7 Reasons to Launch a Newsletter to Build Your Integrative Medicine Practice

You’re missing a big opportunity to grow your practice if you’re not currently publishing a newsletter and using email marketing.

Here’s why:

1. Email Still Preferred Engagement Channel

Despite all the hype about social media supplanting email, the truth is that 94 percent of Americans 12 years and older still regularly use email. Email remains the preferred method of communication even with the growth in social media platforms and messaging options, including text.

Pew’s survey conclusion: 90 percent of consumers prefer to receive company updates via newsletter over Facebook.

2. Own Your List, Own Your Distribution

Growing your email list over time expands your universe of potential patients and prospects. Subscribers can opt-out at any point but as long as you continually maintain trust you’ll enjoy high subscriber retention while growing your loyal community of readers and controlling the distribution of your messages. Serve this integral part of your community well and your reach, influence and customer base will grow exponentially.

3. Educate, Engage & Build Trust

Second only to live experiential engagement in a clinical or community educational setting, a newsletter gives your practice the best opportunity to effectively engage patients and prospects around high quality, relevant content. Delivering practical, informative content to your target audience builds key trust around your brand.

4. Stay Top of Mind

Newsletters allow you to deliver consistent “impressions” to your community over time, in effect reminding subscribers of their special relationship with your clinic. Continuity triggers the essential mental connection between one’s health needs and making clinic appointments or reordering supplements.

5. Email Sells Better than Social Media

While social media is still recognized as most effective to engage, inform and listen, in terms of its ability to actually SELL products and services, it remains anemic on Facebook and barely measurable on Twitter. Permission-based newsletters remain more powerful direct sales tools than social platforms.

6. Extend Blog Post Reach

Your newsletter is the perfect place to republish your blog posts. If you have an active blog (and I hope you do) and offer an RSS subscription feed, you’re probably aware that the number of new subscribers tend to trickle in. Comparatively speaking, newsletters, natural health bulletins or whatever you may call the compendium of information your center should be delivering as a regular digest can be much more effective to grow readership.

7. Thoughtfully Announce New Services, Products and Promotions

Do you currently have an email marketing campaign in place for sending promotional messages about your center’s new integrative and holistic services, products and promotions? Carefully done without overselling and inadvertently turning folks off with excessive frequency (avoid subscribers opting-out), there certainly is an important place for this type of smart effort in your overall marketing mix.

However, stronger customer engagement is achieved by including the bulk of these “sell” efforts within the context of a useful, informative, editorial-based newsletter. It’s the difference between a catalog and magazine—one is all ads and promotion while the other contains ad messages surrounded by valuable, trusted content. Which would you prefer?

Have I done a good job convincing you why you need to build a list and start publishing a newsletter to create more customer (patient) and prospect engagement? If so, check out FON’s how-to guide for launching your newsletter and becoming a bona fide media-maker.

About FON

FON is a leading integrative health and medicine business development and strategy consulting firm. FON specializes in custom solutions for growing patient volume, developing programs, and increasing product sales. Our practical business models are driven by innovative marketing, clear messaging, and customer engagement via branded storytelling.

Contact us today to schedule a complimentary 30-minute consultation to discuss your business development or personal brand needs.