5 Chiropractic Newsletter Ideas That Get Higher Open Rates

chiropractic newsletter ideas

If you’re sending out a regular newsletter for your chiropractic practice, you already know how useful they can be.

A good newsletter will make non-patients who join your list through a signup form more likely to come in for a visit. It also works wonders for retaining fresh patients and convincing people who haven’t visited in a while to resume their chiropractic care.

Your amazing and informative newsletters can’t get patients in the door if no one opens them though.

To boost your new and returning patient counts, you can use these 5 chiropractic newsletter ideas that get higher open rates.

Captivate with a terrific subject line

The subject line of your emails is the most important part of your newsletter campaign.

I know that’s a bold claim. It’s true though ‒ here are a couple of email subject line stats to back that statement up:

  • 47% of recipients open an email based on the subject line alone.
  • 69% of recipients decide if an email is spam based on the subject line alone.

And remember, the email subject line still greatly impacts the 53% of recipients who don’t base their open decision on the subject line alone. They just happen to take the sender and the initial snippet text into account too.

Alright, I think you get it. The email subject line is super important. Without a subject line that captivates the reader and convinces them to open your message, none of the painstakingly crafted body content you’ve written will matter at all.

So how do you write a subject line that captivates readers and encourages them to open your email?

Well, it’s not exactly the easiest thing to master and there’s a good reason email copywriters consistently earn 6-figure salaries. However, there are some concrete and actionable tips you can use to improve your subject lines ‒ and your open rates.

email copywriters

 

Make it short

I don’t know about you, but I have a pretty short attention span when it comes to my email inbox. I rarely give more than half a second of my attention to any of the emails that pile up in my inbox on a daily basis.

I’m not alone in this. Most people have no time to do anything but briefly skim through the dozens or hundreds of emails that pop up in their inbox every single day. And with the average email user receiving a whopping 88 emails per day, that’s completely understandable.

To make the most of this half-second of your readers’ attention, you need to make your subject line short and easily digestible.

I’m not just saying this ‒ the data backs this up. Here are the results of a study investigating how email subject lines impact open rates.

  • 0-5 words: 16% open rate
  • 6-10 words: 21% open rate
  • 11-15 words: 14% open rate
  • 16-20 words: 12% open rate
  • 21-25 words: 9% open rate

As you can see, shorter subject lines result in higher open rates. Email subject lines with 6-10 words are opened the most, and even shorter subject lines with 0-5 words come are opened the second-most.

One tip in particular that can help you craft shorter subject lines is to use words that don’t have many syllables. Try to stick to one or two-syllable words whenever possible. It’s okay to use words that have three or more, but make sure the longer word is really needed before throwing it in there.

Don’t use the word “newsletter.”

Although it’s tempting to label your chiropractic newsletter a “newsletter” when sending it to patients and prospects, doing so would harm your open rates. Email open rates drop by as much as 19% when the word “newsletter” appears in the subject line.

While calling your regular series of value-filled emails a newsletter is a proper way to describe it, the term doesn’t really evoke excitement in your readers. The phrase reminds me of a dry, to-the-point relaying of facts ‒ kind of like an article in a newspaper. If you need to refer to your newsletter in the subject line, try using a more exciting word instead.

Email marketing need a boost?

Make it specific

When possible, you should use specific pieces of data in your subject line. Here are a few examples:

  • A subject line saying “How I Relieved My Patients’ Back Pain By 55%” is more intriguing than one saying “How I Greatly Relieved My Patients’ Back Pain.”
  • A subject line saying “How Your T2 Vertebrae Is Causing You Back Pain” is more intriguing than “How Your Middle Back Is Causing You Back Pain.”

Write genuinely helpful content

Writing good subject lines will get your subscribers to open your first few emails. But if the content inside isn’t genuinely helpful, readers will quickly learn to ignore what you send them.

So, what do your readers want from your chiropractic email newsletter?

To answer this, we need to go back to the foundational concept that underlies the entire marketing industry: people only care about themselves.

chiropractic email marketing

By applying this concept to the framework of chiropractic email marketing, we can understand what it is your patients want from your chiropractic services. And the answer is always the same: pain relief.

The best chiropractic email newsletters will offer actionable, easy-to-follow advice for how readers can relieve the various kinds of pain they feel throughout the day. You can also provide some background knowledge on why people feel certain types of pain, and explain how regular chiropractic care can help them heal that pain.

Here are a few examples of chiropractic email topics that will keep your readers opening your emails for years to come:

  • 7 stretches to relieve chronic back pain
  • How a single chiropractic visit can relieve your neck pain
  • How to get rid of back pain by fixing your posture

When you’re writing your content, don’t just throw in random tips without explaining why they help. Anyone can go on Google and search up “stretches to relieve back pain.”

By using your expertise as a chiropractor and explaining on a physiological level how certain stretches relieve pain, you’ll be going above and beyond to provide your readers with genuinely useful information that they didn’t know before.

One more way you can improve the helpfulness of your content is by simplifying your writing. The average internet user engages most with content that is easy to read. If you use big words or complex sentence structures, readers aren’t going to engage with your emails at much.

To help you simplify your writing, you can use the following tips:

  • Write shorter sentences.
  • Use simpler words. When you have the choice between a smaller word and a bigger word, go with the smaller word. Just make sure not to sacrifice clarity for the sake of simplicity.
  • Use smaller paragraphs. When your paragraphs are longer than five lines, your easy-to-digest content starts turning into a hard-to-read wall of text.

If you’re not sure whether your content is simple enough, you can use an automatic readability checker to figure it out.

Remove inactive subscribers

No matter how interesting you make your subject lines or how helpful you make your content, there will always be a subset of your email list that simply doesn’t want to read your emails or engage with you.

