This original article was featured in the October 2021 issue of Chiropractic Economics

Data is your friend when it comes to marketing.  In fact, without it, you’re bound to waste a ton of time and money.  If you’re going to spend valuable resources of your time and money on marketing, you want to make sure it pays off!  Unfortunately, not everyone knows how to measure its success and what each metric is telling them, so they don’t know where improvements need to be made. 

I’m now going to analyze the three avenues of marketing and the data that comes from them. We’ll look at the different data that you get along the way and what it means so that you know what to do with that information and how to adapt and improve. 

Email Marketing Data

Let’s start with email marketing. By analyzing where the drop-off in interaction is, you’ll know what part of your email content needs to be adjusted (no pun intended). This should go without saying, but you must be using a system that allows you to actually see stats on your emails. Now, what’s the first step?  Sending your email!  

Once your email is sent, the first set of data that we’re looking at is your open rate. A March 2021 study showed that among all industries, the overall average open rate was 16.97% with an open rate of 16.05% in the Health and Wellness Industry.  A 2020 study showed that the Health industry had an open rate of 23.58%2. With this information in mind, I consider the open rate successful if it’s between 15-25%. 

If it’s lower than that, that means your email subject needs work. One thing that I’ve found successful is to add personalization by using mail-merge variables that will put the recipient’s name in the subject. The email subject must also be descriptive and short. To avoid being sent to the Spam folder, I recommend not using a lot of exclamation points or other punctuation marks. 

If your open rate is great, the next set of data we want to look at is your click-through rate. The only way to really measure this is to have links that can be tracked when clicked.  This is often done by using a Link Tracker that redirects to the final destination.

These can be links in the body of the email or with a few call-to-action buttons. With these links, you can actually measure if people are responding to your email.  Seeing whether people clicked on your links tells whether your content is on point or not. If you have a call-to-action and only a few clicks, the offer may not be attractive enough. 

Going further, if you’re selling something or there’s a purchase to be made, we want to look at the conversion rate. If your click-through rate is good but you have a poor conversion rate (this means that no one makes the purchase or takes advantage of the offer), then you want to look at your landing page and again, the offer. 

You also want to make sure that the content you’re sending is of interest to those that you’re sending it to. Segmenting your contact list so that you can send more targeted content can help you improve your open rates and reduce your unsubscribe rates.

For example, I would create a group for pregnant women in our office and send them content specific on the benefits of chiropractic while pregnant and for infants. You can group athletes, elderly, parents with school-age children, or those in a weight loss group. 

By using the data of Open Rates, Click-Through Rates, and Conversions, you can make improvements to your email subjects, content, and offers.  Using this data helps you know what’s working and what’s not working.

Social Medial Data

The next area of marketing that we want to look at is your social media marketing. Just like with email marketing, identifying where the drop off is will let us know which part of the ad needs help. 

After your ad goes live, you’ll want to look behind the scenes at a few things…

First, how many impressions has it received? From there, we want to see based on the number of impressions, how many people actually clicked on the ad for more information.

If the number of people clicking on your ad is low, that means that you need to revamp the ad. Is there a different image you should use? Or if it’s a video, check the length and make it  shorter and more to the point. Try adjusting the copy on the ad and the accompanying images until you hit the highest level of interaction.

If your click rate is good, but the conversion rate is not, you most likely need to work on your landing page and your call-to-action.  A landing page is the page your ad directs a lead to “land on.”

Report of Findings

The last form of marketing that I want to go over  is your Report of Findings. This may not seem like marketing since the patient is already in the door, however, they’re not a patient yet! You still have to convert this “lead” into an enrolled patient. 

Let’s review some data. Think about the last 20 new patients that you’ve had come in. Out of those 20 new patients, how many of them did you enroll into care? Now, we all know that not all new patients will be a perfect fit or the right candidate to enroll into care. With that in mind, 18 or 19 of them should have been enrolled. 

Are your numbers not quite there yet? That means that you need to focus on your enrollment. This really translates to how strong your New Patient and Report of Findings are. How are you presenting care to them? Are you making it easy and affordable?

Your CA’s phone skills and how they welcome and interact with the patient will always be extremely important in getting patients to enroll into a plan, but do you know what one of the biggest factors is? Your communication.  Your communication is the biggest component in getting them to say yes to care and enrolling into a plan. 

Going forward, let’s assume you enrolled 18 of those patients. How many of them make it to their first re-exam? If you have them on a care plan and make things frictionless for them, all of them should have made it to their first re-exam. If they did not, not only do you need to focus on your enrollment (because how you enroll them translates into their compliance with the treatment), but you also need to focus on retention. 

Of those that made it to their first re-exam, how many of them make it to the end of the plan? Assuming no one moved away or had a change in status (PI or workers comp), all of them should have made it to the end of their recommended treatment plan. 

If you’re not happy with your number of patients that made it to the end of their plan, you need to focus on retention. 

Before I explain what I mean by that, let’s take it one step further. How many of those that made it to the end of their care plan were you able to transition over to wellness care? In my practice, that was the ultimate goal. Every new patient should eventually be on a wellness care plan in my office and become a loyal patient. If they don’t make it to this stage, what should your focus be on?  Retention!

Make your time, money, and effort into marketing count! This requires testing and adjusting things based on what the numbers tell you at each point. This allows you to make informed decisions over gut-feeling guesses. Data-driven marketing is sound, safe, and way more secure than offering discounts blindly, hoping to fill the adjustment table for the day. 

Ultimately, the data that you track will help you identify what is and what’s not working in your marketing.  Take the time to learn to track the data and use it to your advantage.  

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