Marketing 101 for Chiropractors
Digital marketing is evolving faster than ever, and as a chiropractor, you're not just a healthcare provider—you’re also the CEO and marketer of your practice. Without a solid grasp of marketing fundamentals, it's easy to fall for one-size-fits-all strategies that waste time and money.
Join us as we break down proven, cost-effective, and innovative marketing tactics designed specifically for chiropractors. From social media mastery to Google Ads that convert, we’ll equip you with the tools to attract more patients, build lasting relationships, and dominate your local market. Stay ahead, stay profitable, and take control of your practice’s growth!
Marketing 101 for Chiropractors
Paper Wins: Handwrytten Notes That Retain Patients
Your patients are overwhelmed by pings, promos, and pop-ups. A single handwritten note still slices through the noise, gets opened, gets read, and often gets displayed—becoming the quietest, most persuasive billboard in the room. We sit down with David Wax, founder of Handwrytten, to unpack why pen-on-paper wins attention and how clinics can scale the habit without losing the human touch.
We trace David’s path from building a mass texting company to designing robots that hold real pens and write 30,000 cards a day. Then we get tactical for healthcare: when to send notes (new patient welcomes, anniversaries of care, birthdays, milestones, condolences), what to say (keep it under 500 characters and specific), and how to turn those moments into retention, reviews, and referrals. You’ll hear why notes triple open rates versus printed letters, how they bypass gatekeepers, and the surprising power of display—cards standing on pianos, desks, and shelves that keep your name top of mind.
If time is your constraint, we cover the systems side: one-off cards for sensitive events, business plans for volume, CRM and Zapier triggers, and adding QR codes that track scans by recipient. Choose from 30+ handwriting styles, replicate your signature, and design folded cards that look great and stand up. The goal is simple: replace forgettable “expected service” with memorable, unexpected care that feels personal and scales reliably.
Ready to build loyalty instead of just chasing clicks? Press play, steal the playbook, and start with one thoughtful note today. If this conversation sparked an idea, subscribe, leave a review, and share it with a colleague who could use a retention win.
Check out www.handwrytten.com for yourself.com
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Hey everybody, welcome to another episode of Marketing 101 for chiropractors. A really cool episode this week about, you know, maybe some archaic marketing that actually works really well. And David Wax is with us from Handwritten. Thanks for joining us, man.
SPEAKER_01:Thank you so much for having me, Doctor.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, this is a great one. I mean, I've been harping about uh this type of marketing since the inception of probably 20 years or whenever I've been doing it. So uh and I keep coming back to it. So it's really great that you're here and maybe dive deep into the nitty-gritty of how this all works about sending people mail and how it really, really does work. How'd you get into all of that?
SPEAKER_01:Um, so I started uh handwritten back in 2014. So I've been doing this 11 years now. Prior to handwritten, I um had a text messaging company that I started in 2004. And that company, we we did um texting for like uh Tropical Smoothie Cafe and Sam's Club, Office Max, Blue Man Group. We sent millions of texts a day just for Abercrombie. And what I realized from that is while texting worked, everybody was receiving a million texts a day. Um, and then you were getting 135 emails a day, and you're getting you were starting at the time in 2014 to get Slack notifications and then Teams and Twitter and Facebook and all the rest. And all this digital noise was just overwhelming. And again, that was 11 years ago. So what I thought is gee, there has to be a better way to create lasting, durable, more personal relationships with customers. And I thought handwritten notes, because when I received one, I put it on display, as you might see behind me, and I knew my clients and customers and employ my clients and employees did too. So um, when I sold the last company, I sat down to try to write handwritten notes to all of them, and my hand got tired, I ran out of stationary, all the typical stuff, and that's where the new idea came from. And uh now I believe we're the largest in the world doing this. We use um Al Motto is to make sending handwritten notes as easy or easier than sending an email. And we do that through 200 custom-built robots that we built ourselves in our facility in uh Tempe, Arizona. Each robot holds a real pen, and they write out uh in mass about 30,000 pieces a day, uh, sometimes more. Right now, this is a recording over the holidays, so it's a busy time for us. Um, but yeah, I mean, uh it's it's uh that's kind of what we do. And and clients across everything from healthcare, uh veterinarian care, retailers, nonprofits, all see tremendous value out of this type of marketing when they tie it into their other forums.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, no, I love it. So that's cool. The nitty-great. So 30 robots, I mean, you guys are pumping it out. 200 robots. 200 robots. 200 robots 200 robots doing this every single day. That's amazing. That's that's a that's a system. You've created something big. Okay, so now in our profession, you said healthcare, um, handwritten notes. You know, I remember sitting there around this time of the year getting a few boxes of the cards from Costco, the Christmas cards, yeah, handwriting them. And I've always forgot, you know, 30% of my patients. I tried to send the ones there, and then you started picking your best patients, which is horrible. You want to pick every patient, right? You want to send it to everybody. Um, and I remember doing it, and you were absolutely right. I went through a couple pens, you do go to the post office, stamp them all, send them all out. And it was it was totally worth it. It was worth whatever it costs, you know, 150 bucks in postage to do it. Um, but but it was lost over time because of the effort and the time it takes to do this. And in small businesses like chiropractic offices, dental offices, you only have five, 10, 15 employees. Um, this becomes cumbersome. And you've kind of solved that. You said, hey, here we we'll do this. So, how would a dentist or a chiropractor in their office utilize something like this handwritten notes? What are some examples that you see done every day?
