When it comes to attracting interest, driving revenue and converting prospects into clients, there’s one tool that delivers big results for nonprofit organizations, software vendors, financial consultants, healthcare professionals—and massage therapists, too.
Believe it or not, in an era when texting and social media seem to compete for everyone’s attention around the clock, email remains one of the biggest games in town.
How big? According to a recent article on Lifewire, a technology content producer, 269 billion emails are sent daily; and despite the bigger footprint of social media in our everyday lives, email accounts still outnumber Facebook and Twitter accounts combined by a factor of three, notes an article from Campaign Monitor, an email marketing company.
Robust research into what marketing channels are most effective, according to Campaign Monitor, lends more data-driven support to the idea that email communication still reigns supreme. Studies show that email marketing yields a return on investment (ROI) of $38 for every dollar spent, which is higher than in any other marketing method.
It’s a safe bet that massage therapy marketing using email is a smart investment for your practice. However, although emailing is second nature to everyone, what’s less obvious is how to use those familiar skills to drive sales and revenue for an entire company.
Keep reading for six powerful tips and tools to help you do just that.
6 Ways to Do Massage Therapy Marketing Correctly, Using Email
1. If You Build (a List), They Will Come
Numbers count—literally—and email campaigns are great tools for getting numbers on your side by driving engagement with your brand and cultivating interest far and wide, with just the right amount of friendly nudging. Strong massage marketing campaigns work from a big, stable email list, and there are two basic ways to build one.
The first method is to import existing contacts. Those business owners who want to focus their email outreach on existing customers will build their list from known contacts. They’ll import these from a local source, such as an Excel file, or from a customer relationship management, e-commerce or similar tool, into your marketing tool of choice (more on these in Tip 2 below).
The second way to build an email list is to start from scratch. If you want to take your massage marketing to the next level, you’ll need to reach a bigger audience. Capturing new contacts will help you expand your reach, and the most reliable method for doing that involves two steps:
First, offer a valuable incentive, which you’ll make directly available to email subscribers. Examples include compelling content from your website’s blog; industry news and updates; discounts on purchases from your web store; coupons for scheduled appointments at your location; or free or upgraded shipping on anything purchased by and delivered to subscribers.
Second, make it easy for folks to subscribe. Offering frequent opportunities to easily subscribe is an essential step, because the best incentives in the world won’t help you capture new addresses if folks lack easy ways to provide them to you.
2. Know Who You’re Talking To
How do you know who your target audience is? Knowing who’s reading will naturally influence how you design the content of your campaign. You may already have a good idea of who your audience is, what interests them and how to hook them on the massage experience you’re offering.
But there’s always more to learn—and the more you know, the more effective your massage marketing strategy will be.
One way to learn more is to monitor your campaign’s performance with some of the email marketing tools we’ll discuss below in Tips 4 and 5. Meanwhile, you can learn a lot from your social media profiles via Facebook Insights, for instance, or from Google Analytics.
By using these tools, you’ll gather data on a variety of useful metrics, including location, demographics and interests.
3. Refine Your Massage Marketing Language
Quantity matters, but so does quality—specifically, the words you choose to send out through your email campaign.
It pays to ensure the language of your massage marketing emails expresses urgency, excitement and exclusivity in upbeat, inviting terms. Since the average adult has an eight-second attention span, according to Campaign Monitor, language that is clear, direct, concise and emotionally powerful will make a strong and lasting impression.
Another tip: Secure permission to add folks’ email addresses to your list by populating your site with permission requests. Newsletter sign-ups are big drivers of subscriptions. Help visitors notice them by sticking them on your site’s navigation bar, blog posts, sidebar or anywhere else conspicuous.
4. Hit the Inbox
The spam folder is where even the best email campaigns go to die. Fortunately, there are plenty of easy ways to outsmart the spam filters, including the following:
• Avoid purchased email recipient lists, which are expensive and illegal.
• Pruning contacts that bounce back or haven’t engaged with your emails in a certain amount of time is a good way to simplify and streamline your address list.
• Large images or other big email attachments where viruses like to hide can trigger spam filters. Downsize your email content to fly under their radar.
• Ditch the lingo. Avoid sales-y terms like “prize” or “free,” which spam filters sniff out, then reroute your massage marketing email to the virtual landfill.
5. Timing Is Everything
Getting your massage marketing emails to land in your recipients’ inboxes where they belong is still only half the battle. If subscribers don’t notice its arrival, your message won’t reach them.
The solution is to figure out when your audience is most likely to be paying attention, which depends a lot on who they are and what their online behavior is like.
Here we see one clear advantage of electronic communication over traditional mail, at least from a marketing perspective. Who exactly opened snail mail, when, and what impact it had on their behavior, if any, is anyone’s guess. With email, things are different. There are ways to measure the success of your campaign.
For instance, your email reports allow you to monitor the performance of your campaigns. This means seeing who’s engaging with your massage marketing emails, who’s not, discovering which days and times see the highest rates of recipients opening and clicking links, and what the click-through rates are for different links in your emails.
6. Measure Your Success
There are plenty of email marketing software solutions that provide reporting and other tools for tracking some helpful numbers to measure the performance of your massage marketing email campaigns.
Tools like MailChimp and Constant Contact are designed to help you keep your email campaigns organized, as well as automate and streamline much of the mechanics of running an email campaign.
You may prefer to outsource the legwork to an email marketing service. Although many require payment, there are free programs that can provide much or all of what your business may require for its campaigns.
Vertical Response, for example, is a free email marketing service that works well for businesses with mailing lists containing 300 or fewer recipients.
This service’s customizable templates and drag-and-drop editor, with options for tricking out emails with brand colors, text, images and social media channel buttons, are handy for businesses who want a point-and-click experience that doesn’t require any code-writing. You can even create a landing page for your business through the portal.
Send in Blue is another free email marketing service designed to accommodate businesses with bigger lists. It supports campaigns with unlimited contacts that dispatch up to 9,000 emails per month. Like Vertical Response, its drag-and-drop user interface puts professional campaigns within reach of non-marketing specialists and non-code writers.
Once you import your contacts into the system, it guides you through creating a profile and launching your campaign.
Kick Off Your Campaign
We’ve covered six basic tips to help your massage business get in touch and stay connected with your audience in a way that cements loyalty to your brand, builds awareness of the services you offer, boosts engagement and helps convert prospects into clients.
Build your list, market to your list and maintain your list, and you will always have potential new clients just a few clicks away.
Christian Golden, PhD, writes about tips and trends in digital marketing and social media for TrustRadius. He is a philosopher by day who loves teaching and digging into the big questions. His extracurricular interests include making music, reading comics, watching really old movies and being in the great outdoors.