How to Get More Therapy Clients Using Email Marketing
Starting a Therapy Practice
Usually, a behavioral therapist's salary depends on the number of hours they can work with clients directly. It's a good practice for anyone who's starting a therapy practice, to calculate how many hours a week they can dedicate to working with clients.
That can give you an idea of how many clients a week you could handle. While it's great to be realistic about your availability, the downside of this method is that you're limited by the business structure in which you trade your time for money.
It's true that when you start your own practice, the first thing you need to focus on is finding clients, but that's not the only thing you need to keep in mind.
With the high demand for mental health services that we're currently experiencing, you'll end up filling your schedule quickly and will be left with very little time to think about growing your business. Not having a plan B, can put you at a higher risk of burnout. And since the health of your practice will depend on your own wellbeing, avoiding burnout should be one of your top priorities.
As a business coach for therapists, I look at the business of private practice as a potential for generating other sources of income besides one-on-one therapy. Therapy businesses shouldn't be limited by the time you have working with clients only. Therapists can also help people by providing useful information in books, teaching coping tools in online courses, and training paraprofessionals.
One of the best ways to open yourself to these possibilities is to build new relationships. Digital Marketing can help you build and establish relationships on a larger scale and one of the best ways to start is to focus on your email marketing strategy.
Building Your Email List
It's important to remember that email marketing is not the same as emailing your current and past clients. Therefore, email marketing services don't need to be HIPAA compliant.
Want to learn more? Download a step-by-step guide to setting up your practice for success
Here are email marketing main purposes:
Create new relationships and establish a "fan base" of people who want to hear from you.
Strengthen your reputation and establish your brand as someone knowledgeable in your field.
Teach, inform and provide valuable information about your industry, work, and business.
Urge people to contact you and become your clients.
Maintain a relationship with past clients.
Generate referrals.
Note that none of these include sharing confidential information about your clients and transmitting sensitive healthcare information. There are other email services built specifically for this purpose.
To start building your email list you need to first have or create a website where people can opt-in to receive email communication from you.
For people to be interested in receiving your emails, you need to offer them some kind of a "freebie". It can be a checklist, a guide, or even an e-book on the subject matter you're an expert in.
The next step to building your email list is setting up an account with email marketing services. Here are a few email marketing services you can use:
Convertkit. This is a service I use personally for my own email marketing. It has great automation tools that allow you to contact people at different stages of their interest and segment your audience into different categories. Built for creators, it's a great tool for those who want to teach through emails. It also offers a free trial.
MailChimp. This is a beloved small business owner's email service. It's easy to understand and navigate, offers fun email templates that you can customize, and you can sign up for free.
MailerLite. It's another email marketing platform suitable for small business owners. Like Mail Chimp, it offers a free account, and like ConvertKit it allows you to automate your emails and sell digital products. But it also has a website building feature in case you want to create a quick website to start building your list right away.
Automating Your Emails
The biggest benefit of using an email service is having the ability to get all the data about your emails. You can see who opened your emails, who clicked on your links, and who decided to unsubscribe. Yes, unsubscribing is an important option to offer your readers. If you want to avoid being labeled as SPAM, having the option to unsubscribe is crucial.
Another benefit is automating your emails. In other words, writing them ahead of time and setting them up to send to new subscribers automatically.
That's a huge time saver, especially for a busy practice that needs to provide a lot of the same information to every inquiry. A great example is having an FAQ email sent out to anyone who wants to schedule an appointment with you.
To automate your emails, you can start with writing a welcome letter that introduces you and your practice. It will give your new subscribers a chance to get to know you and learn how your practice can help them.
You can also create more sophisticated automation that includes a number of emails that are triggered by different actions and dates. With email marketing coaching, my clients learn how to set up their email accounts and create these types of automation that can do the job of building their reputation for them when they're busy with clients.
Using Your Emails to Provide Value and Sell
Besides building your reputation, email is a great vehicle for sales. I know that selling is the last thing that you'd want to do in your private practice. Providing therapy feels like an antithesis to selling. But selling also means showing people the value of therapy.
Email marketing is the perfect way to share valuable information that people are interested in already. It's also an effective tool to communicate changes in hours and availability and news about your business.
People who're not ready to schedule an appointment with you still need help and encouragement. Staying in touch with them, providing them useful information, teaching them, and supporting them through e-books, workshops, and webinars is all a part of selling.
Conclusion
Email marketing offers the highest return on investment you can expect from any other digital marketing tool. And the best part, your email list becomes your business asset. It's not subject to algorithm changes like social media platforms and it's not untrackable like giving out flyers in your neighborhood.
Email marketing can help you grow your private practice at any stage, as someone who's just opened a therapy practice or someone who's had it for years.
