Jack O'Brien: G'day guys.

Hannah Dunn: Evening.

Jack O'Brien: Good evening. Welcome Pete. We're usually waiting for Ben Lynch. So he's not here today. Clearly you've stepped into the late person's seat. Welcome.

Peter Flynn: There we go. Welcome, welcome. Yes sir, I was sitting on Ben's link.

Jack O'Brien: Ah yeah, that'll do it. Well, Ben is away. So it's us three, the mice are out to play today.

Ben Lynch: G'day, good people. Welcome to the Grow Your Clinic podcast by Clinic Mastery. Here's what's coming up inside of this episode.

Jack O'Brien: What do you say to the clinic owner who thinks reactivations is salesy and pushy?

Hannah Dunn: We actually have quite a ban on emails in our clinic. We have an automatic reply that says this email is not wanted by our clinicians.

Peter Flynn: If we're looking at a scalable way to contact 50 to 100 people, that's probably a pretty reasonable way. So here's some practical tips for improving your open rates and click-through rates.

Hannah Dunn: It comes back to having that really clear client journey. Like it's just another step in that client journey. Jack's just left us now. We can just run the show.

SPEAKER_01: Yeah, no. It would depend on the practitioner. No, no, no, Pete. We don't do depends.

Jack O'Brien: Discounts for reactivating patients. Overrated or underrated, Hannah? I think overrated. Pete? Depends. This episode will be right up your Allie if you want to reactivate past clients in your clinic without feeling salesy. We're diving into Hannah's take on how to get your therapists confident with reactivation calls. Plus, stick around for Pete's strategies on blending automation with personal touch so that you can scale without losing connection.

Ben Lynch: Before we dive in, today's episode is brought to you by AllieClinics.com. If you're the kind of clinic owner who loves to feel organised and stay ahead of the chaos, you'll love Allie. Think of it as your digital clone. It's the single source of truth for all your clinic's policies, systems, and training. Test it for free at AllieClinics.com. And, in other news, applications are now open to work with us one-on-one at Clinic Mastery. If you want support to grow your clinic and bring your vision to life, just email helloatclinicmastery.com with the subject line podcast and we'll line up a time to chat. All right, let's get into the episode.

Jack O'Brien: Welcome to episode 321, I think. Again, Ben's not here to count, so it's just us winging it. I think we're up to 321 episodes, which is super exciting. Before we dive into it, if you want support to grow your clinic, whether you're at 10K or 200K a month, whether you need to fill your books or grow your team, we'd love to explore whether you'd be a good fit for our program. So feel welcome to get in touch, jackatclinicmastery.com, and we'll be able to have a conversation and see if there's a good fit there. Today, I've got two legends with me, Hannah Dunn. Now, I've got some introductions for you folks. Hannah Dunn, she's the John Foreman. You know the conductor from the Christmas carols? You're the John Foreman of the clinic world. You're a conductor who brings the symphony to life. And Peter Flynn, the human calculator who has somehow figured out the secret to making numbers sound fun. Together with Hannah's knack for people and Pete's knack for patterns, we've got the perfect duo for today. So Hannah, Pete, welcome to the podcast. Thanks.

Peter Flynn: It's quite the introduction.

Jack O'Brien: Yeah. Where's your intro, Jack? Yeah, I reserve my right not to embarrass myself with my own introduction, so we'll park it there for a minute. But if you haven't heard my voice before, I am a recovering physiotherapist, as Ben calls it, and a previous clinic owner myself. Love helping clinics to amplify their impact and ultimately build clinics for good. Now, I think my Instagram bio says I'm a wannabe triathlete and lover of fine liquids. So I'll go with that.

Peter Flynn: I'm just interested what you put in chat, GPT, to make those intros. Does that sound cool? And then we just like, Pete's a bit of a, he's a bit of a geek.

Jack O'Brien: I use Brock actually. So you maybe need to let Elon in on a few more of your secrets. Although if I, if I read rightly, Elon who wrote the code for your vehicle, crashed your vehicle into a curb. What's going on there? He didn't crash into the curb.

Peter Flynn: I crashed it into the curb.

Jack O'Brien: It didn't stop you?

Peter Flynn: He should have.

Jack O'Brien: Well, that's a separate conversation for Elon. And speaking of other folks, before we dive in, I want to welcome a few new people to the Clinic Mastery ecosystem. Barbara, a physiotherapist from Cronulla, and Rebecca, an OT, multidisciplinary clinic owner. Welcome to the Clinic Mastery community. These folks have signed up as members to our program. So really excited to have them here and also want to make welcome a few new Ally users. So Abdul and Hoda have joined us. They're long-time members of Clinic Mastery. So Abdul, welcome to Ally. Rishabh, again, a previous member based over in the UK. Anna and Dr. Payo. So we have a number of new clinics jumping on Allie. If you're looking for how to do that, head over to AllieClinics.com and you can get access to your free trial over there. All right, well. Let's tee this up. So we're talking about reactivations here today. And so, you know, when a clinic owner looks at the white space in their diary and they think about filling the books of their practitioners, typically we think new clients, right? That said, like every clinic has a database of patients who have drifted away. So we often think about new clients, but we don't often think reactivations straight out of the gate. So Pete, I'm going to throw to you first. What do you say to the clinic owner who thinks reactivations is salesy and pushy?

