A Guide to Email Marketing for Aesthetic Providers Introduction Do you remember the early days of the internet? If so you might recall the exciting message from America Online when someone sent you an email. It was, You ve got mail! What a fond memory. A lot s changed since those near-magical days. Now, email is an accepted part of day-to-day life. You may have more emails than you could possibly read. You probably also have unwanted messages from strangers clamoring for your attention or money. These annoying spam messages are not only a nuisance, but a great example of what email marketing is not. In fact, we would encourage you to never send emails to those who haven t willingly joined your list. Seriously, doing so can chip away at your good reputation and waste a lot of your time. The good news, however, is that you can still utilize email to grow your business. This is because good email marketing is not spam. In this ebook, we re going to focus on email marketing. We re going to give you the rules of engagement and explain how to make your emails welcome in any inbox. The end result is that you ll have a way to strengthen your relationship with existing patients and earn repeat business and referrals. At the same time, you ll be able to gain the respect of prospective patients and earn their business, too. In other words, you ll have a way to attract more patients to your business. PROMOTE MARKET GET SOCIAL 1
No Instant Fix! It s important to note that email marketing isn t an instant fix. Like all marketing initiatives, it takes planning and execution. Your results will reflect the amount of thought and work you put into it. Likewise, some elements of email marketing may not fit your style as a business owner and others may work better in one area than another. So it goes without saying that you ll need to monitor your efforts, do more of what works and change or discontinue what doesn t. It s also important to note that we developed this publication at the request of our partners. We speak to many aesthetic providers on a daily basis and questions about marketing always come up. The Alma Monthly Rewards program and publications like these are designed to answer those questions in a concise and extremely valuable way. Alma Rewards June, 2014 We had a great response to last month s free ebook, A Guide to Websites for Aesthetic Providers. In that publication, we emphasized the importance of collecting names and email addresses from your website. Many of our partners had questions on this topic. In this month s free publication we ve done our best to answer them; and we re happy to present: A Guide to Email Marketing for Aesthetic Providers This free publication explores the tools needed to implement or expand an effective email marketing program. As an added bonus, the first 50 to download the ebook will receive a no-cost, no-obligation email marketing consultation from our vendor, Go Loyal. Click here to download your copy of, A Guide to Email Marketing for Aesthetic Providers. A Guide to Websites for Aesthetic Providers Introduction When prospective patients look for your services, they are doing so online. They are using Google and other search engines, YouTube and even social media sites such as Twitter. It s more important than ever before to make a great first impression online. Not too long ago, any business with a website had a solid competitive advantage over competitors who had none. In those days it was okay to have any kind of site at all. Now it s not so simple. These days websites are capable of almost anything. If you can imagine it, chances are good that you can find a developer who can create it usually at a steep cost. AR03261401 Rev A Please don t hesitate to contact any member of Alma s marketing team with questions or concerns. To Your Success... The good news is that a business to consumer site doesn t have to have every bell and whistle ever invented. Nor does it need to cost a small fortune. In fact a great website must accomplish one object: real life patients in your waiting room. It s as simple as that. This guide contains information to help you achieve that objective. PROMOTE MARKET GET SOCIAL Please note this guide does not cover HTML, CSS, Building Web Sites, Search Engine Optimization, Social Media Marketing, Blogging or creating a complete digital marketing mix. If any of those topics interest you, don t hesitate to let your Alma Lasers representative know. Finally, while this ebook can stand alone, you might also benefit from our previous publication: A Guide to Websites for Aesthetic Providers. If you didn t get a copy, we d be happy to send you one. Just send an email to marketing@almalasers.com and request your copy. Now let s get started! 2
Building Your List building a tribe... Have you heard the expression building a tribe? This is a popular saying with both marketers and social media gurus. The tribe is the group of people who not only want what you ve got for sale, but believe you re the best person or business to provide it. Think of your email list as part of that tribe. Think of building your list as adding new members to the tribe. You can add people to your email list your tribe in different ways. The first and possibly most important is your website. In our ebook A Guide to Websites for Aesthetic Providers we emphasized the importance of giving website visitors a way to sign-up for your newsletter. If you re using one of the popular Content Management Systems such as Drupal or Wordpress, you can add a plug in to your site and accomplish this. If you re not the type to work with HTML, your website developer should be able to do so at a minimal cost. Once the plug-in is installed, you have the foundation to start building your list. Be sure that every page of your website invites visitors to sign-up. If you re a blogger, end your articles with an invitation to sign-up for your newsletter. It s most effective to offer a small incentive for people to sign-up. One of our most successful locations offered a Guide to Great Looking Skin. The guide was two pages full of tips on taking care of one s skin. Some of the tips were common sense, such as staying hydrated and using sunscreen. Others were new. In any case, this location added over seventy new patients to their email list. From the looks of things, they continue to add new folks today. Please remember that the incentive doesn t have to be complicated. It only has to be valuable. You can also add names to your email list via social media. For example, if you re on Facebook you can direct fans and friends to your website via a link in your timeline. Let s say that you ve written an incentive such as, Your Skin and Sunshine. You could then post an update such as, Look great this summer learn how here! At the end of the update, link to your sign-up page where you describe the incentive and invite people to download the article after giving you re your email address. FACEBOOK TWITTER GET SOCIAL 3
