Editor’s note: To celebrate National Small Business Week, we’re spotlighting Performance Physical Therapy, a small business that uses email to put patients at ease and keep the business healthy.

Physical therapy can be scary because people just don’t know what to expect. To help patients feel better about treatment, Performance Physical Therapy engages them regularly in a fun, personal and “quirky” manner.

The clinic uses VerticalResponse to stay in touch and to communicate its commitment to compassionate, patient-centered therapy.

“VerticalResponse is a great tool to reach your audience if you want to get in the habit of communicating consistently,” said April West, director of public relations for Performance Physical Therapy. “And, their customer service makes them better than their competitors.”

Performance Physical Therapy operates four clinics in the Sacramento, California, region. The business started using the free version of VerticalResponse a few years ago. As the clinic collected more email addresses and discovered more uses for email marketing, they upgraded to the Pro plan, which offers more features and flexibility.

Performance Physical Therapy sends about 50 messages a week. According to West, the clinic’s emails serve a variety of purposes:

• Welcome new patients
• Invite people to special events the clinic is hosting
• Keep patients informed and engaged throughout a regular email newsletter
• Recruit physical therapy students who may be interested in working at the clinic after graduation
• Express holiday wishes to contacts

Performance Physical Therapy lets their personality shine through in their emails, which helps them build an emotional connection with patients and earn their trust.

To inspire passionate, kind people to join their team, Performance Physical Therapy uses personalized, authentic emails. 

“We use VerticalResponse to build relationships, build trust with our patients and to communicate with them,” said West. “Many of our patients prefer email as the primary way of communicating, so we need to have that option. And with VerticalResponse, we can ensure that those messages look professional and are sent to the right people at the right time.”

VerticalResponse features that West frequently uses include:

• Email editor tool, which allows her to easily tailor a message’s layout to each of the four clinics
• Email Automation function, which enables her to schedule a four-week follow-up message to new patients
• A/B testing, which has proven valuable in helping her determine how to increase open rates, especially for event invitations
• Advanced Reporting, which provides timely analytics on how emails performed and which contacts were more receptive to a message

West appreciates that the app is easy to use. Communicating with all of the clinic’s patients falls to her and a part-time marketing assistant. So, it’s important to create and send a large volume of emails in a short amount of time. “VerticalResponse is intuitive enough for a new staff member to learn quickly,” said West.

She said VerticalResponse also makes it easy to personalize messages by inserting a patient’s name in the greeting. And with the image library and other features of the email editor, she can creatively produce lighthearted messages that showcase the clinic’s quirky personality.

“Going to physical therapy is difficult for most people,” said West. “They might be dealing with mobility issues or a workplace injury. We try to make the experience of coming to our clinics as enjoyable as possible, and we want to communicate that approach in our emails.”

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© 2018, Contributing Author. All rights reserved.