Peter Flynn: I think it depends how you do it. I think you can do it really salesy and pushy, or you can do it in a way that sounds like yourself. It's the same with anything that is sales. I think sales to me is education. I feel like when you talk to someone who is a really good salesperson, but it comes from the perspective of education, you don't feel like you've been sold to because they've helped to educate you on, you know, where you are, where you want to be and the gap between those two. And then it's your decision to move forward. And it's very different to, you know, I had one of these just this morning. Someone's trying to sell me solar and they just won't like they just talk and talk and they just don't let you get a word in because they're just trying to push on you. So there's a big difference between the two. So I think it comes down to how you do it is important as what you do. What are your thoughts, Hannah?

Hannah Dunn: Yeah, I definitely agree. It's about how you do it. I was thinking about this when we said that this was a good topic for us to be talking about and something that we need to be working on. And we used to do it really well, I think, or we did it much better than we do now. I think we've become really busy with NDIS and reactivating. And now we need to go back to that. We didn't have that need, I guess, as much. And so it was a question about where our time went. And I think sometimes in paeds it can be that parents get quite attached to their therapist and can be a bit scary to discharge even when we've achieved goals. And so that's where it sort of started from, that we used to have a really clear process about we discharge a family, we put them on their check-in list, we check in at three months, we check in at six months after the three months, so it's a nine month check-in. to make sure that no other goals had come in. And then we had some key points, like if they're in grade six, they're going to be going into grade seven. That's a great point where they may need more support with that transition. It's a big jump going into prep from kinder. That's a point to check in with the family. So we used to have these milestones that we would check in with different client groups. And it's definitely something we're looking at re-engaging in.

Jack O'Brien: You mentioned a lot of different things there that I want to pull on a few threads there that we might go down some rabbit holes later. Pete, I'll ask you, how do you know a patient has slipped from maybe just inactive or as part of regular care into needs reactivation? What's that transition?

Peter Flynn: Do you mean where someone, you'd say they're they may be cancelled and they're two or three weeks out of, or they've just gone, you know, achieved their goal two or three weeks later. Like at what point do we then look to reactivate these people? Correct. I think that reactivation is when we're trying to directly reactivate a person, it's like, is there a specific reason or need for doing that? And then can we generate new clients through that reactivation? Right. So, For example, we can do a reactivation email that is actually more of a call to action for our database to send it on to someone else who fits the symptoms or fits the type of person that we want to help. And that can go out at any point. If I look at reactivation, typically for us, it was about three months after their last appointment. So if they haven't been into the clinic for a three-month period, they would then join the different databases for reactivation. And then we would look at adding tags and we can go as deep or as shallow as we like in that. You can really become a Mad Hatter.

Jack O'Brien: So three months, how did you come to land on three months as the timeframe when someone ends up in the reactivation sequence?

Peter Flynn: See, I'd love to say that there was a lot of thought that went into this and there was this equation, this algorithm.

Hannah Dunn: Data-driven.

Peter Flynn: We literally were sitting there, probably sitting there in like two months, three months, four months. Let's go three. Three is in the middle. Let's do it. It's the golden hour, remember. We just felt like a meaningful enough time that someone had not been in for to then reactivate them if there were any issues without feeling like we were sending them too much, I guess you could say.

Jack O'Brien: Right. And this will vary from profession to profession. I think about my context as a physiotherapist, we would think about, so we were slightly more rigorous in our rationale, Peter, at our clinic. We would think, well, what is the longest period that normal care might go? And we might have someone on, say, four weekly I know that's a bit of a swear word in physio, but roll with the example. Now it might be on four weekly maintenance or six weekly check-ins. And so therefore, if someone went eight weeks without an appointment, they've effectively dropped off, they've disengaged, they've become inactive. And so that will look different, I know in a podiatry context, perhaps if there's a six monthly review for maybe their diabetic patient or they need some orthotic updates, if they go seven months, they've probably missed that six month window. Maybe in a PEDS context, if they go more than a term. So it will apply differently in various contexts. But I think when does normal care expire and a patient falls into inactive, that's when we wanna think about reactivation. Hannah, I'll ask you, how do you balance the personal touch versus automations? How do we navigate that tension?

Hannah Dunn: We are quite heavily personal, like we do a lot of phone calls and things. Because of the length of time in which clients are with us, we tend to have those relationships. We haven't used as many mail outs or refer friends sort of activation campaigns. It is time, like it takes a lot of time, but it also has quite good outcomes. One thing we also check in on that sets you up for these re-engagements, I think, well, like Pete was saying, and not feeling salesy, is around when someone discharges, our therapist has to document the reason for that discharge. And if the reason is, oh, we moved locations or it was just a bit far to travel or something along those lines, that's not like achieved goals. It's all good. This is our forward planning. then our Client Connection team will give them a call and say, hey, just checking in. We just wanted to make sure that everything was good and that there was no other further information that you wanted to share. Because sometimes, like you all travel for a good therapist. And so like, why aren't we traveling? And yes, these kids have complex needs. And yes, there's lots of trickiness to schedules with multiple children and families. But and sometimes that is a genuine reason. But sometimes it's like, Actually, when we get them on the phone, they're like, we weren't actually that happy. We didn't know what was happening. We felt like they were just playing or something like that. And so we use that to then be able to give them other options. But also it gives us an opportunity to say, we just want to make sure as well that you're aware that we'll give you a call in three months and nine months and check in. And if all is going well, then we can discharge you. And often people at the nine months leave and say, no, I still want to go for another six months, check in again in six months.

