Running an Open Clinic event is a great way to introduce people to your team, show of your facilities, build awareness of the services you offer and explain equipment to prospective (as well as existing) customers.

It's also a great way of building trust, helping people get to know you and reducing potential barriers to people booking appointments with you by giving them a low risk opportunity to familiarise themselves with you and your clinic, for example what public transport they can take, where they can park, how to find you etc.

Most importantly, it's a great opportunity to offer incentives to buy something from you or an exclusive offer available only to people who visit your open clinic event because to get the best bang for your time, this should a customer or cash-generating sales event.

You could combine it with introducing new features like a new therapist, a new piece of equipment you've recently invested in, or renovations/developments to your clinic area.

Equally you don't need to have any reason to run it, you could make it an annual, bi-annual or even a seasonal event. You could combine it with offering education sessions too.

Whatever you do and for whatever reason, you should offer some free and some 'upsell' opportunities that are exclusive perks to those attending the event because primarily this should be a sales opportunity.

The incentive should be to purchase either at the event, there and then, or within a specified time-frame after the event, as that increases your chances of conversion. Ideally the greatest benefit/incentive should be offered to purchase at the event with perhaps a reduced incentive to purchase after the event.

This could be an introductory rate on treatments using a new piece of equipment, or for a new therapist who has joined you recently.

Or it could be a package offer to purchase a number of appointments at a lower rate than would be available at any other time of the year.

Alternatively you could use your event to target your biggest spending customers, and offer them an exclusive 'clinic membership' offer. It's really completely your call what you do and what you offer.

If you're not running events like this for your business, regardless of whether you're a sole practitioner or part of a multi-therapist team, you really should make this a marketing priority.

My colleague, Vikki Marsh, owner of Headstart Clinics, has implemented an extremely successful annual Open Clinic which has grown over the years, as she learns and refines her process. She kindly turned this into a 5 part article series taking you through each of the steps or organising, running and evaluating the success of an event. You can find that link to that series in the What's Next section at the end of this article.

There are two different ways of doing this.

It consists of:

This is included in the Full Site subscription or alternatively it can be purchased individually. Taking this route means you will be able to set up and initiate this campaign in less than an hour.

2. Alternatively you can use the blank customisable web page template included in all existing subscriptions to set up your own Introductory offer web sign-up page. You will need to do 3 things: