires repeated postcard mailings to the same people for at least three months. You can get lists of people with specific interests or demographics in your area, it’s actually possible to pull these lists, and they are cold audience. So you want to send them a postcard, for example, once a month for three or four months minimum. You are using each postcard as a step in introducing yourself to people, eliminating doubts and barriers, maybe offering a coupon with a deadline, answering FAQs, what have you. It’s essentially warming up a cold audience over time. A classic approach. But it does take time. This is part of why it’s so hard to have success with postcards because it takes commitment. In addition to graphic design for the postcards that actually converts people and gets them to take action, you need to have a plan and a budget for at least three months, and most people don’t do that.
But this month, I wanted to try something a little different. Something simpler and with less commitment. Because as I said, I’m obsessed with postcard marketing. I’m determined to figure out something that works for my community and that is hopefully not complicated. And part of my love for postcard marketing is the graphic design that goes into crafting a really effective postcard that gets people to take action.
And right now I don’t want to commit to that three month cycle.
So my experimental approach is patient reactivation postcards. These are just what they sound like. Postcards sent out to patients who have kind of disappeared, with the goal of reminding them that acupuncture can help them and that it’s a good experience at my office, and getting them to make a follow-up appointment.
In marketing we always say that it’s 8 times easier to reactivate previous customers than convince new ones to work with you. So that is the impetus behind this campaign. I want to pluck up that low-hanging fruit. Lots of people visit my office, have a good experience, and either stop coming because they feel better, or they have to put their appointments on hold because life is busy and they just don’t end up coming back, etc. This happens to everyone, right. These people should theoretically be easier to convince to return than getting a new patient in the door.
So this week I downloaded a spreadsheet of all of my patients. Yes, all of them. And I scrolled through and selected the people who I felt I had a pretty good chance of reactivating. I went back about year – all the way through patients that I haven’t seen in a year.
I didn’t have a lot of criteria except that the person had a good experience in their previous appointments and that they came in at least four times. So we have a bit of a relationship; I spent some time with them; they’ll remember me, etc.
I have to confess that in the past couple of years I have not been great about regularly putting patient reactivation on my marketing calendar. Going back through and contacting the people who disappear to say, “Hey, just wanted to check in on you. How are you doing?” And then from that contact, of course, my intent is that they reschedule. I think this is a really valuable marketing tactic that should be done regularly and sometimes I remember to do it. If I do this, I usually reach out to people however they prefer to be contacted, whether that’s a phone call, text or email. Just shoot them a quick message.
But this month I’m going to try reactivating people with these postcards specifically designed for this purpose.
And let’s talk about that design, because it’s important in postcards. These postcards are pretty simple. Last year I had some professional branding photos taken and I picked two pictures where the model patient is resting on the treatment table. She doesn’t even have needles in yet. She’s resting with eyes closed looking very peaceful.
On one side of the postcard it says, “We miss you,” and the name of my practice. Then it says,
It’s been a while since we’ve seen you. Do you need an acupuncture tune up? Acupuncture for pain, anxiety, digestion and a nap.” We were trying to be kind of cute with these postcards, with the nap comment, because I feel like that’s what my patients expect from me. So it’s on-brand for me, it may not be for you.
And then the call to action says, “Call, text or book online today,” with our contact info.
And then on the back of the card there’s limited space. But there’s another picture of the patient resting and the statement, “Relax and let your stress and muscle tension melt away. Book online instantly.” It’s really important, I think, to have a line in there where you describe the benefit for the patient. Yes they get to take a nap, but how are they going to FEEL, or what is the outcome after treatment? These postcards are looking to reactive wellness patients, patients who are a little burnt out, have some mild pain or discomfort and need the opportunity to decompress and bring their stress levels down a notch. So that’s why I went with the statement, “Relax and let your stress and muscle tension melt away.” But if you want to call out the digestive patients and reactive them specifically, you would describe different symptoms and a describe the different outcome, right? You might say, “Come back to our office and reduce bloating and digestive discomfort so you can, basically, live your best life,” right. But it depends on who you’re speaking to, their pain points, and how they feel after you solve their pain points.
And then below that statement there’s another call to action, “Book Online Instantly” with my website. And of course I added, pretty small, our logo, address and contact information.
I also included on the back of the postcard, for a strong dose of social proof, a brief mention of how many Google reviews we have. I’ve only been in business in my new location for three years but we have 56 Five Star Google reviews. This is one of the primary reasons patients decide to come see me, it’s extremely effective, and it’s something that I teach you how to do inside Acupuncture Marketing School, by the way, how to increase your Google reviews so that people will choose you over other practitioners in the area.
And because we have such a significant number of reviews, I put that everywhere. I’m a little bit shameless about it, but it really helps build trust which is always the goal of my marketing. In genuine, authentic marketing, you’re educating and building trust so that people feel safe and comfortable making an appointment with you and making an investment with you.
