3 min read

MailChimp for Acupuncturists

Email marketing is one of the best ways to continue and build a relationship with your patients outside of the clinic. The ability to reach your patients at a personal level and to show you care for their well being is very powerful.

Using an email marketing tool helps in many ways:

  • Send emails to multiple people at once
  • Create beautiful emails with templates
  • Track user engagement with emails

The benefits of email marketing is a larger topic deserving of its own blog post and I will save it for another day.

When I talk to acupuncturists, the email marketing tool that most are using is MailChimp. So, in this blog post, I want to give you actionable steps you can use today to start your email marketing journey with MailChimp.

MailChimp is a very affordable (free) email marketing tool that is both intuitive and simple to use.

Signup for MailChimp

So to get started, you’ll want to sign up for a MailChimp account, which you can do here: http://mailchimp.com

Create a List

A list is a group of patient email addresses. You can create different lists, for example, you might want to create a list for patients with chronic pain or a list for patients with allergies and then, you can send relevant emails to each group.

The steps to create a list are:

  1. Click on the “List” tab.
  2. Click the “Create List” button.
  3. Fill in the “List details”. To keep it simple, let’s create a list for general emails called “Authentic Acupuncture Newsletter”.

Import Subscribers

Now we’ll need to populate our list with subscribers. Subscribers are email addresses of patients that have given you permission to email them. A way to ask your patients for permission is to include a check box on the initial patient intake form.

To import subscribers, on your list:

  1. Click the “Add subscribers” drop down.
  2. Click “Import subscribers”.
  3. Select an option for importing, if all your contact are in an Excel spreadsheet, click “Copy/Paste from Excel”.

Create a Template

Now the fun part begins, designing the look and feel of the emails. The email template is an extension of your brand, so you might want to follow the color scheme of your logo.

Create your template by:

  1. Click the “Templates” tab.
  2. Click “Create Template”.
  3. Click the “Themes” tab.
  4. Select a template that you like.
  5. Use the template designer to make changes.

Create Campaign

A campaign is just a fancy marketing term for the email message being sent to your patients. You’ll create a campaign within MailChimp to send your email.

To create a campaign:

  1. Click the “Campaigns” tab.
  2. Click “Create Campaign”.
  3. Select a “Regular Campaign”.
  4. Select “Send to entire list”.
  5. Enter the name of this campaign and the email subject, I like to make them the same.
  6. Design the email with text and images. Here, I like to keep it simple.
  7. Test the email, by clicking on “Preview and Test” -> “Send a Test Email”.
  8. When you’re satisfied with the email, click the “Send” button.

Congratulations! You’ve just sent your first

MailChimp email newsletter!

How Jasmine Helps

Jasmine helps in that it is a central location and repository for patient contact information. And since Jasmine is built on the Salesforce platform, a MailChimp for Salesforce plugin exists to sync your patient information from Jasmine into MailChimp.
For more information about MailChimp for Salesforce, visit:
As always, I love hearing from you. Please leave comments below or email me at mintotsai@jasminepm.com.
Minto Tsai
Founder
Minto Tsai

Minto Tsai