In this frantic, fast-paced, modern world, unless you stay in contact with your clients at least every month, you are at a BIG risk of loosing your client to ‘the opposition’ – another service provider.And this is because we are all being overwhelmed by so many different advertising mediums.Staying in contact is easy via newsletters, blogs and the regular use of FacebookBUT – I see so many practices that can’t even collect their clients’ email addresses quickly and easily.Today I show you how to make this process super-easy for your receptionists.Watch the short video, download the podcast or just read the transcript.
Click Here to listen to the Podcast
See below to read the Transcript
Regards
Diederik Gelderman
P.S If you need a hand implementing these strategies – just hit REPLY on this email and we’ll set a time to talk – my compliments
P.P.S To learn more about the psychology of contacting your clients regularly you should read Wendy Evans – How to win clients in 90 days and keep them forever.
Remember – the time frame is now 30 days (not ninety)
TRANSCRIPTION
20th June podcast Collecting Clients’ Email Addresses Quickly and Painlessly
Hi, it’s Diederik Gelderman here, and welcome to week three in our Marketing Month of June.
Now, before we get started on today’s video, which is all about, painlessly collecting email addresses from your client.
I just want to talk about last week’s video on Bonding Your Client.
When I went through the video, I thought that I was really stating everything you needed to do crisply and succinctly.
But I’ve had a little bit of feedback that there was a little bit of overwhelm happening and that some people didn’t understand some of the stuff that we went through.
If you are one of those people please hit reply in this email, put your name and phone number in it and I’ll get back to you and we can set up the time and talk through that video – my compliments. I’m only too happy to spend some time.
Remember: anything I ever do, if you want more detail or information or anything else like that, send me an email, send me an SMS, send me a Skype message. I’m on a lot of different channels, just contact me and set up a time to talk. I’m here to help you so whatever you need from me, I’m only too happy to provide it.
Okay, got that. Let’s move on to email addresses.
Why should you collect email addresses?
Well, it’s really, really important to keep in touch with your clients on a regular basis, as we talked about last week.
Wendy Evans is an Australian author, and she wrote a book back in the early 2000s (How to win clients in 90 days and keep them forever) and she did a lot of research that showed that back then you had to contact your clients every 90 days, within 90 days, three months. You need to contact them at least once every 90 days, otherwise, your chance of losing them, them dropping off your radar as it were, went absolutely through the roof.
She redid the research post 2010—so, 10-12 years later—and it’s now down to 30 days.
- So, unless you contact your client every 30 days, you’re in big, big, big danger of losing them, not necessarily to another vet, but certainly to an online pet store, certainly to a dog groomer or a dog chiro or a dog acupuncturist.
There are lots of ways that you can lose your client and lose a lot of their business. To another vet, if you’ve got another vet in your area that’s very, very visible on Facebook and YouTube and that sort of thing, they’re going to draw a lot of your clients over to them if you’re only contacting your client once a year for that annual health check or contacting them quarterly with a newsletter.
As I said in the last video, you should do a newsletter, say, every two months, and a blog in between that. It’s very easy to do this; newsletters, you can get them done in Australia by Pet Pack, they do some good newsletters. There’s a lot of other people that do newsletter as well.
You can easily do a brilliant newsletter yourself in house, or you just outsource it to Fiverr or to oDesk whose name has now been changed to Udemy.com. If you type in oDesk, you’ll still find them. You’ll find people there writing newsletter literally for peanuts and doing brilliant jobs. Again, if you need to know more details on that, let me know.
Now, the other reason you want to collect email addresses is because you want to do email alerts to your client; when ticks come out, when fleas come out, when snakes come out, when there’s a bad batch of dog food, when there’s a bad batch of cat food—and we’re going through those bad batch things right now, aren’t we?
Wouldn’t it be great, wouldn’t your clients love you if you sent them an email saying “Be careful with these brands, they’ve been recalled.”
The other thing you can send out to them is a change of seasons email, it’s time to worm your pet reminders.
Let your mind go to rampant and you’ll find lots of reasons to email your client.
So, you need to collect those email addresses. Sending vaccination recall reminded by email, obviously, there’s lots of different things that you can do like this as well.
So, the first thing is to decide that you are going to collect the email address of the client.
As a practice, you’ve sat down, you’ve decided that you’re going to do it, and that doesn’t often happen.
What normally happens is the boss says, “Hey! You, you, you, at reception, you must start collecting email addresses,” and the nurse’s think, “What mad idea is he going to do now? What’s he going to shove down our client’s throat? What’s he going to try and sell them—or she going to try and sell them?”
You need to sit down with your team and explain to them that collecting your clients’ email address is for the benefit of the client. They’re going to get contemporaneous stuff, you’re not going to spam them with free dental offers, and half-priced food offers and all those sorts of things. You’re going to send them regular great information that’s going to be beneficial to them and their pet, you’re not going to spam them and chase them for stuff.
Once your receptionists and your nurses and your vets and everyone understand that, that’s step one.
The second step is that most nurses and receptionist will currently say something like; “Can I get your email address please,” or, “I need your email address.”
And the client probably says, “Why, why do you need it for?” And the nurse will say, “I need to put it on our database,” or “The boss told me I’ve got to get it,” or something like that.
And now your client is thinking, “Oh gee, why do I have to do that? I’m going to be spammed by something. No, I don’t want to give it to you?”
So, this phrasing is very different. “Hey Mrs. Client, we send out a fantastic, informative client newsletter once every two month, and in the month in between, Dr. Bob does his blog. It’s really funny, he shares lots of stuff from inside the practice, and some clients’ stuff as well. I know you’re going to love the newsletter, it’s so informative, and like I said, Dr. Bob’s stuff is really funny. I know you’ll love that as well, in fact, it’s so good, you’ll probably want to share it with your friends. To make sure I’m getting it to the right email address, can I just check your email address?” or, “can I grab your email address?”
This is a very different scenario. In that scenario, there’ something in it for The Client. The practice isn’t selling anything or doing anything, this is all for The Client’s benefit, or for Fluffy’s, the pet’s benefit.
This all needs to be about YOUR CLIENT.
Develop a scripting / phrasing with which you are comfortable, that’s natural for you – and make sure it’s all about client benefits!
So, when you do that, when you do it that way, you’ll collect them really quickly and easily and smoothly.
If you’ve got a current email address already, I’m going to suggest that you say to your client, “Hey, look, people change their email addresses on a regular basis, we have yours as lucy.smith123@bigpond.net, is that still the best email address to get you on, or have you got a better address now?”
So, that’s it for this video, just put those two simple strategies in place, and you’ll collect email addresses seamlessly.
I look forward to catching up with you next week when we talk about joint ventures. See you then.