Building Your List Facebook also allows you to implement similar functionality on your page where folks can join your list without visiting your site. This is because Facebook likes to be its own ecosystem and keep its traffic within Facebook. In fact someday, you might not be able to link outside of the platform at all we ll see. Adding a sign-up form to your Facebook Fan Page can be a little more complicated than adding a plug-in to some websites. Regardless, a competent developer should be able to get the job done at a minimal cost. You can also tweet a message to your followers on Twitter. If your tweet is re-tweeted you could attract a lot of attention and ultimately new patients. Keep in mind that both Facebook and Twitter are large social networking platforms and that you might attract people that are not in your area. If the person signing up for your newsletter lives hundreds of miles away they re probably not going to become your patient. But it s not a huge problem. It s perfectly acceptable to have some folks on your list that simply enjoy your content and think highly of you. FACEBOOK TWITTER GET SOCIAL Finally, remember to add your existing patients to your list. Most practices have an email list on file and already communicate via email. You might remind people of an appointment or send a friendly follow-up message. You might be tempted to simply add all of these people and their email addresses to your list. Don t do it! Remember, for your email marketing to be effective, you need to have the recipients permission to email them on a regular basis. So ask first. You can do this in person via a form or through snail mail. Whatever you choose, make sure that the person knows they ll need to opt in to your list. More on opting in in the next section. 4
Email Vendors & Auto Responders So far we ve covered a few ways to add names and email addresses to your list, also known as your tribe. Now it s time to get into the details. The kind of email list you need for marketing purposes isn t one kept in an Excel file. Nor is it stored in your email application such as Microsoft office. You need a place to store your list as well as an efficient means of communicating with your list. On this note, some locations may be tempted to email people in groups via their personal email software. For example, open a new email in Gmail or MS Outlook, write the message and send it to twenty or thirty people. This can work fine when you have a small list of people to email. However, this ebook gives you a way to build a list with hundreds of people on it. If you keep at it, you could one day have thousands of names on your email list. You can t email that many people from your personal email software. It would take too much time away from your business. Furthermore, you could be mistaken as a spammer and blocked by some servers. This means that your emails would no longer get through advanced spam filters. You don t want this to happen. To avoid this kind of catastrophe, you need an Email Vendor. Here are seven companies that specialize in email marketing: GET CONNECTED Mail Chimp Vertical Response Get Response Constant Contact Mailigen Campaigner icontact Or consider a full-service email marketing firm like Go Loyal. No company will do the creative work for you. You ll still need to contemplate your message, write it and send it. All of them will give you a way of adding a sign-up to your website and an interface with which to compose and send your communications. Some of them cost more than others. Some developers have a favorite. The right one for you is the one you like the most simply because you ll be more apt to use a tool that you really enjoy working with. Utilizing a vendor for your email marketing has some big advantages. For one, if you want your emails to look like you spent hours designing them you can do so. The interfaces are relatively easy to use and, after some experimentation, you ll get the hang of it. If you run into a problem, the companies listed have online help and toll free numbers to assist you. Even more important, these companies give you a place to store your list. You can export it any time, of course. But you ll have a safe, secure and back-up place to keep all of your email address. So if your hard drive or entire computer crashes, your list is still intact and safe. 5
Email Vendors & Auto Responders Finally, you can use any of these services to set-up an auto-responder. An auto-responder is an automatic message sent to the people who sign-up for your newletter. Earlier in this ebook we discussed giving people an incentive to join your list. We gave the example of a short document titled, Your Skin and Sunshine and suggested that you create a similar document. Once this document is complete and you have your email vendor in place, you can set an auto-responder in place so that everyone who joins your list receives the incentive immediately after confirming their subscription. Does this sound like you re promoting your business and potentially gaining new patients all day long without doing any additional work? It should because that s exactly what you re doing. This is the power of constantly adding email addresses to your list. This is the power of consistently building your tribe. This is the foundation of effective email marketing. If your website is properly optimized for your local area, the majority of people who join your list will be in your area. This means that the vast majority of those people can become your patient. You did a small amount of work and enjoy the benefits of it for the long term. Don t relax, however. Keep an eye on the number of people who join your list. If nobody signs up to receive your incentive, you ve got a problem. You may need to improve the offer. You may need to look at your site s Search Engine Optimization and make adjustments so that you appear in more searches. 6
