Probably one of the easiest means of marketing your practice and educating your patients is a monthly newsletter. For my first 17 years of practice, I regularly mailed out a four-page newsletter to my patient base as well as about 250 chiropractors. These newsletters kept chiropractic and me on the mind of my patients.

Newsletters help educate your patients on an ongoing basis and that makes them better referral sources for your practice. Newsletters also help keep your patients centered on your care.

We've all had patients who in the beginning of their care were all excited about chiropractic for the right reasons. But, as time went on they seemed to forget the basis of their care and reverted back to a pain-only concept. Newsletters are a key tool in an ongoing educational process for your patients.

With the advent and usage of e-mail, newsletters have taken on an even more significant role. E-mail newsletters have made sending out newsletters much more affordable. In years past, I would spend more than $1,000 an issue to send out a newsletter to my patient base. E-mail reduces that cost to a small fraction of that.

The e-mail newsletter offers several other advantages over the paper version.

First, e-mail newsletters can be much more timely. The ability to get information out to my patients with current stories is much better now.

Second, e-mail newsletters can be in color and contain pictures. My past newsletters were only black and white, because color would have been prohibitively expensive to print.

Third, once my patients had read the newsletter, they threw it away. Even if I asked them to pass the issue on to others, it was very unlikely they would actually re-mail it to someone else. With e-mail, most readers will hit the "forward" button and send the newsletter on to others.

E-mail newsletters carry one other big advantage that many people are not yet taking advantage of. They allow you to easily add others to your mailing list. Why should your e-mail newsletter be restricted to only a portion of your patient base? Over the past three years I have noticed that many doctors who use our e-mail newsletter service are under-utilizing this important resource.

The first step to being more effective is diligence in collecting e-mail addresses in your own practice. The easiest way to obtain those addresses is to add the category to your new patient form. This makes it part of the patient records immediately. Having a patient e-mail addresses should be as basic as having their phone numbers. In fact, if used effectively, you will actually use a patient's e-mail more than his or her phone number.

But why should your patients be the only ones to get your e-mail newsletter? Haven't we always wanted to spread the chiropractic message out to the community at large? Why not add as many people to your e-mail newsletter list as possible?

First, you should be adding people you come in contact with at lectures, and screenings. When you do screenings, do you even have a sign-up list available for people to subscribe to your newsletter? If you do a "Kid's Day," do you collect everyone's e-mail addresses? If you do a public speaking engagement, do you pass around a sheet for collecting e-mails? Not taking advantage of these easy situations means you're missing out on opportunities to tell people about chiropractic and your office.

How about reaching outside our office for e-mail addresses? Are you including others such as your children's teachers? Shouldn't they know what you believe is important for your children? How about sending your e-mail newsletter to the members of your local school board? These are people who are decision makers about the health of the children in your community.

But why stop there?

Shouldn't local politicians be reading an e-mail newsletter from your perspective each month? Shouldn't the editors and writers of your local newspaper be getting a copy? What about the radio and TV news personalities in your area? What about the insurance adjustors? If anyone needs to hear about chiropractic from a positive light, they certainly do.

This is only a partial list of the opportunities available when it comes to adding people to your newsletter list. How many more can you think of right now?

Several state associations have also recently caught on to the idea as they have subscribed to our Now You Know e-mail newsletter and put all the state politicians on their e-mail newsletter lists. This means that every month, each state legislator gets an e-mail newsletter from that state organization with timely news and information on health and chiropractic, from a strong chiropractic perspective.

On a national level, the International Chiropractors Association has also started to send the Now You Know e-mail newsletter out to every member of Congress as well as other key U.S. government officials.

But there's no reason to stop there. How about International? As you can see, the possibilities are endless.

Using e-mail as a resource to educate our communities represents a greatly untapped potential. The more we think about it, the more opportunities we can discover to advance the message of chiropractic. The technology is here. All we need to do is put forth some effort with a determination that we will spread our message and educate everyone we can possibly reach.