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Some people will tell you that email marketing is a thing of the past. After all, with a seemingly bottomless supply of digital marketing platforms—from Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter to Instagram and newer tools like Wyng and MeWe—who has time for emails?
When’s the last time someone said “you’ve got mail!”? Didn’t think so.
But the truth is, reports of email marketing’s death have been greatly exaggerated. Email might not exactly be the shiny new tool everyone is talking about. However, email marketing was, is, and will continue to be an absolutely vital part of growing a small business.
Therapy practices are no exception. In fact, small therapy practices stand to benefit tremendously from an intelligent and effective email marketing strategy. Email marketing is essential for both pulling in clients and establishing strong, long-term relationships.
In this post, we’ll explain why.
Email Marketing’s (Crucial) Role in Growing Your Therapy Practice
Email marketing helps therapy practices in two significant ways:
- Funnel stage: This stage is when prospective clients are looking for a service. Email marketing helps you provide a personalized experience to hook a prospect and lure them in. This is called the sales funnel. Since prospects at this stage will be just learning about your practice (and some will inevitably fall off without converting into clients) you will need to collect their email information first. Once you do that, you can use automated email campaigns to pique their interest and help them make a decision about purchasing your services.
- Ongoing client engagement: Following the funnel stage, the next task is to keep clients engaged. The best way to do this is to provide information and/or experiences that will help them become your biggest fans and advocates. This part of the process can also be substantially automated in order to provide a unique experience for different types of prospects. For example, different emails can be automatically sent to different clients: one looking for anxiety-related assistance; the other for marriage counseling services. Emails allow you to keep in touch with clients and provide consistent value on a regular basis. The goal is to convert them from prospects into loyal, long-term clients.
It is well established that successful businesses nurture clients in order to convert them into loyal brand advocates. That is the key to success. But to get there, you must engage your audience and provide consistent, ongoing value—even on days when you don’t see them in person.
Email marketing will let your therapy practice do just that. It is affordable, its results are proven, and its impact is easy to measure and improve upon. Therapy practices in particular benefit from the regular contact and personalized messaging email marketing enables with their clients.
Without further ado, here are some key ways email marketing can be not only effective but crucial in growing your therapy practice.
1. How to Create a Sales Funnel With ActiveCampaign Email Manager
If you’re not familiar, ActiveCampaign is one of the most advanced and multifaceted email campaign management services. It offers sophisticated automation tools and a wide variety of customizable features.
ActiveCampaign’s full range of features (with the Plus plan) includes, among other things:
- Lead & Contact Scoring to track user engagement
- Automation Split Testing to experiment with different forms of automated campaigns
- Automation Maps to see how your automated campaigns connect and overlap.
Building a sales funnel with ActiveCampaign is one of the best investments your therapy practice can make.
We’ll walk through how to establish a sales funnel and leverage it to draw in leads for your therapy practice.
What Is a Sales Funnel?
A sales funnel is a schematic representation of the process that transforms people from prospective clients into actual clients. It is a series of steps people take towards becoming loyal, long-term clients.
In the kinds of sales funnels we’ll be exploring today, emails and email marketing campaigns are the primary drivers of that transformation.
Building Your Therapy Practice Email List
There are all kinds of ways for a therapy practice to build your email list. Some choice examples include:
- Opt-in forms on your website, social media pages, and landing pages. These are a great way to start building your email list.
- Contact-us emails or form fill-ups on your website. These are useful for adding prospective clients to your marketing list.
- Client feedback forms. Simple forms, to be filled out after appointments or consultations, are ideal for collecting email addresses and other basic contact information.
Another trend we are seeing is that many therapists offer a complimentary consultation to gain new clients and add them to their email list.
One someone subscribes to your email list, congrats! You’ve just moved them past the first stage of the sales funnel. If you’re using ActiveCampaign, all the addresses you collect will be automatically sorted and organized into your official business email list.