24. Why Healthcare Email Marketing Is Important For Your Medical Practice

Burhaan Pattel  0:00  
Welcome to the marketing stack podcast. And in this podcasts, I'm going to be talking about how email marketing and why email marketing is so important in your healthcare business. Whether you're a functional medicine doctor, whether you're a nutritionist, whether you're a health coach, email marketing is something that is here to stay. It's, it's the thing that basically leverage the Internet right in the beginning, when the internet started. In this episode, I talked about where email actually started, what the foundation of email was, and how messages have evolved into becoming this huge email marketing opportunity. And, you know, if you're listening to this podcast on whatever platform, whatever device, consider hitting the Follow button, consider hitting the subscription, or subscribing to the, to the to the podcast, so that you can be notified of future episodes that come out. And I'm building a library of these episodes to help you with your business, help you leverage your land, use the internet, leverage, email marketing, leverage all the digital tools that we have to build your practice to give you time freedom in your practice, to build systems for your practice. So that you can ultimately do the thing that you really want to do, which is help in in various different ways.

Burhaan Pattel  1:14  
Or maybe you just want to be selfish, and relax, maybe you want your business to run on autopilot so that you can actually have other people do things in your business where you can still be credited with helping them in the way that Bill Gates or some of these other people have been able to do. I've spoken to a bunch of doctors naturopathy, functional medicine, you know, chiropractors, dentists, they're struggling with this concept of email marketing, they a lot of them don't have it built in. A lot of them are collecting email addresses there. They've got webinars going on, they've got all these external things going on to promote their business. They're running Facebook ads, lead ads, they're running all of these things, but they're not leveraging email marketing, to the best of its ability. And so what I want to do is, in this video cover why email marketing is important for a medical practice.

Burhaan Pattel  2:01
So before I get into why email marketing is important, I want to go back a little bit, I want to take a back step, I'm going to go back it back to the future. No, I don't want to go forward, I want to go backwards into the past and want to talk about how communication needs to happen in the past. So if you're, you know, if you're at a certain age group, where you remember some of these things, definitely comment below and let me know what your experiences with these things. But I don't know if you remember, but back in the day before the internet started, and I'm giving my age away here. But before the internet was around, we used to use direct mail. We used to use classified ads, we used to use newspaper ads, we used to use magazine ads, to attract the clients that we wanted to our businesses.

Burhaan Pattel  2:50  
And this is obviously not doesn't only apply to healthcare professionals, it applies to everybody. And of course, there's billboards, and there's all of these other things that we did as well, in terms of outside, right, one of the most common things is if you have a medical practice, you've got to put your logo, and you've got to put your, your your branding on the building or on your office, so that you can get people to notice your practice, you have got to give it a good name, you got to give it a nice color, good logo, paint the building, like whatever it is. That's what you relied on. Right. And then the Yellow Pages then became available. And so you started posting or you know, you had to pay for an ad in the yellow pages. So that you could actually when people search through the Yellow Pages, looking for whatever they were looking for that they could find these businesses. And so then it was a phone call, they would phone the practice and book an appointment. And then they go into the sales process.

Burhaan Pattel  3:46  
We relied on facts, right, the how the way we used to communicate with our suppliers specifically, you know, as a medical practice, maybe you placed orders via fax, or maybe, you know, people would fax you stuff, fax you information. Maybe you got articles from publications via fax, maybe they posted your stuff in the mail, white papers or updates, or, you know, these type of things, these you had to subscribe to newsletters and those newsletters were physically printed and posted to you. Maybe you subscribed to you know, a magazine, that was exclusive to your industry, maybe because of your your practice because of maybe your specialization, you you subscribe to this thing in your University send you updates, or you had to go to meetings to actually update yourself and, you know, that still exists. However, it's happening online now. And they will you know, they will vast amounts of communication that used to come to you physically these days, though, you know, people are sending stuff by email.

Burhaan Pattel  4:49
They're finding ways to eat quickly and easily email you the information that you need. Or they're posting updates on their websites or they're posting updates on their Facebook pages or they're posting updates on other platforms, forums and whatnot to notify you or to be to notify your clients, your customers, right? You're maybe posting blog posts, maybe you're posting on Facebook, this is just the way that the internet has changed the our level of communication, and most importantly, our level of distribution. And specifically email, it actually caters for some of the needs that we have. One is, you know, to actually write out a letter to each and every one of your clients, let's say you had a program, and you had to physically write out a letter, and you had 100 people in your program in your practice, and you had to physically write out this letter every single month, to let people know what their health regimen should be, maybe you're prescribing a specific meal plan.

