Welcome to the Dietitian Boss Podcast. I'm Libby Rothschild, creator of Dietitian Boss. After almost four years of sitting in my dimly lit, windowless clinical office, I had enough, I wanted to feel like my work mattered. So, I did something about it.
I created a program that empowers dietitians and nutritionists to create their own private practice from scratch, following my proprietary system. Before I did this, I had a private practice of my own while working a full time job and I learned a lot about building relationships, marketing and sales.
And I'm so excited to be able to share my proprietary framework with you. So, you might be familiar with email marketing. And in today's episode, I want to talk about mistakes that dietitians and businesses are making when it comes to email marketing. Really excited because I've created great content inside both of our membership and our mastermind programming to help dietitians step by step tutorials, templates.
I've written you email sequences so all you have to do is plug and play. I also have tech tutorials that me and my team have put together and I want to share with you why email marketing is important and the mistakes that I've seen our clients make and I've seen dietitians at large make when it comes to using email to help you get the benefits you want, like really being able to work the schedule that you want and help impact more people.
So firstly when I say email marketing, it's a form of marketing, emails are used to promote businesses, products and services as well as incentivized customer loyalty. So, when you're sending out emails when you're receiving marketing emails and think about the last time you did, you've received an email from me.
You've gotten an email. That's a marketing related email and it's a great way for you to create targeted personalized messages and send them to people who involuntarily subscribed to be on your email list and you can really build meaningful relationships with your customers and it can improve engagement and also conversion meaning sales.
I mean I know when I get an email from j crew or one of my favorite stores and they're talking about having maybe a new outfit or a new skirt or something in season or they might have discounts. I get really excited and I open those emails and sometimes I purchase because I love the skirts from the Jcrew. And so that's an example.
Think about a time in your life when you've opened up an email when someone has written an email and the purpose of email marketing and you have either opened it or you've clicked through and you've purchased something that someone has sent you and that's what I'm talking about today. So the biggest mistake is that dietitians are not using email marketing in their business to build relationships.
Create personalized messages and stay top of mind with potential customers and guess what? It's free. There's a lot of email service providers that you can use that don't cost money of course, there are so many platform options and I can talk about that on another day or maybe I'll visually do a YouTube because I can actually show some of the comparisons.
But today I want to talk more about the mistakes I'm seeing and less about the options for what technology to use. So the first mistake is that dietitians aren't using email marketing to build relationships with customers and subscribers who opt in. And I also want to share that. The second mistake is that we don't understand how important email is and kind of goes with the first mistake.
And so even when I first started my business, it's so funny my story. I got a coach, a dietitian business coach when I first started because of her email marketing efforts. So she had a canoe, continuing education webinar about growing your email list and I thought, wow, it's so interesting.
I would love to learn about how I can use the internet with what I want to do as a dietitian. I didn't have a business or anything. Her name was Amy Soward's and I did her webinar. I booked a call with her and I purchased her coaching and I coached with her for years. She's fantastic and it was all because I had an idea, email marketing was important and that's how she got me looped in but I didn't understand just how important.
I definitely put more emphasis on social media and I'm gonna be honest because I find social media pretty fun. And email marketing is more impactful and it has a higher return on investment. But it might, I don't want to say it's not fun. Um it's just different, right? And there's a lot of differences between email marketing and social media and I think they work together.
But if you're not yet using social or you're not consistent with social or you're not getting the results that you want with social, I definitely suggest that you also consider using email marketing. So I'm gonna let you in on a little secret. And email marketing is the most effective way to market on the internet even more so than social.
This email marketing has a higher what's called return on investment. That means that out of any other form of digital marketing, like search engine optimization, social media and even traditional marketing, like word of mouth, email marketing is the most effective. The cool thing about email marketing is that you can measure it, meaning if you look at you go inside your email service provider, you can see what percentage of people are opening your email and what percentage of people are making a purchase and knowing those numbers can help you then improve the efforts that you make when you send out those emails so that you can increase your conversion rates and your open rates.
So, it's a really important way for you to be top of mind and also learn about your behaviors of people on your email list and then of course make sales. And so I also want to mention some laws because of course as practitioners are probably thinking about mistakes with compliance. And so there's a lot of, I would say bad email marketing going on. And some of us just because we're not familiar in the other ways because we're really eager to get clients, but we want to make sure that we stay free from using any deceptive email addresses, names or subject lines that are considered and you know, spammy and you don't want to mislead people.
So you can actually get blocked if you try to mislead people with email marketing. So if you're sending an email to an individual who has not given consent, then you have to identify the message as an Ad. So these are actually, there's a law can spam act of 2003 that requires you to include the contact information for your business in any unsolicited email.
And you also have to give an option to opt out of receiving future email. So you have to have an unsubscribe button at the bottom of each marketing email as well as your business address. And you can also apply for a virtual address. If you don't have a PO box, I have a PO box, I might change it to virtual.
And so if you open my emails and if you are subscribed and you haven't opened it for a while, search Dietitian Boss in your inbox and you can see how it looks if you need a little bit of a refresher and then of course I have to talk about his book. Right? So HIPAA compliance is a hot topic always.
