Cosmetic Surgery Marketing through Patient Newsletters

Patient newsletters are more than an email here or there to touch base with your patients and subscribers; it's a cosmetic surgery marketing tool for your plastic surgery practice. With so many options for what type of content to include in your patient email communications, it can seem overwhelming.

With these tips for patient retention through your e-mail marketing campaign, you can experience a better doctor-patient relationship, more traffic to your website, and ultimately increased appointments and procedures. Here's how to use your newsletters to help grow your practice.

Your patients will likely have an agenda for what they'd like to talk about as well as what questions they have when they come in to see you. Use this time with your patient to do two things related to your cosmetic surgery marketing. First, take a mental note of their questions and use them as building blocks for your next newsletter. Second, use the newsletter as a means of letting your patient know that topics they care about are covered in each newsletter to keep them informed of the latest cosmetic surgery procedures. Ask them if they've been receiving your newsletter. If yes, ask them what they liked most and what they thought could be improved upon. It takes less than two minutes to have this conversation, but the rewards are well worth the time spent.

Always ask for your patients' email address when they fill out their initial patient questionnaires. If this is an existing patient who is not yet receiving your newsletter, be sure to ask them for their email address (have them fill out a permission form and sign it) and let them know that the purpose of your newsletter is to educate patients as well as provide them with special pricing not offered to anyone else. This is a great incentive for them to sign up! Using newsletters to help your overall cosmetic surgery marketing ROI is smart, simple, and extremely effective.

It's highly likely that a large percentage of your newsletter subscribers are existing patients of yours. Therefore, use your newsletters to point out any referral rewards you offer. It can be as subtle as a small graphic image that is clicks in to a page on your website. That page is important because it should only contain information relating to patient referral rewards for existing patients. This keeps the click relevant to what the person intended to see more about and increases the chances that they will take action - and that's when you start to see some tangible results from your cosmetic surgery marketing efforts!

Don't be afraid to use your newsletters to announce a new patient referral incentive, promotional pricing for newsletter subscribers, or new procedure pricing. Yes, these items have an air of "selling" to them, but if you don't ask for the sale you won't get it! Make it noticeable in your newsletters but not overwhelming. The focus of your newsletter should be on patient education, first and foremost. Second, you can think about offers, promotions, and asking for referrals.

Having a newsletter sign up on your homepage is absolutely essential to your cosmetic surgery marketing plan. People who find you online can also sign up for your newsletter and start getting emails from you. This can also work in the reverse way, fortunately. If you use your newsletter as a means of allowing your subscribers to share the newsletter with someone they know, you'll not only get more people to your website, but you'll have more newsletter subscribers and a better chance for growing your patient base.

The very nature of newsletters is to build a list of "warm market" email addresses (people who have opted in to receive your emails), so use this to your advantage! Think of creative ways to push more people to your website through your emails. How about offering your subscribers a $5 Starbucks gift card for forwarding your newsletter to 10 friends? Here's another idea - have a contest with your subscribers asking them to nominate mothers in their lives who deserve a "mommy makeover". Take them to a special page on your website when they click on the promotional picture. Then, ask them to enter those special people into your contest by filling in their email addresses so you can inform them that they've been nominated.

This is a great way to build the momentum of a contest as well as gain valuable referrals as a part of your online cosmetic surgery marketing. Oh, and don't forget to mention in your email to the nominees that even if they don't win - if they print out the email message and bring it in, it's good for a (fill-in-the-blank)% off any procedure (you can place a maximum discount amount on this offer).

If you like these ideas and want to implement them in your plastic surgery practice, feel free to contact us. We provide patient email management services, creative ideas for patient involvement, as well as imaginative methods for growing your practice. Your cosmetic surgery marketing has never been easier or more effective!

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