So I added onto this postcard a tiny little section with five yellow stars that says “55 Plus five star Google reviews.”
Now, how the heck did I decide what to put on this card and why do I have confidence it will be effective? Or a fair amount of confidence, since this is an experiment, after all.
Whenever I’m creating postcards for marketing, I always use the designs from Postcard Mania, which is a postcard marketing business online, postcardmania.com, as templates. They share hundreds of high-converting postcard designs and I just pick one that suits my needs and then go on Canva and try to recreate it as best I can, with tweaks of course, based on my audience and my goals.
I think Postcard Mania really has their postcard design on lockdown. They talk a lot about the words, design, call to action, etc. matter a lot in the effectiveness of a postcard marketing campaign. They have blog posts with advice about how to design elements of a successful postcard marketing campaign in terms of the graphic design of your postcards, and that’s very important in order to get people to take action. It’s always a leap between looking at a piece of paper in your hand and reading the call to action, “Book online today. Visit our website,” and then actually picking up the phone, punching in the website or phone number and taking the action.
I’ve realized from reviewing dozens and dozens of their designs that they always include testimonials or Google reviews for social proof, and they have very specific, strong calls to action in contrasting colors, among other things. So I made sure I included those things and I feel good about what I created, using their expertise and advice as a template.
If you are interested in postcard marketing, I highly recommend checking out PostcardMania.com for tips. And they will do the whole postcard marketing campaign for your, by the way, everything including postcard design. But you know I like scrappy, do it yourself, free marketing. So here we are.
So my office manager and I will be mailing these postcards this week, and if this campaign is successful, I will definitely release this patient reactivation postcard design as a template for you to purchase. It’ll be pretty low cost and it will be editable in Canva.
You know that I love Canva, and if you haven’t heard of it, it’s an very easy to use, FREE graphic design website. I also sell a group of social media templates that you can edit on Canva, so if you’re familiar with Canva, you can easily edit these postcard templates to match your brand, your audience, etc.
And here’s one more reason I’m so comfortable with this marketing experiment. It costs $16.50 To purchase 50 postcards and the postcard stamps right now are 40 cents. And so that’s $20 to send 50 postcards. A grand total investment of $36.50. So one patient on the schedule more than pays for this. ONE. That’s amazing. Very low investment and I expect the outcome to be much higher than one patient on the schedule.
I also expect to know after sending 50 cards, if it’s successful or not. For me, 50 is a large enough sample size. I won’t be sending 50 cards a month from here on out, because as I mentioned, I went back a whole year and selected 50 patients to try to reactivate from that time frame. Moving forward, this will be on my monthly calendar, to look back and see what patients fell off schedule in the past 1-3 months, and send them a card.
So I will absolutely update you on how this marketing campaign goes. Clearly I’m very excited about it. Stay tuned. I will let you know how it goes.
Also coming up next week – this is wild that it’s next week already – is the scholarship competition for Acupuncture Marketing School. Acupuncture Marketing School is my foundations marketing course that I put together because I know as acupuncturists we do not have enough marketing education in acupuncture school to feel confident in putting ourselves out there and marketing our practices.
When I say, treat your marketing as an experiment, just give it a try, I realize that that makes sense to people, logically. BUT I completely understand that there’s often still a visceral resistance to do that if you had no marketing education at all. You may be feeling like, “I don’t know how to position my brand to speak to the patients I really want to see. I don’t even know what it means to position a brand.”
Acupuncture Marketing School walks you through the process of creating a really strong brand, so that you can identify your ideal patients and how to talk to them to make them take action.
We do the scholarship competition every year and we give away two free seats inside Acupuncture Marketing School, one to an acupuncturist and one to an acupuncture student.
This is one of my favorite times of year because we have people from dozens of countries enter their applications.
I really want you to be able to reach your audience in an authentic and effective way that feels good to you, as the person releasing the marketing message, and to your audience who’s receiving it. That’s pretty much what I teach you inside Acupuncture Marketing School. Stay tuned on Monday, I will be releasing information on how to apply for the scholarship. We only accept scholarship applications for four days, and that’s going to be next week, Monday, May 9 through midnight on Thursday, May 12.
If you want to learn how to apply for the scholarship, sign up for my email newsletter and I will send out an email on Monday morning, May 2, explaining how to submit your application. The link to sign up for my email newsletter for the Scholarship Waitlist group is in the show notes.
And of course I’ll link to Acupuncture Marketing School so you can see what you could win. As always, you’re welcome to send me questions. If it’s a question about the scholarship, please send your email to scholarship@michellegrasek.com. If you have other questions, you’re always welcome to shoot me an email at Michelle@michellegrasek.com
I cannot wait for the scholarship doors to open. I always look forward to it. It’s such a pleasure to get to meet everyone who applies. Thank you for being here. I will update you next month on the effectiveness of these reactivation postcards. Have a great week!