Listen to the podcast here: Should I have a Newsletter?
Episode Summary: In this episode, Phil and Marina discuss the role newsletters can play in a Direct Primary Care pediatric practice. While not every practice sends them regularly, newsletters can be a powerful way to stay connected with families between visits, share helpful pediatric insights, and remind patients about the value of membership care.
They explore how newsletters help keep your practice top of mind, strengthen relationships with current members, and even encourage referrals from families who may not need care very often. The conversation also touches on what makes a newsletter engaging—from seasonal health tips to practice updates—and how to keep the process manageable so it doesn’t become another overwhelming task.
If you’ve ever wondered whether newsletters are worth sending—or what you should include in one—this episode offers practical insights and encouragement for DPC pediatricians looking to communicate more effectively with their families.
Welcome to DPC Pediatrician. We’re Dr. Phil Boucher and Dr. Marina Capella, two DPC pediatricians who are on a mission to share our love of direct primary care with you. Welcome back to another episode of DPC Pediatricians. Today we are talking about newsletters. Now, I should be a better steward of recommending newsletters for every practice.
But as Dr. Capel and I were getting ready to hit record, I was telling her that I actually don’t have a newsletter on a regular basis for my practice, although I wish I did. Now, newsletters for the practice can look at a couple different ways, and I would love to hear, Marina, how you use newsletters in your practice.
But I think our patients like to hear from us and hear what’s going on in the practice, what’s the news in the practice world, what we’re seeing, all of those sorts of things. I am just not disciplined and organized enough to do that on a regular basis.
And so I’m going to let you kind of start us off in telling us how you do newsletters or how you do that in your practice for either for your patients, your prospective patients, or for your community at large.
Yeah. So I did not have a newsletter for a long time. And I think I realized that it was important. And the reason that I think newsletters are important is because it’s a touch point with your patients. And so even those patients who aren’t coming in very often, who maybe only see you once, twice a year.
they still kind of feel that connection. And also, I think one of the best things about newsletters is that for those families that don’t even see you that often, you remain top of mind for them. And then they refer other people to you so totally if they kind of forget you exist because they hardly ever need you they’re not like being reminded oh yeah dr capella is awesome oh yeah that clinic is great oh yeah this and if they just see that newsletter come in even just once a month and they’re like oh yeah oh yeah oh yeah it’s also a way just to
educate right so i use my newsletter as a way to educate about the measles stuff going on about teething about common pediatric myths about integrative approaches and herbs that their families can use for coughs and colds and soles and things like that way i don’t have to
necessarily i can point someone to a blog post all of the articles now that are in my newsletter my virtual assistant then puts on my blog and that also helps to increase my seo so those are a couple of the really big benefits of having a
newsletter now i didn’t have it for a long time because i just felt like oh this is a lot of work i would have to figure how to design it myself and how to write the articles and blah, blah, blah. Now I’ve created a system where I have a virtual assistant who helps me with it.
Once a month we meet, we decide on the articles. I use chat GPT to help me write the articles. Now I edit them. I review them. I give chat a very long prompt saying, I want the article to be about this. And specifically include this point and this point and this point and this point
and take the angle of me being an integrative pediatrician or whatever angle you want to take, right? So chat has really helped. The paid version of chat I recommend for this purpose because it’s going to be more robust and it’s going to learn your voice as well.
it’s gonna be helpful to generate the content so that it doesn’t feel so overwhelming. Because for me, the overwhelming part felt like I have to sit down and go, who has time?
Right, like get my typewriter out. I have 17 other Chrome tab windows open and you want me to add another one to write.
Yes. So I think AI tools have really made a big difference in having an assistant who does all the formatting. We basically meet and decide on the article topics. My job is to deliver the articles to her, but it’s really quick with the help of AI tools. And then, of course, I always read them,
make sure that I agree because sometimes AI can make mistakes. I send them to her and then I say, hey, let’s highlight this midwife in our community or let’s highlight this cool event. And she helps me find events in the local community to highlight.
