Dr. Allen Miner:
Welcome, everybody, to the UAC Best Practices podcast. I’m Dr. Allen Miner. Dr. Brian Capra, and today we have a special guest, Dr. Jeff Langmaid. Dr. Brian, why don’t you introduce him?
Dr. Brian Capra:
Well, thanks so much, Jeff. Really excited that you were able to join. This is the best practices, like Allen said, for UAC, and this is the portion where we get to hopefully share a little tidbit. We don’t have a ton of time, but we want to share something, a little nugget that somebody could take and implement into their practice. Dr. Jeff is a great friend and UAC member as well, and has some really special gifts, I would say, when it comes to marketing, so we could probably talk here forever and give people a gold mine of information. But one of the things we spoke about earlier was emails, and I know you have amazing results with emails, and a lot of times people think things like email and direct mail are kind of dead, but those old things are now new again, so maybe you can share a little bit about what you know and what’s working out there for people.
Dr. Jeff Langmaid:
I’d be happy to do so. Guys, thanks so much for having me on. I feel like UAC is the place where I go to learn about best practices, so I’m honored to come on and share, and I would encourage everybody listening and watching to get involved if they’re not currently involved because we talk about stuff like this all the time in the sessions and outside the sessions. I’m honored to come on and talk a little bit about email. I think it traces back to the money is in the list. So many die, with the graphic I put up at the last conference, and it’s kind of a picture of a doc standing on top of a pile of gold, looking out at a shiny object. And many of us fall into that as human beings, we’re like, what’s new? What’s great? But email needs to be the foundation.
Dr. Jeff Langmaid:
I put up a post yesterday, and it basically said the number one thing you can do for your practice in 2023 is to stop ignoring your email list, because so many docs out there, I feel like, they might send an email once a quarter, maybe if a practice is going to be closed or if something changes, but they don’t utilize it as a tool for marketing. And email is one of the most powerful ways to market your practice, and that goes through all three phases of care, as we would define it, from new patient acquisition, email can help with that, retention throughout your active care plan, critical. Email is a critical component of that. And then long-term, of course, retention by staying top of mind and continuing that relationship.
Dr. Jeff Langmaid:
And in my mind, kind of coming full circle with that, and I’ll let you guys guide and direct on where we want to dive into the details there, but it really encompasses the entire patient journey, it’s a critical touch point, the money is in the list, it’s sitting there all day, every day, waiting. You have people that know, like and trust you, hundreds, maybe thousands of past or inactive patients. When is the last time you reached out and said, “Hello?” And when I talk email marketing, the final thing I’ll say of it before we dive into some specific details, is I view email marketing as a once-a-week activity, it is not once a month, it’s not once a quarter, it’s a once-a-week activity, and the pushback is always, “That sounds like a lot.” One email is too much once a year, if it’s trash, an email a day is welcome if it’s high value. In a chiropractic, in a healthcare practice, a one time a week cadence tends to be the perfect balance of providing value, staying connected while not overdoing it. And when you do that, that’s when you start to see your schedule maintain more consistent as far as its being full, because now you’re staying in continual communication and enabling patient retention at a maximum opportunity point as well as reactivation.
Dr. Brian Capra:
I got a question… But you Go ahead first.
Dr. Allen Miner:
I too. Yeah, I think the first two that I hear people get stuck on right away is the simple one of what platform should I use, and what do I send out every week? What are some ideas for content? Because boy, that sounds like a lot. How do you answer that?
Dr. Jeff Langmaid:
Yep. So, platforms, there’s a bunch of great ones out there, whether you want to use MailChimp, AWeber, Constant Contact, basically, they’re all the same. They all have a little bit of different functionality, but in general, those are all going to be the same. With Patient Pilot by The Smart Chiropractor, we build the content and all the automations, but if you want to build your own and do it that way, whether you choose MailChimp, AWeber, Constant Contact, they’re all basically the same product, so don’t get too caught up as far as that’s concerned. The second component, as you said, what do I teach about? We always think about things through the lens of teach and invite consistently. How do I teach, educate, entertain, and engage? Invite, that’s the call to action, and do it consistently. So, some ideas for that are, who are your ideal clients? Who are your ideal patients? What’s your patient avatar? What do you want to have the conversation around? And I like to think about it and chunk it down to months and then weeks. So, months, you think about, what are 12 big ideas, big topics we have in and around our practice?
