Although it's by no means the only method to promote your CAM practice, email marketing is one of the easiest and cheapest. Add to that the fact that a growing proportion of your patient base is going to prefer email as a means of communication, and it's worth considering.

The challenge for many practitioners, of course, is that it just seems too technically challenging or too time-consuming.

Enter Intellicontact. In my quest to find a decent email marketing system I could recommend here at Alternative Health Practice, I looked at a bunch of options (and there are a lot of them), but settled on Intellicontact. Happily, it was not only easy and feature-rich, it was also the cheapest.

If you want to be able to send newsletters, inform your patients of new offerings, or easily contact your patients with a few clicks, then this system is for you. And if you have a website (not required), you can easily add a subscribe feature.

Here's why I recommend Intellicontact for your holistic or alternative practice:

It'’s easy

You're likely a holistic practitioner first, not a web geek or marketing guru. You can get started with Intellicontact in a few minutes, with no real experience in the world of email marketing. The interface is so intuitive I think any CAM practitioner can pick it up pronto.

Full of Features

Lots of templates -– you can create a newsletter for your practice in just a few minutes that looks as professional as anything you’d buy.

Autoresponders - an autoresponder sends one or more automatic, scheduled emails to anyone who signs up via a website form. Pretty handy for regular tips, free "e-courses" and the like.

Subscribe/Unsubscribe - You've probably also been to websites with those neat little "sign up" boxes where you enter your email address to subscribe. And when you start receiving messages, you can easily unsubscribe just by clicking on a link at the bottom of the message. Intellicontact automates all this - no technical knowledge required.

Personalized mailings - When you send a newsletter, letter or some other mailing, each one will be customized to the recipient. So Bill will get a "Dear Bill" or "Dear Mr. Jones" note instead of "Dear Holistic Patient" or some other generic marketing killer.

Results tracking - You'll be able to tell how many of your messages were delivered, and how many of your patients actually opened them!

Best value

I compared a lot of different options out there, including Constant Contact and Aweber. While they're all somewhat similar, and work well, Intellicontact was the best and the cheapest, which is always a nice fit. If you've sent out a traditional mailing to your patient base lately, you'll have felt the pain of stamps + printing + paper + envelopes. Ouch. At $1 or more per client, the costs add up pretty quickly. Intellicontact is free to try, then only $10 a month for a patient base of up to 500. (And more if you need it!)

Scalable

Whether you've got 10 patients, or 100,000, Intellicontact can handle your contact list. No list too small or large.

In the end, using email as a marketing tool saves you time and money and generates practice growth. If you'd like to be able to reach all your patients instantly, and for as close to free per patient as you can get, check out the free trial at http://www.intellicontact.com/a.pl/51275

Intellicontact Free 15 Day Trial