And so it’s just it’s now it’s this like just process that we have in place. It was a little bit hard in the beginning to get that going. But once we got it going, literally takes 30 minutes of my time once a month meeting with her, producing those articles. And all of my members get a newsletter.
And I actually share that newsletter with my fellow DPC pediatrician who shares my office. So we both benefit.
Beautiful.
Kind of co-branded. And she also sometimes contributes articles or I ask her, Hey, what should we talk about this month? And she’ll give me ideas. So it’s a nice little cooperative model and our parents love it. And just this month for February, for February, since it’s Valentine’s day, we,
I said, I want to ask parents for Google reviews. And so I asked my assistant, put a little thing in there, share the love and have like a QR code and a link to my Google reviews page. And I got a couple of nice Google reviews from that.
So it was like, it doesn’t have to be super complicated. The basic backbone of my newsletter is one or two articles, depending on how I’m feeling, maybe one for younger children and one for older children. topics related to those groups and then highlighting one or two events in the local community.
And then sometimes I highlight a product that I like, but it’s not to make money. It’s just like, Hey, this is a cool thing you should know about. So that’s all, it doesn’t have to be super complicated, but it’s a touch point that keeps you on their mind and also acts as a potential
source of referrals and reviews and things like
All right, you convinced me. I mean, I have drank the Kool-Aid. I just have trouble executing on the Kool-Aid. I think for me, what I was hearing that really stood out is one, it’s another touch point. It’s special. Like if they’re coming in, if they have a new baby and they’re coming in,
they already have plenty of touch points with you and they’re probably too overwhelmed to do that. but for our families that don’t come in on a regular regular basis you’re at least getting a little bit of face time with them even if it’s just them glancing through
your newsletter occasionally and feeling that connection to oh i knew she would say something like that or oh that’s really interesting it also gives them the opportunity to forward that to a friend of hey did you this about this that or the other thing that’s going on
fyi and then that they well my pediatrician never sends out a newsletter yeah but um another way to get find more people in the community to know about you right i tend to wish that i had a newsletter every time that we need to send an email of like some sort of administrative change or something like that.
I wish I had sent them a newsletter on a regular basis so they wouldn’t be so surprised to get an email from us. And we could tell them that now credit card processing fees will be part of their monthly fee or something along those lines. Because then when we do send out an email, it’s like, oh,
bad news or something like that finance-wise or administratively or hours-wise. And if we had a newsletter on a regular basis, it would make it much easier to be like, hey, here’s some good news and then here’s a little bit of bad news here at the end.
Just saying we’re going to be closed this day or we had to change our hours or your bill is going to be slightly higher now. Something along those lines, if we communicated them on a regular basis, it wouldn’t be so challenging to send that email of, hey, we’re going to raise prices or something like that.
Uh-huh. Yeah, exactly. Now, in terms of tools that we use, I actually use your light-labeled product, Phil Praktos. Oh, that’s great.
Yeah, I know. Another reason that I should do a newsletter is because I have a company that exists to send newsletters to patients. Exactly.
Right. You already have it there. But yes, I found that helpful. It was a little bit painful to learn to use that system, but then I trained my virtual assistant on how to use it, and we’ve figured out all the kinks. And You don’t have to have something that’s a very robust kind of like system with
automations and all these other things. But you can use something like what is it called? MailChimp or.
MailChimp, Kit. You can start your own like Substack and just use that. Like Substack works as an email platform too and is a way to kind of be your blog and your email newsletter all in one. And so that’s another good tool. There’s tons of ways to get it.
There are tons and tons of free ones, low cost ones. It doesn’t have to be a high cost thing. But I would just say like creating a system that works for you and asking for help. And even if it’s just like your spouse or your teenager or like someone who can
help and or like maybe a parent of your practice who just either wants to help or wants to make a few bucks a month, like just helping you with that and maybe some social. I think it pairs really well with social media stuff. Sure. You’re going to hire someone to do that.
having them help you with social media, my virtual assistant, I record, I’m getting better at finally, I block an hour every Monday on my schedule, social media videos, and I have social media videos for a couple of things, not just my practice.