There are quite a few reasons they might not be opening your newsletter.

  • Maybe they’ve relegated your emails to the dreaded spam folder.
  • Maybe they’re completely pain-free and don’t need your pain relief focused content anymore.
  • Maybe they’ve switched to a different email account and aren’t even seeing your emails anymore.

Whatever the reason is, they need to be culled from your list to provide you with a more accurate view of your open rate statistics. You should only be interested in how your emails are performing with people who have a history of recently interacting with your emails. If you allow these inactive subscribers to remain on your list, they will muddy the waters and make you think your emails are less popular amongst your active subscribers than they really are.

A good rule of thumb is to remove any subscribers who haven’t opened your content in at least six months. Your email marketing service provider should be able to automate inactive subscriber deletion. If you aren’t sure how to do this, your provider’s customer support can help you set it up.

Segment your chiropractic email list

Your email list is comprised of all sorts of different people. They are all subscribed to your list because they are interested in how chiropractic care can help them. But within these shared interests are a bunch of different sub-interests.

  • Patients who suffer primarily from neck pain would be most interested in emails about neck pain relief.
  • Patients who suffer primarily from back pain and would be most interested in emails about back pain relief.
  • Patients who were in a car accident and would be most interested in emails about car accident recovery.
  • Patients who have suffered a sports injury would be most interested in emails about sports injury recovery.
  • Email list subscribers who haven’t experienced chiropractic care and want more information.

pie chart

If you’re up to the task, writing content specifically targeted at a certain segment of your list will help you get higher open rates.

There are some pieces of content for which segmentation might not be suitable though.

For example, almost everyone suffers from neck pain because of how often we use our computers and smartphones. Many of your patients who primarily see you for back pain or injury recovery would still be interested in content about relieving neck pain. Restricting that content to the subset of your email list who see you primarily for neck pain would be wasteful.

And even if restricting content with a universal appeal does slightly improve your open rates, the lower number of people you’re reaching with the content will make it less effective at converting and retaining prospects and patients.

Keep your emails out of the spam folder

One of the biggest obstacles to a stellar email open rate is the dreaded spam folder.

If email service providers (Gmail, Yahoo, etc.) think most of the emails you send are spam, they’ll automatically relegate your emails to the spam folder. This will tank your open rates, as the people on your list will never even see your emails hit their inbox.

While there are automatic indicators that an email is spam, many email service providers use user spam reports to determine whether an email is valid or not.

Before we discuss how to keep your emails out of the spam folder, you first need to understand why users mark emails as spam. Here are some of the most common reasons:

  • You didn’t get permission. When you take patients’ email addresses, it’s important to get permission to send them emails. This permission can be verbal, though it’s easiest to ask right on the patient intake form.
  • Your subscribers don’t remember who you are. This is less likely to happen for chiropractors, as most of your patients will probably remember meeting you. However, it is possible for new subscribers or patients who haven’t been to the office in a while to not know who you are and mark your emails as spam.
  • You have a large number of inactive subscribers. Believe it or not, email service providers check how many of the addresses you’re sending emails to are active accounts. If you’re sending messages to a large number of abandoned accounts, this increases the chance that an email service provider will mark your emails as spam.
  • Your subject lines are misleading. While it’s smart to use clever subject lines to improve open rates, flat out lying to people will catch them off-guard and make them more likely to mark your email as spam.
  • Your physical address isn’t included in the email. You have to include your physical address in the email. This is not just an email marketing guideline ‒ it’s the law. If you don’t provide your physical address ‒ or you intentionally use an incorrect address ‒ your emails might be immediately and irrevocably marked as spam.
  • Your emails don’t have an “Unsubscribe” link. Including an unsubscribe link in your email is just as important as including a valid address. If readers don’t have the option to easily click a button and immediately unsubscribe, you’re going to be hit with tons of spam complaints ‒ and potentially thousands of dollars in fines.

Now that you know why emails get reported as spam, you can employ some email marketing best practices to ensure your chiropractic email newsletter always reaches your readers’ inboxes.

Tell subscribers to whitelist you

One of the best ways to stay out of the spam folder is to get your subscribers to whitelist you in their email service provider. Once they do this, your emails will always reach their inbox regardless of what you send them.

The best place to ask your subscribers to whitelist you is in your initial welcome email. This will ensure that all of your subsequent emails reach their inbox instead of the spam folder.

Use a spam checker

If you’re concerned that your emails are going straight to the spam folder, you can use a spam checker to see how “clean” your emails are. A good spam checker will also tell you exactly how to improve your emails to decrease your chances of getting marked as spam.

Don’t use spam trigger words

There is a collection of words that spammers often use to trick people into opening their emails. If you use one of these words in your subject line or body, it will increase the chances of email service providers marking your email as spam.

Want to learn how Dr. Moss gets more leads?

Here are some of the most common spam trigger words:

  • Click here
  • Congratulations
  • Order now
  • Special promotion
  • Great offer
  • Promise you
  • Cancel at any time
  • Check or money order
  • This is not spam
  • Risk-free

Conclusion

Improving your chiropractic newsletter open rates is easier said than done. While the tips I mentioned in this article will certainly get more people to open your emails, implementing a lot of this stuff is challenging and time-consuming.

If you’d like some professional help with improving your open rates, you can schedule a free consultation with one of the chiropractic marketing experts at Ignite Marketing. We work exclusively with chiropractors and know exactly what to do to boost your newsletter open rates to the highest percentage possible.

final shawn
Shawn Manaher
Shawn Manaher is the founder and CEO of Ignite Marketing. He's one part local business growth specialist, one part campaign strategizing ninja, and two parts leader of an awesome nerd pack. He won't eat pancakes unless you call them flat waffles.
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