The physiotherapy rack card. It’s simple, usually. This two-sided piece of marketing collateral usually includes a big call-out, like asking for a review or extolling the virtues of a new service. The smartest designs also include a QR code for easy access to your website or to a review site.
Given how much emphasis is placed on social media and content marketing in the digital age, you’d be forgiven for thinking that rack cards can’t have much of an impact on your marketing strategies.
But don’t allow yourself to be fooled.
Modern consumers have A LOT of messages vying for their attention, mostly in the digital space. A well-designed physical therapy rack card display has a better chance of getting a customer’s attention than all those fancy digital displays. Educational rack cards can explain the value of therapy and encourage a first-time patient to keep coming back in for care.
In this post, we teach you how your physical therapy rack card display can cut through the clutter to grab a potential client’s attention. We also teach you which types of rack card displays are the most effective.
Let’s get started.
Why Physical Therapy Rack Cards Work: The Evidence
It is estimated that original graphics — that is illustrations, infographics, etc. — are the most effective types of marketing visuals a business can use to increase sales. A recent poll indicated that nearly 41% of business owners felt that original graphics were the most effective type of information they could put on marketing collateral like advertising cards.
Additionally, nearly 20% also felt that multi-page documents, like white papers, ebooks, and brochures, weren’t as effective as marketing visuals. In other words, concise visual graphics, like rack cards, helped their businesses the most.
Blame it on the shortened attention span of modern life and a lack of context. According to Forbes, people who saw ads in context paid more attention to those ads than ads seen out of context. (The numbers were 37% higher to give you a comparison.) The ad that a consumer viewed for three seconds had a conversion rate of 50%. That isn’t much time to cut through all the clutter.
Additionally, ads in context were memorable. People who saw one were almost 25% more likely to remember an ad’s content if it was seen in context. And add some emotional appeal to the mix and that number goes even higher. Those ads were 40% more likely to linger in consumer consciousness.
In this case, your physical therapy rack card display functions as an ad in context. Just picture it: your patient is waiting to see you in the waiting room, thinking about physical therapy…and they see a rack card that talks about their condition!
Rack cards are highly potential clients’ attention than other lengthier, more involved types of marketing collateral.
Simple and stunning is best.
3 Types of Rack Cards Your Physical Therapy Clinic Needs
1. Online Review Generation Rack Card
According to consumer research information on the Concordia St. Paul University website, the importance of online reviews can’t be overstated.
- A full 73% of people who make purchases online use online reviews to assist them with those purchase decisions.
- Ninety-two percent of people polled said that they’d think twice about buying something if they didn’t see an online review for it.
- Another 35% admitted they would be less likely to make a purchase without a review.
- Thirty-two percent admitted to waiting to make the purchase until they could conduct more research.
- And 2% said they’d not make a purchase if there was no online review available.
Aside from all of this, getting online reviews helps your website’s SEO rankings, which means it places higher in the SERPs than your competitors’ sites do (potentially). That means more people in your local area will be drawn to your brick-and-mortar physical therapy practice.
In other words, online reviews are pretty important, and despite being an offline marketing tool, your physiotherapy rack card display can play a big role in getting online reviews for your business. Fortunately, you don’t have to try to get reviews from your digital efforts alone. (i.e. email requests, blog post calls-to-action, etc.) You can use your physical therapy rack card display to encourage your clients to leave you online reviews.
Basically, you’ll put a call-to-action — in this case, a request for a review — plus a QR code on your rack card. Your clients can scan the QR code with their phone and be taken directly to a review site, like the local Yelp page for physical therapists in your area.
To see what those cards would look like, see the video below.
2. Physical Therapy Condition-Based Rack Card Displays
A physical therapy condition-based rack card display allows you to reach people with specific conditions that physical therapy can help with. For example, if your specialties include helping back or knee pain, aquatic therapy, or women’s health, then you can create specific rack cards to address these issues. Your patient may be coming in for help with their knee, but not even realize that you could help their mother with her back pain!
Physical therapy condition-based rack cards help you educate your patients about their treatment options. They’ll learn:
- Why it’s important to continue on with their physical therapy treatments when they’re tempted to drop out
- How physical therapy can help with their conditions
- Why physical therapy is often a better solution for pain management than drugs are
- Etc.
The benefit of this is that these physical therapy condition-based cards can increase your referrals.
Let’s say, for example, that you’re helping an athlete with a sports-related injury and this athlete also happens to have a grandmother who suffers from painful arthritis. You can create a condition-specific physiotherapy rack card display about arthritis. There’s a good chance that your athlete will see the display rack and pick up a card to bring to grandma.
Condition-based rack cards have a couple of features that make them attractive to both you and your clients. First, they’re succinct. They consist of just two sides, which aligns with the “rule” we spoke about earlier — short and sweet.
Second, they feature a smart design on the front with a headline-based call-out that attracts attention. Third, the back of the card highlights some basics about the condition and why physical therapy can help.
They’re easy for you to use and provide information in plain language that’s easy for a patient to remember.
3. Service or Program-Based Rack Card
Here’s a secret for you. The extra services you provide in your physical therapy business, like reiki, massage, acupuncture, nutrition and fitness classes, etc., are actually cash cows that bring in more money potentially than your main service.
Here’s why. At some point, a client is going to be well enough to finish up his/ her physical therapy. Unless your clients continually need physical therapy, you’re looking at a one-and-done scenario.
Once they finish their plan of care, you have two options:
- Say: “Goodbye; I hope I never see you again”. You stop receiving income from this patient.
- Say: “Wow! Great job. You’ve finished your plan of care, but I think you’d be a really great candidate for our Massage Therapy program. This will help you maintain the progress you’ve made. Let’s get you in next Monday for your first session.”
The cash-based services we named above often don’t have an expiration date. Clients can get a massage at any time. They can continually take fitness or nutrition classes. They can come in for a bit of Reiki therapy when life gets too hectic.
Physical therapy rack card displays can educate your clients about these additional cash pay and subscription-based services.
They can be put into the take-home bags you send home with your clients when they first come in for physical therapy. Ad infinitum. Only the savviest physical therapists currently offer these extra cash-based services. You should be among them because this is where the REAL MONEY is made in PT practices.
Incidentally, you don’t just have to sell extra services. It’s to your benefit if you also provide your clients with products, like knee braces and compression socks. Any kind of add-on service or product that you can legitimately offer your clients adds to your bottom line.
The Anatomy of a Physical Therapy Rack Card
Physical therapy rack cards are compact, yet gorgeous additions to your 3D marketing collateral. They typically measure 4” X 9”, are glossy-coated, and contain information on both sides of the card.
They give you a chance to visually show off your practice in a way that’s effective but not intrusive. More importantly, physical therapy rack card displays can add hundreds, if not thousands, of dollars to your business’s bottom line.
What If I’m Not a Writer or Designer or Don’t Have the Time?
Not a problem at all! We work with highly-specialized writers, designers, and physical therapy professionals to help you create branded physical therapy rack cards for your practice. That leaves you to do what you do best: give great care to the clients in your charge!
Key to Remember
It’s important to keep in mind that multi-page, complicated, text-based advertising isn’t what most people want these days. They’re already inundated with too much information, especially in the digital sphere. By creating some beautiful physical therapy rack card displays, you tap into an underused marketing avenue. This allows you to get ahead of your competition easily and simply.
It’s all in the cards.