And so it just gives me that hour of like, just hammer out like five or six videos. And then I send them to my respective people and they’re the ones who edit them and they’re the ones who put the captions. And it just saves me from having to do all that work that I don’t really like doing
because over Instagram reels on my phone, it’s just not my, but yeah, so find, find help. Don’t, don’t feel like you need to, maybe if you love doing that kind of thing, by all means do it in the beginning. And then eventually if you feel like you’re getting too busy,
then offload it and just train someone else on how to do it.
I think you could honestly write the content while you’re driving across town, you’re commuting. You can have chat, you can open up ChatGPT and say, do like the hand free one where you’re just talking with them and say, Hey, I’m having a hard time coming up with ideas for my pediatric newsletter.
Give me five topical ideas that parents would want to hear. And then you could talk through it with chat and be like, okay, write a four paragraph, blog in my voice discussing this aspect of croup and what I know about measles and those sorts of things. Have it put together. By the time you get to work,
then you can just open Chachapiti on your computer and you’ve got something that is ready to copy and paste in your voice to put into the newsletter. Like that would be, I mean, this is just me thinking out loud of how could I integrate this into my day while I
drop my kids off at school and then I commute over to my office. And instead of just listening to podcasts or audiobook or something like that, I could just talk to Chachapiti for a few minutes and come up with a newsletter.
so yeah ai tools are making it a lot easier and just having an assistant who can do the kind of like the the detail work for you yeah because futzing with the formatting on a newsletter i could spend hours doing that and then i’m like okay a
few hours of my life are gone was that really worth it i could have paid someone 20 an hour to do that for me so
And at the end of the day, I’m one to just ship, like hit full send on those sorts of things. Even if it’s imperfect, you didn’t get the formatting just right. People are going to be, this is something that is a touch point. It is not the touch point. And so they’re going to be having,
they’re going to be in an elevator or they’re going to be the grocery store. They’re going to pick up their kid from soccer practice. They’re going to be looking at their email. They’re going to see that they’re going to take one little vibe from it and they’re going to move on.
And they’re going to have those little boxes. bits that add up to all of those touch points and their feelings about you and the the way they rely on you but it is not going to be the quintessential thing that if
you make a mistake or the formatting is a little off or it’s a week late yeah none of those reasons are none of those are good reasons to say well i can’t do it or i need to spend six more hours on it before i hit send
exactly yeah decide where that threshold is for you that’s just like it’s better to be done than perfect right yeah absolutely but i would i definitely just again encourage you to get some help doing it don’t try to do it all yourself because your time is better spent on maybe deciding the topics that you want to highlight
but then just offload the rest because again you can pay someone 20 25 an hour to do that for you versus you who are worth a lot more per hour for the work that you can do. And also just having more time with your family or doing the things that you like to do.
i love i love your idea specifically of getting somebody like a patient in your practice because i bet there’s a lot of parents out there that could use a little bit of extra money and they already love your practice because they spend the money
on it every month and they love you and would love to help and so i mean our office manager now she’s full-time she was a parent a patient parent in our practice And when we were looking for a new one, the rest of my staff,
like we thought of her and we reached out to her to see if she would be interested in the position. And she’s our full-time office manager now. And she’s amazing. You have those people that already are bought into your model and you can make it
even better for them by getting to participate and be behind the curtains a little bit. And who knows where that would go from there. But I think that’s a great way to get that initial virtual assistant style help.
Absolutely. Yeah. So if you don’t already have a newsletter, consider creating one. Consider creating a process that works for you also that doesn’t feel overwhelming. because again it’s a great opportunity for it to be a touch point it helps if you especially if you post them and i encourage you to post those articles you’re
creating for your newsletter you already did the work then post them on your blog for your website and that helps drive more people to your website it helps drive what’s called search engine optimization that you’re creating fresh content on your website regularly And that kind of just puts you up higher and higher on those Google search results.
So that helps your visibility and helps people to find you as well. Mine definitely, I’ve seen that happen. The more we add to our website, it’s just going up and up and the more Google reviews we get and things like that help. So consider a newsletter.
I think most of us could really benefit from having it and hopefully you can find a way that works for you. Thanks everyone for listening and until next time.
