Are you having trouble bringing in new PT patients? Do you want to solve that issue by working LESS than you are now?
If so, then you need to get serious about automating your practice.
“Automation” is a huge buzzword within private practice physical therapy right now and I think that there are some misunderstandings about it and exactly what it can do for us as private practice owners.
Watch the video below to learn more.
Things you’ll learn from the video above:
- How to start a simple conversation that leads to conversions
- Why short emails are okay
Quick question….
Would you like it if you had 250 people email you and say, “I’m in pain right now.”
It would be pretty remarkable, right?
That would be a lot of conversations to have.
Even if you converted 1 out of every 50, you would at least have 5 patients on your schedule right now just by responding to them and having a positive conversation about what is going on for them.
A lot of the time when we are thinking about automation, Facebook marketing, or email marketing, there is this misconception that the software or the program is going to do everything for us.
I’m here to tell you that that is dead wrong.
Automation simply starts the conversation. However, it is really up to us to put the work in to close those leads:
- Have an engaging conversation with those potential patients
- Convert them over to our physical therapy services
- Also convert them to our physical therapy products
Are you guilty of this too?
Have you ever been guilty of emailing your entire newsletter to your past patient list?
Where basically… the entire subject line reads: Newsletter from Madden Physical Therapy, October, Volume 7, Issue 10, something like that?
Then when you open it up, at least what I did and what I’m guilty of, and I had my entire newsletter in there.
Well, Carl, my partner, crushes that and does a really nice job of going back to that Market Message Media match which we have talked about in the past and shows you exactly how to use email marketing.
Applying the Principles
A practice owner Cathy and her husband, Joe, have a private practice in New Jersey.
Cathy has been through the Killer Marketing program. She followed Carl’s Single Question Email template and sent it out to 2,361 people.
Typically, in private practice PT, we call that an email blast. She had over 300 people respond and out of those 300 that responded, 250 of them said, “Yes, I’m in pain.”
Cathy jumped on one of our monthly calls we do with owners all over the country.
She told us, “Hey, I did Carl’s Single Question Email exactly as he laid out. Over 300 people responded to the email. We had over a 50% open rate.”
This may or may not be the right metric to look at, but nonetheless, she had a really good open rate. A ton of responses.
Why do we want responses?
Because it helps us with any future emails that we may be sending.
Over 250 of those people specifically said, “I have pain.” If they have pain, then it is pretty simple to have a conversation with them.
So I asked the natural follow-up question which was how many of them scheduled. She said immediately 5 of those people scheduled.
Now, I want to give you something really, really valuable here.
Have you ever talked with somebody who said, “Hey, Mike, I’m in pain?”
You have the conversation maybe it is a friend or family member or something like that and they never really convert over to a patient.
You give them advice but nothing happens.
I did that for years and it led me to find really quick and efficient way, basically a 2 step process, that I can use to have somebody hop on my schedule.
Because there is nothing I like less than showing up to a Thanksgiving dinner and having a line of relatives that want me to treat them or want me to give them advice when I’m just trying to spend time with friends and family.
Learn an easy 2 step process to convert people into patients:
The first thing that you are going to do is say, “Ok, ‘Uncle Larry’, you are having hip pain. Between 0 to 10, what is the worst pain that you have had in the past month?”
You can do this by email. You can do it live. You can do it over the phone. But remember… this person is reaching out to you and saying, “I’m in pain.” This is a big deal.
“Between 0 and 10, what is the worst pain that you have had in the last month?” Let them answer.
Respond: “Ok, so you had 7/10. What were you doing when that happened?”
Basically we are looking for them to say something like, “Every time I stand for more than 15 minutes, I get numbness down my right leg.”
We are looking for them to identify how their pain is reproducible. This brings out an awareness of what the real issue is and if it is something that they want to take care of or not.
Then if they say, “Every time I stand for 15 minutes or if I ride in the car my right leg goes numb.”
Now you have something you can work with.
My response to something like this would be, “I don’t have the equipment here to give you a proper evaluation, so let’s get you on the schedule and I will take a look at you in the office.”
It literally takes one minute and then I can move on and grab an apple pie or whatever it is that I am trying to get to at gathering and continue enjoying the time with my family.
You can use this same 2 step process in your email responses:
Step #1: “Hey, I’m in pain.” “Ok, can you tell me a little bit about your pain. Between 0 to 10, what is the worst pain that you have had in the last month?”
Step #2 , “What were you doing when that happened?”
By the way, I’m going to give you some gold here… in closing out an email, there is a very specific 6 words that you should be using every single time in every single email that you ever mail from here on out.
It is:
Kindly reply back and let me know.
Then you have your name after that. Short emails work. You can read more about it in Chapter 11 of Killer Marketing Secrets. (You can pick up a FREE copy here)
Carl created the email that Cathy used here specifically for our AllStar FB Group group here at Breakthrough Physical Therapy Marketing. No branding or anything like that.. just 5 or 6 simple and incredibly effective lines.
Automation starts a conversation with new people and those that have yet to become your regular PT patients.
You are responsible for continuing the conversation.
It takes two simple steps to convert people into new patients, whether it is in person or via email.
Simply asking “are you in pain”… reading the individual responses… asking engaging questions in your responses…
Then sit back and watch the magic happen.
Until next time,
Chad