Jack O'Brien: I love that, really highly personal. I'll ask you for your clinic and then for the clinics that you work with, Hannah, what role do practitioners play versus admin in this highly personal context?

Hannah Dunn: Yeah, absolutely. I think there's a mix. I think it's up to each individual practice. I do think having mail outs, we do mail out for when we've got groups running, which is another good way to get clients back into the clinic who may have not had one-on-one therapy. And so we mail out based on age and those sorts of demographics. But yeah, absolutely, to the therapist's perspective as well, them being able to forward plan and say, I'm going to ask our client connection team to give you a call in three months and check in. I'm going to send that off to be booked in. And then they just, from a practical point, they book it into the Asana calendar.

Jack O'Brien: And that's really interesting that you're pre-framing or setting expectations with the patient that the client care team, which is effectively your admin team, They are the ones going to touch base. So the patient is expecting that call. Yeah. Interesting. Pete, have you had other experiences, admin versus practitioners taking the load of these personal contacts?

Peter Flynn: I think it depends what the outcome is for the personal contacts. Right. And I also love that you call them the client connection team. I think just the name and that is it's beautiful for our clinic. If it's more of someone's dropped off and we think it's more to do maybe with the treatment or the lack of treatment or the lack of results, we would prefer that the clinician called them rather than the admin team, because if there is a little bit of an issue there, it's better that they can be able to talk through some of the things that aren't going as well. And also I think it's just they've got the relationship, like our admin team had a great relationship with them, but the therapist has the best relationship with them. And that said, what you'll find is your admin team normally are kind of used to calling because you say, you know, call these people, answer the phone. pick up the phone and your therapy team are normally allergic to the phone and don't want to do that at all, which is a challenge most clinic owners face. So what we did was we flipped it and said, all right, you're not calling them because they cancelled. You're not calling them to book them back in. You're going to call them. We're going to call it a point of care call. And we just want to add one more point of care or one more bit of value to this person. And so rather than calling up saying, hey, Jack, um be cancelled and then you're like yep and like so you want to come back in no not really um instead you'd call it just say hey jack just touching base um you missed your last session. I just wanted to touch base and see how your low back is doing. You might say, yeah, look, I'm going well. I'm doing this exercise. I might say, you're still getting some issues with X, Y, Z. You might say, oh, yeah, a bit of pain doing this and that. And the idea is that we just want to add one more piece of value. Okay. So with that exercise you're doing, if you change that to doing this one and you increase the volume or you decrease this one here and add this one in, yeah, that'll help you to continue to progress. And that's the key thing. Like in that conversation, we want to say, this will help you to continue to progress. And then we say, look, if you would like any more help, you know where to find us. And for a lot of clients, they would then choose to book back in. But it just changed the narrative of that conversation. People would just rather than feeling like, oh, they're just calling to book me back in, which feels salesy and it doesn't feel good. If they don't come back in, right, they leave with a really good taste in their mouth. Like, hey, those guys genuinely care. Like, they actually gave a shit and they didn't ask me to come back in, but they just tried to add some more value. And then suddenly the therapist didn't mind doing it because it felt good to them rather than feeling like they were calling to book them back in.

Hannah Dunn: Is that something that is just done when they have a cancellation, when they find five minutes in their day, or do they have scheduled time in which they're doing re-engagement?

SPEAKER_01: It would depend on the practitioner. No, no, no, no. Pete, we don't do depends here. Get off the fence.

Peter Flynn: No, no, no. We create the system, but then we humanise the system. So like our top practitioners, I know I butchered that one, but Our top practitioners, our top two or three practitioners would say, I don't book it in, I'm going to fit it in because they wanted to be busy. And so we're like, yep, fine. But the rule was, yes, it was booked into the diary. But there were those exceptional team players that were just like, hey, I don't want to book these things in because I want to, you know, they had a hugely busy week and we're like, we trust you. We know it gets done. But you have to earn that right.

Jack O'Brien: Okay, so I'm gonna press on this for both of you. I'm thinking about the clinic owner who's listening along, going for a drive, maybe they're going for a walk with the dog, with the kids, they're at the gym, and they're thinking, yeah, what Pete said a couple of minutes ago, that therapists are, quote, allergic to the telephone, my therapist just ain't gonna have a bar of me asking them to pick up the phone Maybe you've got some younger graduate team members and Gen Zers who have probably never spoken on the phone in their life because that's what Gen Zers is text. So how do you lead your team to be willing to participate? And then how do we practice? You know, Pete, you rattled off a script like you've done it a thousand times because you probably have. But how do we help our team practice? How do we help our team feel comfortable, you know, hitting the right questions and asking the right things? Hannah, I'll throw to you first. How do you help the team get comfortable?

Hannah Dunn: Yeah, even just listening to Pete then, like showing them the value, like they feel good because they're adding value. That's why they became like the why behind why they're health practitioners, because they want to help. and being able to think about, yeah, how do we structure it into their day? What's the reward for them? And then the reward is also that they've got a full caseload and that they're seeing clients and that they're being supportive of their community.

Jack O'Brien: Nice. Pete, what do you think?

Peter Flynn: it sidetracked by the sugar-free Red Bull that I saw there. Jealous, very jealous. But I think for us, it was doing it with them. We just said it as a non-negotiable. It's not a, I want to do this, I don't want to do this. This is going to be done. We're going to block time and in that time, it has to be done during this time. not done during this time, I want a written reason why it's not done. So there's some accountability that comes with it. But for the first couple of weeks, yeah, I'll sit down with you and I'll do it with you. We'll role play. We'll have a little bit of fun. I'll even do some of the calls with you. I'll call some of them to say it's Pete here, one of the directors of PhysioFit, essentially just touching base. You saw Dex recently. So it was basically that that process of we'll do it with you, we'll provide the support to do it, but the expectation is here and you need to meet that expectation to be a part of this team.

Hannah Dunn: And I think that's with any one of our team members that we're trying to get them to achieve a goal that may not be their comfort zone, meeting them at their just right level, like that just right challenge where we're saying it's like tricky enough, but not too hard that they won't do it. And so for one team member, it may be, as Pete said, sitting with them for a couple of days to do it. With another, it may be one time example and they're ready to fly.

Peter Flynn: Yeah. And for me as well, I think it's when we're hiring, like pair it back to like when we first hire people, I think it's having the conversations around, you know, working as a part of this team. Like for us, we wanted like our mission statement or a little division, I can't remember. I'm going to mix the two up here, but it was changing the healthcare experience for the better. And that didn't just mean being a great therapist in the appointment. It meant all of the things outside of that. And to be a part of our team, you had to be willing and committed to actually doing these things. And so we'd have these conversations going through the interview process. Hey, This is what we do here. Are you comfortable with that? What support do you think you would need for that? But letting people know that these aren't, oh, you know, I don't really love doing that, so I didn't do it. These are non-negotiables. If you're a part of the team, you are going to do these. We'll provide you the support and the time to be able to do it. but it's, it's all a part of client care, right? Like it's not just what happens when the client's in front of you, it's doing outstanding notes reports. It's how you communicate with other stakeholders, other colleagues. It's how you communicate with the client in that period as well. And, and it's for us, it's the whole picture, not just that tunnel vision.

Hannah Dunn: It comes back to having that really clear client journey. Like it's just another step in that client journey. Jack's just left us now we can just run the show.

Jack O'Brien: Yeah. We're good. We're good. So, you know, I think about at my clinic, to your point, Pete, it was a collective expectation of a team. It wasn't an optional extra that you might be able to squeeze into your week. It's like, no, this is not optional. This is part of the role. But what we did is we made it a team collective experience. And one of the things I would encourage clinic owners to share with your therapist team is that there is good ways and better ways to go about these calls. And what we want to do to borrow some language from Jack DeLosa is we want to bottle the collective genius of the team. And I want to brainstorm like, Hannah, what do you say that works well in your calls? And Pete, I overheard that conversation with that patient. What was that line that you used? And we end up collaborating on what works and what doesn't because ultimately to that point earlier, whether our admin team or our therapist team do it, it's likely that our therapists are going to get better results. Now, some clinics might delegate that to their admin team for the purposes of efficiency or productivity, but we know that our therapists are going to get great results. And so we might as well help our therapists get good results. And we spoke to the idea of helping our younger team members get comfortable on the phone. And so, you know, getting used to role-playing and speaking live, like having a literal real-time human communication conversation is important. What role do text messages and emails on a personal level, what role do you see them having in the notion of reactivation, Hannah, to you?

Hannah Dunn: We don't use emails a whole lot, and we actually have quite a ban on emails in our clinic. We have a reply, an automatic reply that says this email is not monitored by our clinicians. It'll get uploaded to your file. Please call us if you'd like to speak to your clinician. Otherwise, they'll be able to discuss it with you in the next session. But yeah, for us, I know for a lot of clinics, it plays a big role in what they're doing and that we're doing a lot of coaching around supporting them about different like three-step reactivations, for example, like, and targeting different events, for example, really thinking about what is relevant to your field. Okay.

Jack O'Brien: Interesting. And so no emails. What about SMS either in your clinic or in clinics that you're coaching and working with?

Hannah Dunn: We're not using SMS for reactivation. We're using SMS, no, just for appointment. Just on the phones. But that comes down to us being a really busy clinic with quite a big wait list and where we invest the time. For other clinics, it would be really important to be utilising those text messages. I think, yeah, I mean, I don't know that there's, I think text messages are more effective than emails, but I don't know what Pete's thoughts are.

Jack O'Brien: Yeah, Pete, hit us. What do you think?

Peter Flynn: It just depends what you're using it for, right? Like, if you're doing a big mail out to the database, I'd be using both email and text. If we're doing it on a more personalised level, then it would be, it would be text. It just depends at what scale are we doing this? Like, is there a list of 50 people we're looking to reactivate? And each therapist has been given 10, 20 of them. I'd probably say, if you have a clinic phone, you know, send them a text that says, I've got one here, you know, Hey, you know, insert name. It's Pete from physio fit, just touching base little arrow down. And then I'd send them a 30 to 60 second voice message. Like if we're looking at it, a scalable way to contact 50 to 100 people. That's probably a pretty reasonable way. So then it's got basically the first part, which copy and paste, change the name, and then a 30 to 60 second voice message, which comes across very personally. It depends exactly what you're trying to reactivate there. You've got something very specific and you've got a list built out. If I'm doing 5, 10,000 people in a database, that's no longer going to actually work there.

Jack O'Brien: It can work, but at what cost? That's going to take days, if not weeks, to pull off. That human touch that is seemingly unscalable is very effective. but over time probably becomes diminishing because we cannot scale it or we cannot replicate it. And I think what I see the best clinic owners do when it comes to this blend of communication methods is it is sequential and that it is multimodal. And with tech-like clinic apps or there's many others around, Peptalker, I'm gonna start listing them off here, but with these types of technologies and apps, you can set it up where if people meet a criteria, they get an email. And then if they book, they drop out of that sequence. But if they still meet the criteria, they get an SMS. And if they don't book and they still meet the criteria, your therapist can get a task to call them. And you can automate a bunch of this stuff. So it means that we are multimodal. It means that we're speaking to the right patients at the right time. We're not doubling up and we're not hitting them with impersonal, irrelevant contacts.

Hannah Dunn: Yeah, the worst thing I think we want to do is just email our whole database every single time we're sending out offers.

Peter Flynn: the more specific I think the better. Just on that, Jack, I think go high level gives you the ability to actually send out that voice message to literally those thousands of people. So as long as you record the voice message in a way that it's personal, but it could be, you know, you're not mentioning anyone's name in it. Hey, I've got a special, you know, we're running this special, we've got this opportunity, thought you might be interested, or, you know, if you've tagged them based on back pain or something like that, hey, you know, I understand you've come in for back pain before, and then yada, yada, yada, just send through a 30, 60 second voice message. That could be a way of doing it scalably. But again, you need extra softwares and different ways of doing it.

Jack O'Brien: Okay. On that, you gave me a couple of segues there, Pete, but I'll take this one. On the point of softwares, how do you respond when a clinic owner says to you, Those softwares cost a fortune. You want me to invest another $150 a month? Seriously, text messages cost $0.11 if you include GST. How do you respond to that?

Peter Flynn: Cheekily, I'd say, let's pull up your zero and let's see what we're going to cut. Because it's not that expensive. We have to look at it from a return on investment perspective. I love Google Ads, but people will spend two, three, four grand a month on Google Ads, but they won't spend $200 on a text campaign that'll arguably get them the same result. You obviously can't do it all the time, but I mean, I think we look at different things through a different lens, right? Like in our mind, we've got the budget for marketing for new clients and that's big, right? And then we've got the budget for reactivating old clients and we're like, oh, that's small. And so we look at two, $300 a month and we're like, oh, that's that's terrible. That's way overspending. But then we look at the front end budget and we go, yeah, I'm more than happy to pay for that. Or when we get out with the team, buy everyone a few rounds of cocktails, there's a few grand. And arguably that's money well spent, according to Shane Davis, but very well spent. But it's just looking at those things and understanding it.

Hannah Dunn: But even like, yeah, if it's $193.99 appointment and it's $0.11 a text, it's 1,765 reach outs that you can have, which means it's only one client to cover that. So if you get one client out of that.

Jack O'Brien: paid for itself paid for itself to you're making money back and you know the difference between reactivation and marketing as you alluded to p is that when we are reactivating a past client maybe they've gone dormant or inactive that patient already knows us likes us and trusts us, assuming they've had a good experience with our clinic. And you compare and contrast that with marketing. And so much of our marketing is branding, is helping a patient go from unaware to knowing about us, from unconscious to conscious. So to reactivate new clients, arguably quicker, arguably quicker and easier, because they already know who we are, they like us, they trusted us previously. So we don't have to overcome so much of that barrier. Does that make sense, Pete?

Peter Flynn: It does, yes.

Jack O'Brien: Okay, now the other thread that I wanna pull on, you sneakily mentioned one of the two D words, you mentioned depends again, I nearly pulled you up on being on the fence, but you also mentioned the word discount. And so we're gonna play a little game, I'm the host, Ben's out today, and so a little game for us, we're gonna play an overrated, underrated game. And you're not allowed to justify your answer, you just need to respond to what I say with overrated or underrated. Hannah, you're going to go first and Pete, you're going to go second. It depends. No, it's over or under. Discounts for reactivating patients. Overrated or underrated, Hannah? I think overrated. Pete? It depends. Not allowed. I'll put you on mute. Underrated. Underrated. Okay, good. Sending we miss you emails. Hannah, over or underrated?

Hannah Dunn: Oh, overrated. Just like, sorry, you missed this. I didn't want you to miss the last email. I didn't bloody miss it. I'm ignoring it.

Jack O'Brien: OK, good. What about birthday messages? Pete, you can go first. Overrated or underrated? Overrated. Hannah? Underrated. Oh, some disagreement here. I like it. I didn't get a birthday message from either of you two. Yes, you did. You just didn't reply. You didn't change in your email. You're sorry you missed it. Yeah. Okay. Calling from a landline versus calling from like a mobile or a random number. So, calling from a landline, overrated, underrated? Underrated. Don't care. I think we get more answers from that. Seasonal checkup. So, you know, it's coming into spring or back to school. So seasonal check-ins, overrated or underrated?

Hannah Dunn: As in like people don't do it enough. So underrated.

Jack O'Brien: Yeah. Underrated. Using scripts in reactivation phone calls.

Hannah Dunn: Underrated.

Jack O'Brien: Okay. Admin teams doing reactivations. Like calls? Individually. It depends. Folks, you've got to check in the YouTube and see Pete just deep reasoning there in the silence. Hannah?

Hannah Dunn: I think from our experience, it can be overrated. There's a lot of no answers. Not that I'm justifying, but a lot of no answers. A lot of time is taken for a single point of contact.

Jack O'Brien: Interesting. Okay, so I'm going to come back to some of those disagreements there. Where did we disagree? We disagreed on the birthday message. So I'm going to ask you both to justify your positions. Why or why not should a clinic consider birthdays as a reactivation point?

