Most medical practices depend on patient visits to generate revenue, which in turn, can be used to pay for the various operational costs of running a particular practice.

Modern day practices are doing all they can to increase their patient volume. In an effort to retain their current patients and to attract new ones, they are actively engaging with them through online social mediums, and through direct mail campaigns.

One of the key components of productive direct mail campaigns, is the use of mailing lists. Good mailing lists allow you to reach the right target audience and can produce excellent returns, while a bad one will simply result in waste of valuable time and money.

Generally speaking, there are two ways to acquire a mailing list:

1) Making your own list comprising of current and prospective clients.

2) Buying a mailing list from a marketing firm.

While the first option may not cost you any money, it can take a long time to compile, and for practices with low patient volume and few prospects, this list will be a less than desirable option

On the other hand, the second option is to buy direct mailing list from marketing companies. They may cost a lot of money, but can save you a lot of valuable time required to manually compile such lists. They can also be tailored to your practice and can target a more receptive audience, potentially resulting in increased revenue for you.

Target the right prospective patients

A good marketing campaign finds people who are in need of your services and presents them with the option to make an informed decision. A successful marketing campaign is not as focused on “convincing” people as it is on “finding” the people who are in need of your services.

When you are able to find such people, selling to them is easy. You can simply highlight how your services are different from the competition and use your USP to generate sales. If you are able to find people who are already looking for the kind of services or product your practice provides, it will not require a lot of convincing to bring them onboard.

Choose the right list

Now that we have highlighted how important it is to choose the right kind of list for your direct mail campaigns, let’s take a look at the different types of mailing lists which are generally available through marketing firms. The idea is to choose the one which will help you “find” the audience, most receptive to the services and products you offer:

The house list

This list consists of your current, past and prospective patients and is compiled in-house.  It contains high quality leads as people in it have already shown interest in your product.

The response list

These lists are compiled by third party marketing companies, and consist of people who have expressed an interest in practices similar to yours. These also contain high quality leads and can serve your purpose.

The targeted demographic list

These are the kind of lists in which prospects are targeted based on their demographics such as age, gender, geographic location, etc.

The opt-in list

These are lists in which people have willingly shared their emails with the understanding that they would expect to receive emails, thereby showing an interest in opting for a particular practice. These contain high quality leads and are usually expensive but almost guarantee sales.

The segmented list

This kind of list is more like a demographic list, except for the fact that prospects on these lists are further segmented by other characteristics such as spending habits, reading preferences, travel patterns and the like.

These are just a few examples of the kind of mailing lists available for a practice to choose from. The trick is to pick the right one.