Dr. Jeff Langmaid:
Is it sports care? Is it family care? Is it a niche like spinal decompression and shock wave? Probably a combination of different things. Great. Identify those big rocks, are those your monthly topics? And then saying, “Awesome! Sports is going to be this month… We’re going to talk about that weekly through email.” So, each week I’ll have a different take on a sports topic. How to get the best performance with chiropractic care? How to stay on the field might be a different topic, how chiropractic helps top athletes perform their best might be a different weekly topic. But when you chunk it down to the big ideas and then you break down, as I say, different takes, different opportunities to talk about those big ideas, it starts to simplify the process a lot.
Dr. Allen Miner:
That’s awesome.
Dr. Brian Capra:
Content is always the hardest part, right? I know we did it with Genesis, it’s like, “Man, we got to create this nurture sequence,” and it was like a lot of work once you actually sit down to write. So, one of the things in content is the subject line and open rate. If you start just sending emails to your existing patients or even new patients, I would think… And if they read your content, maybe it’s great content, but they have to open it. So, it’s first of all, so they can read your great content and then say, “Oh, the next one, I want to open again. Now, it’s actually valuable to me.” But getting them over that first… That hump, if you would, what’s some key points to getting them to open… An open rate, and what is a good open rate?
Dr. Jeff Langmaid:
Great question. So, there’s… I want to break it down to two separate answers. One is, if you had a dormant list and you haven’t messaged them, I recommend sending what we call internally a “success blast” with The Smart Chiropractor, and that’s basically letting people know, “Hey, I’m going to start emailing you. We’re going to start providing you some great information,” so that people know what’s coming. That’s a great warmer as opposed to just starting to send and you have a list of 10,000 patients maybe that you’ve never sent to in the past. So, I do recommend a little bit of a warmer and it’s basically just, “Hey, here’s what we’re going to do. We know that patients are missing out on a lot of information that can help them live the healthiest life possible, and we have that information so we’re going to start sharing with you on a weekly basis. Paraphrasing, but that’s an easy way to warm somebody up to the idea you’re going to email.
Dr. Jeff Langmaid:
Second component, Brian, that you mentioned, that I think is really important is your subject line is directly correlative to your open rate. If your open rate stink, you have a subject line issue, if your click through, CTR, click-through rate stinks, you have a copy issue, meaning body copy. What are you writing in the email itself? So, you want to monitor your open rate and your click-through rate. Now, a great open rate in healthcare is about 20% to 25%. If you’re below 15%, you got some yellow and red flags going off there. It might be a list issue, it might be a subject line issue, but realistically, you want to be 20% to 25%. We looked at our data for our docs, we average 32% open rate for our docs. And our highest doc is over 50%. They’re 51%, 52%. So, I’d say if you’re about 30%, you’re doing great. If you’re below 15% or below 20%, you probably want to look at subject line or list quality and identify what’s going on there, but those are what I would use as far as general rules of thumb. As far as click-through rate, going one step further, would be 1% to 2%. If you can blow that out of the water, wonderful. But a 1% to 2% click-through rate, you’re doing just fine.
Dr. Allen Miner:
Hey, Jeff… Oh, sorry.
Dr. Brian Capra:
Sorry. Just to finish the thought there on the subject line, the content itself, what are some tricks or tips to get people to actually… What needs to be in the subject line? What should not be in the subject line?
Dr. Jeff Langmaid:
So, short and sweet, and you want to generate curiosity. So, it’s a great idea to generate curiosity, so great subject lines could be time-based. Let me give some specific examples. “New” [chuckle] and… I got a blog for the title. People like new stuff, so that stimulates curiosity. I want to know what’s new. “How Dr. Allen got rid of back pain in less than two weeks.” That’s interesting, that’s curiosity. That’s driven by curiosity. Those are great ways. New, time-based, anything that generates curiosity. I always think of a great subject line, I write a lot of subject lines that end with dot, dot, dot, so it’s like half the sentence. “The new research on sports chiropractic… ” That’s interesting. Now, when I’m sending it to a chiropractor to generate curiosity, where I’m like, “Wow, how Michael… How, insert pro athlete here, stays in the game… ” that could be a great one when you open it up. Now, the body copy is all around sports chiropractic. So, I think any… New is always an easy one. How is always an… How, blank, did, blank, in, blank, amount of time, is a great one. And anything that generally ends in dot, dot, dot, because your goal is to generate curiosity not to teach them everything in the subject line itself.
Dr. Brian Capra:
Do you have a common mistake that’s made in the subject line?
Dr. Jeff Langmaid:
Way too long, way too boring. So, “Dr. Jeff’s weekly email newsletter 72,” [chuckle] subject line. Nobody wants that…
Dr. Jeff Langmaid:
What’s in it for them? There’s like…
Dr. Brian Capra:
Like, “Oh, I missed 72… “
Dr. Jeff Langmaid:
That may generate some curiosity? Because if somebody saw me send that, they’d be like, “What is this guy doing?” [laughter] We want to generate better curiosity than that. So yeah, the biggest challenges I see are subject lines that are way too long or way too boring, because they’re statement driven, not curiosity driven.