Hannah Dunn: Even though I know it's systemised, I do think it feels a little bit more personalised than just a back pain email, for example.

Jack O'Brien: Okay. So even though, you know, it's automated.

Hannah Dunn: I know, but it's only me who has a birthday on that day, isn't it? It's not necessarily, but it feels more like no one else is getting this.

Jack O'Brien: And Pete, why do you think it's overrated?

Peter Flynn: I just think for all the reasons that we could be reaching out, I feel like I get sent so much random shit on my birthday from different companies. And it all just feels like noise. It's got to the point now where I think it's overdone. And so it almost just feels like I lose everything in the noise, and it's kind of irrelevant. And if I was going to focus more on something more personal, like if the birthday message was a voice message from your therapist, yeah, I'd probably see some value in that one. So I guess it depends how you do it. Right. You said the D word.

Hannah Dunn: I also think, um, it's nice. Uh, I actually think you don't need a discount offer or something necessarily on your birthday. Like just even that brand awareness of like, come back to the forefront of your mind. Hey, we just want to let you know, we're thinking of you on your birthday or whatever, like happy birthday. Yeah.

Jack O'Brien: I think it's a good point. And I'll, I'll split between you both and I am for birthday messages. I think they are a good opportunity because ultimately we're looking for a reason to get in touch other than just, hey, it's the 29th of September and we thought we'd get in touch. It's nice to have a reason to get in touch with a dormant or inactive patient and birthday is as good as ever. But also we don't just want to be noise on someone's birthday and you end up in their inbox with the 27 birthday messages from their bank and their insurance company etc. So what we did at our clinic is we would send them a message a week after their birthday and we would say happy birthday and then in brackets we'd say we know it was last week but who doesn't want to prolong the celebrations? So we're still utilising their birthday as a reason to get in touch, but we're trying to cut through the noise by not doing it on the day with everyone else in their inbox and separating it out. So ultimately, we're just looking for a reason to get in touch. And a lot of what we've spoken about today really is about reasons. Maybe it's been X weeks or months since their last appointment. Maybe it's their birthday. Maybe it's back to school or maybe it's the start of a sports season. We're looking for a reason to get in touch and then to contextualise that. So in some of these communications and contacts, I'm curious in either in your experience or in clinics you've worked with, what are some scripts or strategies or phrases that you've seen that work really, really well? What have you seen that's maybe a little bit left of field or maybe it even is conventional? What have you seen that's worked well? Pete, I'll come to you and then Hannah.

Peter Flynn: Like a reactivation email, you say?

Jack O'Brien: Email, phone call, SMS. What's the strategy that's worked well?

Peter Flynn: If you want to get someone on the phone. So if you want to reach out to someone, different clinics will do this differently. But let's say you have a clinic mobile phone. It's super effective to message them that morning. Let's say you're going to call people at midday onwards message at 8 a.m. Every person on a call and just say, hey, it's Pete from PhysioFit. And just letting you know, I'm going to give you a call on this number. between 12 and one, between 12 and two today. So just make sure you save this and then maybe put like the reason, like a really quick reason for the call, you know, to talk about an upcoming special, upcoming event, whatever it may be. But just letting them know, this is the number. What I find is that people will either respond to that and say, Hey, that doesn't work. What about this time? Which is great too. So we can then start that conversation because that's all we're trying to do is initiate a conversation. But people just, I mean, I don't know. I don't know about you guys. People don't answer numbers that they don't have saved in their phone most of the time because it's normally spam. If you want to contact people and you want to do it, you know. meaningful way over a large number of people, let them know when you're going to call and what phone number will be calling them. And you'll find that that pickup rate increases massively.

Hannah Dunn: I'll tell you now, Pete, I'm not answering the call. If I get a message from my physio saying I'm calling you at this time with special offer, I'm like, great, that is enough. I'm not picking up. But Hannah, you're not normal.

Jack O'Brien: You're not our ideal patient.

Hannah Dunn: As if people are picking that up. Are people doing that?

Peter Flynn: But you want a birthday email from them?

Hannah Dunn: Yeah, I know. I don't have to engage with that. I have to answer and take, I can just read it.

Jack O'Brien: It's very tricky. That's funny. That's funny. Okay. Hannah, what's worked well for you? Clinics you've worked with? What little strategies or hacks are you finding effective?

Hannah Dunn: I think just the language, like making sure the language is right. Like it can be like a, I don't, whatever the offer is, but really trying to shape it and use chachi pita or whatever you need to use to get into a positive light. Like, you know, if you've got a, um, I don't know what an example is, but thinking about like what you said about like. 10 days later or a week later for the birthday message. I think you've really got to think about what language. I think some of the tweaks and doing trials at different sendouts and really making sure you've got the data to measure it is really important. Being able to see click-through rates and seeing who is actually opening it. So I'm really interested in Jack, both you and Pete, about what specific programs people are using because I think listeners who don't have any idea don't know. Like for us, we're using just MailChimp and it shows us who opens it, what the click rate through is, but that's not allowing us to target specifically unless we pull out the right route from our client management software.