Burhaan Pattel  5:49
And now you have to sit out and write, maybe you didn't have a typewriter, maybe you didn't have a computer, maybe didn't have a fax machine, this is how you would do it right, you'd write a letter, put it in the post, you'd walk into the post office, and inside the mailman would go and deliver that letter, maybe take a couple days or a week or month to get to that person. But then you'd have to plan ahead. And you'd have to be organized in in getting that letter to arrive at the person's place. And so then you had to collect their email address, and you had to collect their physical address and then pay for postage, and spend the time to write it out all of those things. And so it was time consuming. It used to take a lot of effort. Or maybe you use the Xerox, and you actually printed things out, then you had to get the mail. Maybe you had somebody working in your practice.

Burhaan Pattel  6:33  
And so you had them actually go through the administration process of putting those letters into envelopes, printing or writing out the name and addresses and then physically posting there, I remember those days. But what the Internet has done and what email marketing is done is it's given us time, it's given us the ability to mass produce to mass message people with personalization. So we can still personalize the messages based on our client's needs, based on what our clients require, in a way that's that we've never been able to do before. Obviously, email marketing has been around for a while, but the tools around email marketing are becoming more and more sophisticated. What does that mean for you? Now, if you're not using email, you're relying on other forms of communication. And so what that means is that if you're using a Facebook group to communicate with your, with your clients, then you know you're subject to Facebook's rules you're subject to that platform, either being available or not. You're subject to Facebook, maybe shutting down your Facebook group, because of terms and Terms of Service.

Burhaan Pattel  6:33  
You don't know if Facebook is going to be around tomorrow. Neither do your clients. But we're relying on these sources on these platforms for free to be able to communicate our message, right? Maybe your website, you're relying on on your clients coming to your website to get the updates. And then when they don't. And they communicate with you. You're like, oh, but I posted on my website like Well, I didn't know. So email, or letters or faxes used to give the ability for us to communicate with people in quantity, and email marketing specifically tailored for that it gives us an ability to personalize messages to multiple people, hundreds, maybe 1000s, maybe billions of people at a time, in a very short doesn't take a lot of effort to actually get those messages out to your people. And so this is why digital marketing has become such a big industry is because of the the time savings it gives you.

Burhaan Pattel  7:39
And the fear around digital marketing is that you don't know how to use the internet, you don't know how to use the platform, maybe you're maybe you've got a ConvertKit account, or you've got an Active Campaign account, but you just don't know how to use it. And I gave this example to a client that I was speaking to on the on the phone the other day, where I said to him that, you know if if you're a doctor, and if you are maybe you're an aspiring doctor, back in the day, when you are an aspiring doctor, you you knew that you wanted to be a doctor and you wanted to help people, you had to go to university to learn that skill. You had to go practice, you had to meet clients, you had to maybe do an internship, you had to do all of these things, spend the time for 5,6,7,8,10 years, however long it's taken you to build that skill.

Burhaan Pattel  9:16  
And email marketing or digital marketing, or using these tools on the internet using your computer, using your iPad using your phone. These are all the same principles that you have to apply. They may not be as complex as learning biological functions in a human being. But and you don't have to understand how the phone works. You don't have to understand how the software works. You don't have to understand how your computer works. But all you need to do is learn to learn and understand and follow a process of clicking a certain number of buttons and looking for the buttons on the screen, reading the information that's in front of you so that you can follow the process that the software gives you. So you can actually get your emails out to your people.

Burhaan Pattel  9:58  
And so as you send one email, send two emails, send three emails, you know campaign emails to your people, you start getting used to that process. And so now you can do it on your own, you don't have to rely on customer support, you don't have to rely on somebody else you can do that on your own. Or maybe you educate somebody in your clinic to actually do that. Or maybe you contact somebody like me to educate you on how to do that, though all of those options are available. But just like learning any other skill, digital marketing is a skill. Using a computer is a skill that you can develop that you can do over time. The other advantage of of using email marketing, apart from just saving you time is the cost associated, the relative cost to send an email to 1000 people versus printing that letter out, personalizing it, and posting it is vastly different, it's ridiculously cheap to send email out.

