Monthly Massage Marketing Tip
By Michael Humphreys, N.C.T.M.B.

This month, I received an email request from another massage newsletter publisher with this question:

“What was the biggest thing you did when you started your massage therapy center to help it become successful?”

The truth is, it’s rarely one thing that you do great that will give you a successful massage practice. It’s frequently doing many little things well that makes the difference.

While this publisher was inquiring about me writing an article for their publication, I decided to share this story with our loyal subscribers because I believe many of you may find it both informative and educational. Please bear with me if the story seems a little long…it’s definitely worth your time to read this story.

When I started my massage therapy center in 1999, it wasn’t completely smooth sailing.

I had to pay for construction and making the original office handicap accessible. Well, that construction ran almost a month late and I was paying rent for an office space that I couldn’t use yet. In addition, the architect made a major mistake on the blue prints that cost me an additional $1500 in construction costs.

So when that office opened, I had no money remaining to market the practice with. I was so broke that I didn’t even have the money to run a “Help Wanted” ad to hire additional massage therapists!

Here’s The Massage Marketing Idea That Pulled Me Quickly Out Of The Mire...

I mailed out an endorsement letter.

A good friend of mine is a physical therapist. And he remembered that I had referred new patients to him in the past and even helped him when he hurt his low back once.

So this friend had a successful physical therapy office that was near my new office. And he let me send an endorsement letter to his patients. All 600 of them.

The problem was: I didn’t even have the money to pay for the printing and postage to mail six hundred letters.

So I mailed a few letters each week, until three months later, I had mailed all of them.

In fact, I deliberately didn’t personalize the letters (which is a great way to increase your response rate in direct mail), or put an expiration date on it (another great way to bump up the response rate in your marketing). I did this because I reused the letters that were sent back to me as undeliverable. I simply mailed them to his patients that I hadn’t mailed a letter to yet just to save money!

I wasn’t a great writer…in fact, when I looked at this letter recently, I was surprised by how many marketing mistakes I had made when I wrote it. (I’m actually embarrassed to show anyone that initial letter because it is that shaky by my current high standards.)

My massage office rates at the time were only $50 per hour and I could only offer ten dollars off on their initial visit. And if one of my staff did the massage, I had just a few dollars remaining to use towards paying the office bills after paying them.

But despite all of these obstacles, I still slowly mailed out those letters.

And at the end of those first three months, those letters had produced over 20 new clients and half a dozen additional referrals. These new clients started coming back repeatedly and pretty soon, I had some extra money to run my first advertisement.

By the end of the year, I had added over 90 new clients to that massage office and my staff and me were on our way to success.

Looking back at this experience, many years later, I can tell you that I made plenty of mistakes and I was a pretty bad writer at the time. But I continue to learn, study from the masters, and track my results.

That first endorsement letter taught me a great marketing weapon that remains one of my favorite ways to generate new business for my massage practice or for my friends’ businesses as well.

That’s all for this month. On behalf of Eric, we'll look forward to talking with you next month.

Seize The Day,

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