Jack O'Brien: Yeah, interesting. So I'm glad you asked on the software front. So there's many different softwares that do these kinds of things and they all work. It's finding what works for you in your context. Pete's book doesn't say they all work. Well, they might not all work for you, but they all can work. I'm not on the fence, Pete. So, let me finish, guys. What? It's a yes or no, Jack. It's a yes or no. Okay. If I was to just tell one software carte blanche, I'd say Clinic Apps. I feel like it integrates with most practice management softwares. Hootan is the founder and is on the front edge. There's so much functionality in there. So I love that. But Pete, what do you see work?

Peter Flynn: Clinic Apps has by far the most functionality. If you're going to be tagging people and segmenting by far the most, as long as it integrates with the software you're using. If you want to use something that doesn't integrate, but I'd say is the best outside of that, go high level would be by far the best that I've used. It just doesn't have the same level of segment. It's not built for healthcare like Clinic Apps is, but it's amazing to use and relatively cheap.

Jack O'Brien: Yeah, and not one software does everything. So I think if we speak broadly, when we're talking about reactivations too, we're playing a numbers game. So to bring it back to numbers and spreadsheets, Pete, you and I love this. It is a bit of a numbers game. And so I think it's important that clinic owners approach this with the right mindset. You will get some unsubscribes and that's okay. You might get some patients who for whatever reason, maybe they've just had a bad day, got out of the wrong side of the bed, coffee wasn't strong enough, that respond really strangely, that will blow up or write back and say, stop contacting me, I had a terrible experience. So you will get some of those unsubscribes and unsavoury replies, and that's okay, that's par for the course. You'll also only get a certain percentage of emails or text messages that get opened. and even a smaller percentage of those that get clicked on and an even smaller percentage of those that actually make it into the clinic diary. And so us being cognisant of maybe what some of those standards or benchmarks are, allow us not to become offended and allow us to meter our expectations. So maybe Pete, do you wanna think about speaking to some of the open rates, click-through rates, the range that clinics could expect and what might affect those open and click-through rates?

Peter Flynn: Yeah, definitely. I think before that, people will sometimes… You always get one who says, please unsubscribe me from this list. It's a very angry email back. They've spent 10 minutes writing this email and they've obviously had a bad day. And in my mind, I'm always like, you know how annoying it is and frustrating and hard it is to go and unsubscribe you, myself? There's so many buttons to click. I just want to respond with a little… screens circling the unsubscribe button. You just click that one, you're gone. You don't get these anymore. But, you know, we've all had a bad day. So let them let them be, as Mel Robbins would say. But in terms of click through rates, I see such a wide range. And part of it is, let's say we had a clinic that's been there 20 years. I would expect your click through rates to be lower than a clinic that's been there for three years because the clients in your database are more recently engaged. with the clinic on average, you could say. It depends on the profession you're in, but let's say like click-through rates and open rates in the email, I would say aiming for about 25 to 30 percent. really good if you're getting as an open right as an open right sorry uh open right um if you're getting sort of 25 to 30 you're doing really really well in the scheme of things i see some clinics that get as high as 40 and some that get as sort of low as 12 but it's all relative and at the end of the day that the most important metric is is how many reactivations if you had from it I could have a 12% click open rate, but if I reactivate 30 clients, arguably that's far better than having a 40% open rate and reactivating five clients. So remember at the end of the day, the most important thing stays the most important thing. The other metrics are important for us to, if we can increase that 12% to 15%, do we see an increase in the number of clients we rebook from that? Just keeping the most important thing, the most important thing in 25 to 30% I would aim for.

Jack O'Brien: And Hannah, how does that play out maybe in your context, whether it's open rates or click-through rates? Have you got any insights?

Hannah Dunn: Not a lot of insights, given we don't do it from a personal perspective. So we're not seeing that background and that I'd be asking Pete what he would expect them to be. So it's good to know what they are. But I think also being able to compare campaigns and just being able to use that data to make sure that it's right and maybe retrying it with different language can help. Well, that's right.

Jack O'Brien: And I love that, Hannah, because we want to continually think of this like a science experiment. We want to compare to ourselves. We want to compare to our previous experience. And we're always trying to find those little 1%, pun intended, 1% gains. And so if your open rate in your clinic is 14%, You don't need to get down the dumps about that. Just make it 15% next time. So here's some practical tips for improving your open rates and click-through rates. If you want to improve your open rate, you need to work on the subject. The only reason people open emails is it's got nothing to do with what's in the email and everything to do with what's in the subject line. So can you try different variations? You could utilise a custom GPT or train your own chat GPT. You could include emojis. You could include the patient's name if your software allows you to include the name. We're trying different variations of the subject that will improve the open rate. If you're looking to improve the click-through rate of your email, so we're assuming that some people are opening up and reading it, it is the call to action that will dictate your click-through rate. Now, typically, click-through rates are really low. We're talking 2% to 5% normally. And so is our call to action, is the last line right near the final link, is that clear and compelling and concise? The three Cs, clear, compelling, concise, and does it make sense for the audience? Do they know where they're going next? And so the ultimate comparison is internally. Can you improve your open rate? Can you improve your click-through rate? And ultimately, to Pete's point, we've always got an objective that we're trying to achieve. And if you know the objective, Pete, I'm interested in your perspective here. If you know the objective, you can reverse engineer the activity that you need to do. So if you look at the diary and you go, ah, we could do with 10 more reactivated clients. You can then reverse it back and go, well, that probably means we need, say, 60 clicks on an email. And to get 60 clicks, we need to get 200 opens. And to get 200 opens, we need to send to 1,000 emails. patients to get that outcome. You can really reverse engineer the numbers or segment the database down. So Pete, how have you seen clinics segment their database? You've alluded to tagging or carving out different components. How do clinics segment their database?