Burhaan Pattel  10:50  
In fact, some people would argue that it's near free. So apart from time, you're going to save money in sending your emails and sending your message out to people. And so one of the things that I had in my business, or one of the things that I realized when I was learning this digital marketing stuff, a good five, six years ago, was this ability to not only personalize the messages to a whole, you know, a vast number of people, but also to segment people, depending on what their interest is, or depending on what they were in your business for. So let's say for example, you have 1000 patients, and maybe you have a fairly large practice. And so for people who have a certain condition, or maybe you're treating them for diabetes, versus treating somebody for, I don't know, some some other issue that they have or some other problem they have, you can personalize their messages based on that thing. And obviously, with HIPAA compliance. And a lot of the platforms that I work with are actually HIPAA compliant out the box.

Burhaan Pattel  11:58
So when you're messaging them, and you're talking specifically to them about their problems, or talking to their problems to them, you can personalize those messages based on that segmentation. Whereas in the past, if you printed all your letters out your new personalized, you had to be organized in a physical way. So that you can, you know, tailor that message to each person, that is available online as well, it's a little bit more complicated than what I just said. But it is possible to do that. And that's where the power of personalization, and customer service comes in. Because as you're speaking to these people about these specific problems, no longer are you just sending a newsletter to your entire list about a certain thing that you've spoken about on your blog, to let them know that you've written about this thing. Now you say, hey, I've written a blog post about diabetes, and you send that to all your diabetes patients, or to all your leads who are have indicated that they are looking at the diabetes aspect of living.

Burhaan Pattel  12:59  
That's powerful. And that's what real marketing is about personalizing the message to get in front of those people. And that differentiates you because when you're speaking specifically in a unique voice to the people, based on their specific problem, now you end up building more trust you building more relation, more of a relationship with them. And then people become clients of yours, you get to help them with their problem. One of the other things about email marketing is you can go paperless. So as we're becoming more eco friendly, and we're being more conscious about the environment and and how we're utilizing the resources in the world. Email Marketing helps you reduce your costs, your paper costs, going digital reduces your paper costs, because now you can store vast amount of information on your computer on your servers on the cloud, and email emailing people in bulk no longer do you need 1000s of envelopes, 1000s of printed addresses, 1000s of letters, 1000s of pages printed or 1000s of brochures, you can send your brochures out via email without spending that money on the physical aspect.

Burhaan Pattel  14:08  
You may not reduce, you may not eliminate the physical printing of certain things, but you can definitely save on on money and save on save the planet. When it comes to communicating your message to people and that and that's the biggest draw card I would say with email marketing with digital marketing with digital social media marketing with content. It's the ability to distribute your message to 1000s of people at a time. That's the real power and that's where the real leverage comes to your business and to the to the ability that you bring your people. I think that covers a lot of why you know email marketing is valuable. I haven't spoken about list building and how to actually build your email marketing campaign, how to fill that thing up with with leads and how to make sales from your email marketing.

Burhaan Pattel  14:56  
Of course you can make sales from email marketing and 1000s of people doing it. And you can do that in your practice to try to get more patients to convert. I haven't specifically spoken about that. But that is a major benefit of email marketing, because you can market yourself to so many people, that is possible. And so you know that that's a topic of a whole nother day how to sell on email marketing. So if that's something that you're interested in, definitely subscribe to the channel, and hit the notification bell so that you can actually see that video when it comes out. But I want to help you build your business and create efficiencies in your business. So that you can become the CEO of your business where you utilize all these digital tools, all the digital marketing, all the all the knowledge and the experience that you have in speaking to your clients one on one, and bring it online, so that you can actually speak to more people, help more people, and just make a greater impact in the world with the selfish goal of just utilizing more time or having more time for yourself, for your family for the things that are important to you.

Burhaan Pattel  16:07  
So if you can, you know, get that magic trick or have that magic trick for you where you're actually making money, making good money, when you have systems in place where the business is functioning almost on autopilot without you. And you focus on elevating your profile so that you start working on some more important, maybe bigger projects, maybe you start working on more humanitarian level, rather than just a patient to patient level. That's what I ultimately want to help you with. And if that's something that's of interest to you, you know, consider subscribing comment below if that's something that you want, or visit my website at burhaanpattel.com and book a book a call with me. With that being said, thank you so much for listening and watching to the watching the video watching me talk about email marketing and how it can help you in your business and why it's important in your business. So with that being said, thank you so much for listening to the podcast, consider subscribing and following along depending on where you're listening to this episode. And if you have any questions, visit me on burhaanpattel.com and I will catch you on the next episode. Thank you so much and I'll catch you in the next one. Bye