The biggest one is: James, Isn’t an email patient newsletter enough? Why do I need a print and newsletter site as well?

My answer to that is… An email newsletter is better than nothing, but you are most likely missing the attention of a majority of your patients.

If you were to look at your patient base and see how many email addresses you have, my guess is that it’s hovers around 50-60% if you are doing a good job of collecting them.

So for an average practice with 500 patients, you would have about 250 email addresses.

Now, your average email newsletter has about a 20% average open rate, meaning of those 250, about 50 of them are reading your newsletter. The rest are throwing it directly in the trash.

So, if you are really good at email newsletters, you are getting about a 10% reader rate. Meaning of your 500 patients, 450 are actually not seeing anything from you.

That is why the print newsletter is so important. It will allow to provide the content in a way it will get consumed and used. You may pay $0 for just a plain email newsletter, but you’ll also see pretty mush that same return.

You need to communicate with your patients in different ways and in different formats, so they continue to keep you in the top of their consciousness, and continue to refer their friends and family to you,

By combining an email newsletter with a print version as well as a newsletter website, you are going to increase your readership, and allow more of your patients to build a better relationship with you and your practice.

It is true that if a patient has referred to you in the past, there is a better chance they will refer again, but what about those referring for the first time.

What I am trying to get at is your patients newsletter. No matter how you deliver it (print, email) you are missing a major portion of your patient base, this portion doesn’t get your information, and you aren’t in the top of their mind when it comes to telling their friends about you.

In a mastermind group I am a part of, of the 10 people, 6 like to receive physical printed newsletters, and 4 like to get the email version. Using that as a cross section of your patient base, if you send only a print newsletter, you’ll miss about 60% of your patients base. Even if it;s the other way around, you are still missing a large number of your patients.

For this reason alone, it is becoming more and more important to use multiple media sources to communicate with your current patients. Just a print newsletter isn’t enough anymore.

It doesn’t mean you have to do a lot of extra work, your print newsletter and your email newsletter can have the same articles, these articels should then be posted to an online website as well.

If you deliver your newsletter in different media, you will have better communication with your patients. Better communication means more referrals, more treatment acceptance, and better patient retention.

The above graph appeared in a recent study done by a very high profile statistics firm.

It was a survey done to see how people preferred to receive a newsletter from a business they were a customer of. The results were quite interesting.

By looking at the graph, you can see that 1/3 of people like to receive a newsletter in the print format.

Just over 20% liked the newsletter in the email format.

And over 40% liked both print and email.

So, why aren’t you doing both, or better yet, doing both print and email, as well as adding a website newsletter to the mix.

If people want information isn a certain format, you should be providing it to them. IT is the same reason why there are 500+ channels on TV… different people like different stuff.

Your patients are no different. Each individual patient gets their information from a different source. While Gary likes to read the newspaper, Sally likes to go online.

You need to integrate your marketing so that you can accommodate all these different people, and their different lifestyles.

Look for a system, like Communident, that will allow you to distribute your newsletter in different formats, and you’ll see you referrals go up, your missed appointments god down, and your patients will love the feeling of being taken care of.