Peter Flynn: We're even going one step further with that. Let's say you look at your diary and you go, look, we're quiet between 11 a.m. and 1 p.m. or 10 a.m. and 1 p.m. or something like that. So you might go, look, the clientele that we need to reactivate need to be able to come in during these times. So we can try and reactivate people who love to come in the most popular times. If you think of a physio clinic, it's sort of before work after work weekends, but those might be already full. So sending out a reactivation is reactivating those people. you know whilst might feel good it's probably not going to achieve the desired results you might go look maybe our population of people who are retired could fill in that gap there so let's send it to people based on age and we have a specific offer a specific outcome that we're helping people to achieve and send it to people who are 60 plus that might be retired that would be one way of looking at it. You can segment, let's say using Cliniko, you can add tags to that. And so if someone came in with, as a runner, you could add the tag of runner. Now you need to make sure that the tags are all the same, right? So that the hashtags are done, you know, consistent manner. And so how we typically would do that at our clinic is you would copy and paste. If they're a runner, you would copy and paste the hashtags for runners. If they were low back pain, you copy and paste them. So you're not making spelling errors that then mean that the tags are useless. But then let's say you go into clinic apps, you can then target based on those tags to create a segmentation. If someone's come in who's a runner, maybe we've got a good running off or a running program or we've got the city debate coming up or something like that.

Jack O'Brien: Super helpful. So as we land this plane, Hannah, I want you to think about the maybe speech OT, PEDS, NDIS type clinic who hasn't done much of this previously and has never really had to consider white space in the, it's like it's a new colour. Suddenly got white space in their diary. And they're thinking about dipping their toe in the reactivation waters. What encouragement for them would you have?

Hannah Dunn: Yeah, I just say to them to really think about those key milestones, like what are those key milestones? Same in splice, you can use tags. And so where are we going to get the most impact? I think also thinking about the diagnostic group, like we're working more and more, I think clinicians and business owners are working more and more on setting client groups up for individual therapists to have specialist areas because that's what we're seeing people want to do more and more of. So being able to send out like, hey, we've got Jackie who's joined the team and she's really interested in X, Y and Z or can spot these clients and sending it out to those client groups.

Jack O'Brien: Super helpful. And Pete, if you had a word of encouragement for maybe the clinic owner who's a little bit tech phobic, unsure about unsubscribes or offending people or sending out mass emails at three o'clock in the morning, you know, there's this trepidation. Maybe the clinic owner is a large multi-site clinic. They're doing hundreds of thousands of dollars a month and they're a little bit anxious. They might, you know, stir up the hornet's nest, so to speak. Seek forgiveness, not permission. I like that. Pete, what would your advice or encouragement be?

Peter Flynn: You've just got to start. I think you've just got to dip the toe in and go, look, you're not going to be perfect at it to start with. It's the same as anything that you do. If you've got the opportunity to do it with someone who's done it before, it certainly takes away a lot of the perceived risk. I know you can look at some of those systems. First time I looked at the clinic out system, I almost had an aneurysm. in all the different things, and you're looking at all the different variables and wondering how to make it happen. So it is nice to have someone who can hold your hand. But at the end of the day, it's challenging. It's not easy for the first time, but it's worthwhile to learn and to understand.

Hannah Dunn: And I think, Jack, you touched on a point earlier where you said you're just trying to improve your click-through rates, like you're not comparing yourself to everyone else. If you can start off and then improve your click-through rates, that's where we want to be.

Jack O'Brien: Yeah, I like that. And you can only compare to yourself if you've got started. It's the second and third one that enables you to compare. I think there's some really helpful tips in there for clinic owners. I know our coaches at Clinic Mastery have been immersing ourselves in email and reactivation marketing over the last couple of weeks, so we're ready to go. To your point, Pete, we can prevent so much of the brain damage and mistakes that other clinics have made, by a clinic owner coming and joining us inside CM, whether that's our Elevate program or our Business Academy program. If you need help getting this stuff set up and to the point that we've been speaking about here, if you reactivate five, 10, 20 clients and they become new episodes of care, you've probably paid for your Clinic Mastery membership for the next 12 months anyway. And so if you've got white space in your diary, you think I need to fill my therapists and fill their books. Please do, get in touch. You can head to clinicmastery.com forward slash podcast or send me an email. I do check my emails, contrary to Ben, but send an email to me, jackatclinicmastery.com. I will get back to you. We'll be able to understand a little bit more about your situation, whether you're a fit for us, we're a fit for you, and just to help you make some progress and get started on this front. But Pete, you're knack for patterns. Hannah, you're knack for people. I feel like we've nailed this episode. I'm interested whether our listeners give us some feedback. Make sure you head over to Spotify. You can leave comments on Spotify episodes now. So I'd love you to our listeners head over there and let Hannah and Pete know what you think of this episode. But Hannah, thank you for joining us today. Thank you. And Pete, appreciate you jumping in the hot seat. Good to have you back, mate. We might leave Ben out of a future episode. What do you reckon, Pete?

Peter Flynn: There we go. Always a pleasure. Thank you very much.

Jack O'Brien: So we've got listeners. Thank you for joining us as always head to clinic mastery.com forward slash podcast head to Spotify. Give us a review a comment. We would love to hear from you, but we look forward to being back in your ears again for another episode again really soon. Bye for now. Bye.

Peter Flynn: See you later guys.