Dr. Allen Miner:
Hey, Jeff, I’m curious if you think this is a good idea or not. But we’ve never done a weekly email for UAC, so we sat down last week with Christa and mapped that out for the year, and Christa has started using this AI bot of ChatGPT, because what Brian said, she was stumped, like, “Hey, can you give me five good subject lines for an email campaign for a mastermind group?” And same thing with the body content, and she was like, “Holy Moly, this was… ” Or we had one, because we just came off of our Ultimate Growth Conference, which is our marketing… Coming up here in February is our Ultimate Life Conference, which is where we go through different mindset, lifestyle. That’s the topic and the subject. And so, the middle one is, Ultimate Wealth is the one in May, in Austin. And so, we wanted a tag line, and we were stuck like, what do you want to say? Is it building generational wealth or… So, she just put that in, like, “For an ultimate wealth conference, give me five tag lines around wealth and finance,” and she’s like, “It was really impressive.” So anyways, that’s just… Have you played with that yet? Do you suggest using that if you’re kind of stuck to just… And anybody not familiar, I think it’s like ChatGPT.com, you should Google that, and you just type in a query, or a question and it pretty quickly spits out the answer. Sort of like Google, but more specific to a direct question you’re answering.
Dr. Jeff Langmaid:
Yeah, I’ve used LEX, L-E-X, which is a competitor to them, and I find it to be… Here would be my take on it, is that it’s like, it’ll do a lot of work for you, but it’s not the ultimate panacea. So, I think the docs listening that are unfamiliar with it, it’s like, “Wow, do I just go there and it’s going to build everything for me?” No. Dr. Allen, you said it exactly right, you got to go there with a concept or an idea. It is a great creative influencer. In other words, if you go there and you’re like, “I know I want to write a chiropractic weekly email newsletter, I have some ideas of what I want to do,” man, that can really be an accelerator to your process, but it’s not going to do all the work for you. So, for the docs listening that haven’t, I’d absolutely recommend heading over to ChatGPT, head over to LEX and just play with it. They’re great creative tools, if for nothing else, just to get your mind going. But I’ve found them to be great opportunities to build out. So, I’ve used it, I’ll just tell you my personal use case.
Dr. Jeff Langmaid:
I’ve used it when let’s say I’ve written 200 words or 500… Insert number of words here. I’ve written a piece, but I’m like, “I want that blog to be longer,” but I don’t know really where to go with it. I use those tools and it helps me to then generate like, “Oh, that’s a great one-liner, I can write a paragraph off of that.” So, I use it as what I’ll call a creative influencer to hype up what I’m doing, similar to how you just mentioned Christa used it. You kind of knew what you wanted, you went over there, it’s not going to do all the work for you. So, any doc that’s expecting that will be sorely disappointed. But it certainly can help you get way more creative by harnessing the power of the internet.
Dr. Allen Miner:
Yeah, we use it… Our COO, we have… So, I heard you speak on email lists at Parker last year, and you hit me, because we have 7000 name list, I think 8000 for our clinics that we just… I was like, I don’t open these emails, I’ve spent the last year opting out of every email, unsubscribing, this is stupid. And you convicted me in your presentation at Parker, and I was like, “Alright, we’ve got an untapped resource.” So, we committed to once-a-week emails and Dr. Shelby Lockhart, she’s our COO for our clinics, she creates those. And we were playing with this the other day, and I said, “Write me an email on disc.” I think we said, “Can you write an educational email about disc health, spinal disc health?” And it generated… And it was exactly as you said, we then went in and filled in around it, and it really was kind of a shortcut. It wasn’t the end-all be-all, but it really did kind of help speed up that process quite a bit.
Dr. Allen Miner:
Cool. Well, Dr. Jeff, we appreciate your time in, and thanks for sharing. I can promise everybody listening, from after hearing you teach this, implementing it, major impact brand awareness, just staying in front of people who’ve been in our offices in the past, who are in there now. It’s something we’re so used to, but there’s so much valuable information. And I know you teach on this in other areas. If people want to go deeper with you, where do they find you?
Dr. Jeff Langmaid:
Yeah, you can shoot me a message, jeff@thesmartchiropractor.com, or you can head over to the blog at thesmartchiropractor.com. We have hundreds of resources all around this topic as well, so those are great tools and resources for you.
Dr. Brian Capra:
Awesome, man.
Dr. Allen Miner:
Awesome, man. Thanks, Dr. Brian… Thanks, Dr. Jeff. Have a good one, guys.