Email Vendors & Auto Responders Likewise, you may find that the incentive you created draws people to your list for a period of time and then stops doing so. Don t worry. You can always create a new incentive and auto-responder. Some ideas will be successful. Some won t make much of an impact. It s the reality of the world we live in. What s important is that you keep at it, measure your results and continue your marketing efforts. At this point, you re almost an email marketing guru. You know different places to collect names and email addresses, several different email vendors and how to incentivize people to join your list. Now let s go through a sample campaign. PROMOTE MARKET GET SOCIAL 7
Your First Campaign Remember what we said about the incentive you created for joining your tribe? We noted that it didn t have to be complicated. It only had to be valuable. By valuable we don t mean that it s worth lots of dollars, although the information it contains could very well be. We mean that it has a value to the person receiving it. The same holds true for your campaign. The rule of thumb is that every time you hit send, your message should provide the recipients with value. Said another way, effective email marketing is a value exchange. Your exchanging the value of your content in exchange for the recipient s time. At the end of the message, you offer the opportunity for a second value exchange your aesthetic services in the form of a treatment in exchange for your recipient s time and hard earned money. As an aesthetic provider you already know a lot about what s valuable to your patients. For example, aesthetic patients often value: Remedies that combat the visible signs of aging Preventing premature aging or damaging their skin Looking good for a specific date such as a wedding or reunion Looking better under their clothes Taking care of their skin as they get older Saving money while fighting the hands of time 8
Your First Campaign Now, with that list in mind, start drafting an email to everyone on your list. Don t worry about writing professional copy or a hard core sales pitch. In fact, it s better to speak directly to the person receiving the email in a friendly, informative tone. Imagine your ideal patient and write the email for them. If your ideal patient can relate to the information, others will find it relatable as well. It s important to get to the point rather quickly. Don t rush through the message. But don t ramble on and on either. Your recipient s time is valuable. If you don t get to the point you ll lose their attention. See examples on the following page... 9
Your First Campaign Dear, As a kid I always looked forward to summer vacation. School was out and the local pool was the place to be. My only job back then was to have as much fun as possible. As kids, we never worried about how we looked in our swimming suits. It s a fact of life that as we get older we don t look as good as we used to in our beach clothes. Time takes its toll on all of us, often in spite of our diet or how much we exercise. Until recently, there wasn t much a person could do to look great after a certain age. I m happy that s changed. Now, almost anyone can utilize technology to recapture their youthful confidence at the beach. This includes getting rid of wrinkly knees, dealing with cellulite and perhaps even fitting into last year s trunks. Here at (your business name) we help people feel better about their appearance. In our summer series, we re going to share what other patients have said about our treatments, some interesting information about our technology and how it can help you look like a million bucks at the beach. Are you a candidate for these revolutionary treatments? Hit reply and let us know. Thanks for being on our list! Your Name The above example focuses on selling treatment during the summer, but it isn t a sales pitch. Nothing will encourage people to unsubscribe from your list faster than a few hard-core sales pitches. How would you as a patient feel if you received the following message from your provider? Dear, Check out our monthly specials! Book your appointment today! Don t wait do it now! Click here! The bad example does nothing to establish common ground between the two parties. It s a meaningless interruption of the recipient s time. Furthermore, the Click Here can trigger spam filters to automatically file your email into the recipients junk or spam folder. 10
Subject Lines Most folks don t read every email they receive. It s fair to say that most of us scan our in-box and mentally organize it into three categories: 1 2 What I m Going to Read NOW What I m Going to Read Later Think of the subject line as a sort of attention getting headline. However, it s more than attention getting. It s also a promise. It promises the reader that the message will be one or more of the following: 1 Useful to the reader 2 Specific to the reader s needs, wants or desires 3 What I m Going to Delete Immediately Obviously, you want your messages to land in category one. The way to do that is by writing a compelling subject line that makes the message irresistible. 3 Urgent It s great if you can make every single subject line meet all three of the above. But you re building a relationship, showcasing your authority and not every message will be alike. So for now, concentrate on meeting at least one of those promises with your subject lines. Some subject lines for our example email message might be: Stop Hiding Under Clothes at the Beach This Summer, Make Your Friends Jealous Fit into Last Year s Bikini You Can Have a Beach Body You get the idea. 11
Conclusion An ebook of this size can t address every aspect of email marketing. Besides, each business and each person is unique. Like anything, it takes time, trial and error to master a new skill. Always remember that even experienced marketers struggle to find the perfect subject line or the best way to get a message across. Now you ve got the basics for creating compelling email campaigns. The next step is to implement it into your marketing mix. Nobody can capture your passion for helping people achieve their aesthetic goals quite like you. So take action and start writing. Let your unique personality and commitment shine through in your messages. Build your tribe with two-way relationships and always keep the value-exchange in mind. Most important, let us know what else you d like to know about this subject or other marketing topics. Your feedback helped us create this guide as well as the Alma Rewards program. Keep it coming we re all ears and always on your side. PROMOTE MARKET GET SOCIAL 2014 Alma Lasers Ltd. All rights reserved. AL06111401 Rev A Alma Rewards, June 2014 A Guide to Email Marketing document 12