Sometimes the best marketing techniques are some of the oldest. Today, we’re going to explore the use of direct mail in your marketing efforts. Direct mail can be a great way to stand out whether you’re in a highly saturated and competitive market or if you’re the only chiropractor around.
How can that be? You might wonder to yourself. Well because when you’re in a competitive market doing a direct mail campaign will set you apart from other chiropractors in the area. And when you’re in a less saturated market your community might not know as much about chiropractic and it’s an opportunity to educate them.
Let’s look at tips for running a successful direct mail campaign.
1. Set your goal
Just like you would with any other marketing campaign. You want to have a goal for your direct mail campaign. If you’re spending money on something, then it should achieve something for your practice. So when you set out to run a direct mail postcard campaign you need to decide what you want to achieve. Here are some examples of goals:
- Get a past patient to book an appointment again
- Get 10 current patients to book recurring maintenance appointments
- Get 10 new patients
Your goal will shape the rest of your campaign, so it’s important to have this defined upfront.
2. Make it measurable
So you’ve got your goal set, now, you need to be able to measure how the campaign actually performed versus how you hoped it would perform. For a direct mail campaign, there are a couple of ways that you can make sure the data is captured.
- Include a trackable URL to a landing page Postcard recipients would be prompted to go this URL to book or schedule their appointment
- Include a QR code QR codes have gone in and out of style, but lately, they’ve been making a comeback. Adding a QR code makes it easy for recipients to simply snap a picture of the code and be taken to a landing page. It’s also tracked.
- Make the postcard itself the coupon If you make the postcard itself a redeemable coupon that they can bring in for a special offer, then you can easily track results.
With that said, there’s no reason you can’t do all three! Use a specific URL for a landing page, add a QR code, and allow them to bring in the postcard to receive the offer. This way you’ll make sure that you’re doing the most to measure performance.
3. Know your target audience
One way to develop a target audience is to look at your current patients. Are there any trends among your current patients? Take a look at the data for your current patients to look at zip codes, age, services used, and the like to try to figure out who comes to your practice the most frequently and then replicate that audience in your direct mail campaign.
The location of your audience will help you pick the zip codes that are best for your marketing outreach. And the other data points like age and what services are used frequently will help you determine your messaging and what you should offer.
4. Have a valuable offer
If you’re sending out a postcard to help you achieve a certain goal, then you’ll want to make sure that your postcard is offering something valuable in order to help you get there. Revisiting the goals mentioned above:
- If your goal is to get a past patient to book an appointment again, then you might offer them a free consultation or an appointment at a low rate
- If your goal is to get 10 current patients to book recurring maintenance appointments then you might want to offer a discounted package rate for booking multiple appointments or a lower rate on regular appointments after the first few appointments
- If your goal is to get 10 new patients then you might want to offer a free or very low-cost initial consultation
Pro-tip: Make sure your offer is worthwhile enough to get someone to take action.
5. Use the postcard space well
Postcards are neat in that they can be less costly to mail out because of their small size, but the downside is that you don’t have much real estate to work with. You’ve got to be smart about how you use the space on the page. You don’t want to clutter it. Make your offer clear and concise, short, and sweet. Simpler is better.
6. Repetition is key
One postcard send is better than none, but if you have the budget for it. It’s a great idea to do multiple sends. Maybe send a prospect three to four postcards over a period of a few months. With slightly different layouts, designs, and text, but the same offer. It takes a few times for a message to sink in and resonate. It might take a few reminders before someone will take action. So sending a few postcards will increase your chances of reaching your goal.
7. Volume saves money
The more postcards you send, the lower the rate you can get. With that said working with a company specializing in direct mail, you’ll likely benefit from their lower rates. It’s worth doing some shopping around for the right provider.
You can check out a few postcard services like the following businesses that I found via a simple Google search for chiropractor direct mail or check out the search results yourself.
As always, I hope this blog post is useful to your chiropractic marketing efforts!