And as a practitioner you might not need to be HIPAA compliant. It's just gonna depend on what you're doing. And if you're considered a covered entity and if you are a covered entity, you can look into HIPAA compliant providers and if not you can look at a broader group. But when I say providers, I do mean what technology you're choosing in some of the nuances in terms of how your email marketing and so you can seek legal counsel.
And then in our programming, whether you're joining our membership or our mastermind at different levels, we do have access to our team lawyer who can help provide resources about all the questions that you have in terms of compliance because as licensed professionals, we really want to be compliant. And then I also want to talk about a few other things in terms of bad email marketing.
So I already talked about spam, you can't send unsolicited emails and you can't use a personal software for email. That's bad email marketing. So you can't send a marketing message via your personal emails. It's unprofessional. So you can't use like a Gmail account for email marketing, you do have to use, you actually have to use an email service provider, like mail chimp or convert kit.
Now, male chimp is free, Convert Kit is a low cost, but you don't have to pay money for software, but you do have to differentiate that software from your gmail. And again, you can't send emails without permission. So buying a list, although I don't know about you, but I get emails all the time about buying list, especially dietitian lists because they obviously someone's trying to target me and take my money and that's actually illegal due to permissions.
So you can't buy a list. I know we all want to get sales faster. We want to grow our list. We want to make sales, we want to work less. But there is, you know, a process and foundations that you have to lay down.
And so you only want to send emails to people who have signed up for your email list after full disclosure in terms of what to expect, meaning that they've said yes to receiving emails and so you can set that up in your email service provider and have people take a box that says that they understand that they're signing up to be a part of your email list.
And then you also want to incentivize them to join your email list by sending them a fun newsletter and then creating a free guide. So if you've ever opted in, meaning you've given your information, your contact information in exchange for a free guide on the internet. That's a great example of how someone else is building your email list and so that's what you want to be doing again. That's what's going to help you learn more about. Well, first of all, you wouldn't have a list, you can send emails to your list and then when you have a list and you send emails, you can look at your conversion rates, you can look at your metrics and see what percentage of people are opening your emails. What percentage of people are engaging in what percentage of people are actually clicking and taking the action you're asking them to do, another mistake would be selling too hard.
So you want to make sure that you're not being very aggressive. There's some nuance with any type of relationship you're building, whether it's in person or on social media or through email marketing. So you, you, I want to make sure that you're adding a lot of value before you're asking somebody to purchase your product and service.
And also, I know this is a little bit technical, but you don't want to blow up your email with a ton of images and gifs. So none is fine. I mean if I think stripping it down to zero is great, especially if you're just beginning with sending out emails, but less than three is a good standard.
So, think of less is best when it comes to images because they can be clunky and unless, if you have your really sophisticated and you've been doing this for a while, it can just be an extra detail that can be a little bit unnecessary. There are also use cases with email marketing or if you have too many images that can get sent to the spam folder.
So you obviously want there to be higher deliverability meaning that your emails are actually sent and received to the person you're trying to send them to and then already mentioned this earlier but you want to offer the unsubscribe button because you have to give people a choice. And so if you read any of my emails at the bottom of every email and give you a chance to unsubscribe.
And so you also want to adopt that practice as well. So in closing a couple of the mistakes or that you're not sending that you don't have an email list and you don't understand the value of email marketing. Remember that it is the most valuable form of online marketing. Even more so than search engine optimization and social media.
And then the other issue is that you are not practicing good etiquette or practices you're not offering unsubscribe or you don't have your address or your business address or your registered virtual address entered into your email service provider. So just think about those basics when you're looking at how you can start to set up an email list and it doesn't have to cost money if you want to do it through Mailchimp, you can also change your mind.
I've had a lot of our clients start with one email service provider and then switch it. And believe me, I've switched our email service provider at least three times. And it's just because I've made changes and decisions of the business to use a different email service provider. And so I've been able to transfer over my contacts from one email service provider to another.
And that is a topic for another day. And although it's a little bit clunky and frustrating to have to deal with different technologies and importing contacts, what's the most important when I look back on my marketing efforts is that I am sending regular emails so that I can keep top of mind of dietitians and help inspire them and support them to growing their business.
And also I can make some sales and then talk to you about what that looks like so that you can have multiple ways in your business that you're making sales too. Because if you want to make money online and build passive income and work less email marketing is going to be your secret weapon. I hope you enjoyed today's episode.
And if you're looking for more support and you want to apply my templates that have already written emails for you and show you how to set up for your email service provider. I have a couple options to work with me. I have an affordable option in our membership and then I have much more high access to me and my team in our mastermind.
So make sure to head to DietitianBoss.com and look at your options and make sure to apply and look into talking to someone from our team. If you're looking for support to start grow and scale your dietitian private practice, I want to invite you to work with me and my team. We have a few different options. Head over to DietitianBoss.com and apply to have a conversation with somebody from our sales team to discuss your options for your budget and stage of business. Head over to DietitianBoss.com and we look forward to connecting.
