Q&A was part of Next Level Practice, the most supportive community for therapists starting a private practice. In this video, Joe answers the question based on how to create an email tripwire.
Question
Justin: I finished the email course you had in February, but I don’t have a tripwire. Can you talk more about that and what that could be?
Answer
Joe: Tell me what you’ve developed with the email series. And than we can decide what a good tripwire would be.
Justin: Sure. It was called ‘The Bumpy Road to Becoming a New Dad’. I think it was twelve emails about finding your own resources.
Joe: What’s the opt-in that they get for jumping into that email series?
Justin: It was a PDF with ‘The Five Myths Debunked About Fears About Becoming a New Dad’.
Joe: Is the overall goal to have them do counseling with you? Is the overall goal to join some sort of community? What would you say you hope that these people do?
Justin: I like the second one, but I’m just focusing now on getting new clients, so I guess that was the overall goal.
Joe: Okay, and then have you had many people opt into the email series?
Justin: I’ve had a bunch of people opt-in. It was all the people that I connected with over LinkedIn. I don’t know if any of them are someone who could potentially become a client, it’s all colleagues and such.
Joe: I think that that’s one thing with such a great topic for your email series, there’s going to be people all over that say, Oh my gosh, this is a great email series!’ So, you may want to have different options. So if someone’s local and they want to come work with you, that’s going to be a percentage of it. Are you using Aweber or which email platform are you using?
Justin: Aweber.
Joe: Okay, so I believe that you can go into your subscriber section and you should be able to see what state they’re in and then you’ll be able to have an idea of what percentage of people even have a chance of being local. How many people have opted into the email series?
Justin: About 30 – 35.
Joe: I would send a broadcast email to those 35 people and say, ‘Thanks so much for opting in for this email series. I’m really passionate about this subject and I’m looking at what types of things you would be interested in. Here are things that I’m considering’ – and then you can throw some ideas out. Then they would probably give you some ideas on what they might be interested in. Just keep in mind that this may take you to a national level faster than it helps the local practice. The email guide is definitely helpful locally, but then I would say have one of the emails be, ‘Are you interested in scheduling counseling with me?’ Where would you get stuck in that process?
Justin: The idea, then, that the next step would be a whole new project of writing a book or creating a community and all that would go into that. My one thing has been connecting with referrals for this year, so my one thing would then become this.
Joe: Well, so say you took a bunch of blog posts for the next 26 weeks, and you thought from the mindset of ‘I want to take these 26 blog posts and I want to put them all into an e-book’. Then you’re blogging, you could do Facebook lives that then you download and then pull the transcripts from, so that you’re not doing as much writing, and then you have this collection of blog posts that walks through different kind of times of being a dad.
Then, you can have a physical book that you print and give to your referral sources so that they can give it out to new dads. That then becomes really good for your local branding. And, for probably a $1,80 or so, per book, you can get them printed. I mean, it’s like an oversized business card for you and gives you tons of credibility. So, I would say, don’t view it as another project, view it as ‘how can I take what I’m already doing, i.e.: blogging, networking, social media, etc. and how do I have that be repurposed into something like a book?’
Joseph R. Sanok, MA, LLP, LPC, NCC
Joe Sanok is an ambitious results expert. He is a private practice business consultant and counselor that helps small businesses and counselors in private practice to increase revenue and have more fun! He helps owners with website design, vision, growth, and using their time to create income through being a private practice consultant. Joe was frustrated with his lack of business and marketing skills when he left graduate school. He loved helping people through counseling, but felt that often people couldn’t find him. Over the past few years he has grown his skills, income, and ability to lead others, while still maintaining an active private practice in Traverse City, MI. To link to Joe’s Google+ .