SPEAKER_01:Um, well, the number one is thank you for becoming a client, welcoming clients. Um, you know, you could use this when you open up a new practice to kind of geofence the area around your practice and send prospecting notes, but that's going to be expensive because postage, if nothing else, is very expensive. Um, and then, you know, we're a manufactured product, we're not a printed product. You know, the very first step in our process is to print the greeting card that we write on, but then it's a manufactured process. It gets fed into a robot to write it, another robot to QA it, another robot to stuff it, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. So it's never going to be as cheap as junk mail. But junk mail has the word junk in it, and this is kind of higher upstream. So we recommend using this for where you already have a relationship and you're trying to build on that and um keep that going. And you brought up the very good point. You said you when you write your handwritten notes, you pick your best clients. And that's what we tell people is you know, they say, Oh, you know, I want to use handwritten for 30 clients. I say, and what we say is, okay, um, before finding a service like handwritten, you'd have to pick your 30 best patients or clients, right? But with a service like handwritten, you don't have to put on that filter. So you can provide the exact same experience to all your patients and not limit where, because it's it's I guess it's an investment in money, but it's really an investment in their time. And we take away that that feature. So um getting back to your question, uh it's anniversary of patient, it's new patient, it's death of patient um condolences. We do a lot of that in veterinarian. I mean, we have a whole business dedicated to the uh putting down pets. So um, you know, those are kind of the main use cases uh for the medical field.
SPEAKER_00:So you order in bulk. So let's look at from your perspective here. Um you don't order one note, do you?
SPEAKER_01:You can. Um at handwritten, a single note is three dollars and seventy-five cents. I'm I I'm not here to push handwritten with a why in my company. I'm here to really talk about handwritten with an I, which is the magic of you sitting down and writing a handwritten note. And then after that, if it becomes too cumbersome, use a service like ours. But with handwritten with a why, you can uh send as few as one. You're gonna pay the most, you know, the most retail rate we have, which is$3.75 a card. Um, and then if you do any sort of volume, there's a number of ways to get discounts, which would be um placing an order in bulk or prepaying for a number of cards, or the best option for most people is a business plan where you pay a monthly fee and then you get a drastically reduced rate off the cards, um, in addition to a number of other services included in that. Okay, but yeah, you can you can absolutely go to our website and buy one card. And if you want to do bulk and you want every single card to be different, the message can certainly be different, but so can the card. So if you want to put a different image on every single card, there's no additional fee for that.
SPEAKER_00:Very cool stuff. Okay, so you blew my mind with the one card thing. There was really no one out there doing the one card because that I mean, condolences, yeah, that would be great. We don't even do that. And starting tomorrow, I'm using handwritten and we're gonna start doing that. I didn't even know that was an option. So my office is gonna be on board right away with that. Happy birthdays, all these things for three bucks, four bucks. I I don't think I can do it in my office for three or four bucks because of time. Yes, correct. I can buy the envelope, I can buy the card for 50 cents, I can put it uh a stamp on it. Yes, I know. And I could probably do it for a buck 75, but my time correct, and it's 375. I mean, that's worth way more than my time, yeah.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, and in volume, it's you're talking two dollars, less than two dollars, a buck fifty. So, you know, it just depends on what you want to do. But um a lot of people say, well, is this as good as you sitting it down, your sitting down yourself and doing it? And my answer to that is kind of twofold. Number one, it well, threefold. Number one, nobody will know. You know, we've spent 11 years making the world's best handwriting robot genuinely. Go to handwritten.com and get your free sample kit and you'll see for yourself. So that's number one. Number two is this isn't a new thing. You know, back in let's let's take a time travel trip back to the 60s, and you wrote into the CEO of TWA Airlines because you had a good or bad experience, and you get a note back from the CEO of TWA. Do you think the CEO of TWA really sat down and wrote that note? Absolutely not. They had some admin do it. So it wasn't a robot, but it was an admin doing it. You know, it wasn't that same person. Um, but my new answer to that question, just to share, is it's often not a choice between handwritten with an I and handwritten with a why. It's often a choice between handwritten with a why or nothing, just for what you said. I mean, time is your most valuable commodity, and you can't do it. And even if you visit our website and punch out every handwritten note separately or do it on our iPhone app, after a week or two, you'll stop doing that, even if that's easy. So it's really about making it automated, whether, you know, for birthdays, you mentioned birthdays, you can go on our website and we have a birthday automation tool where we'll automatically send out a card with a Starbucks gift card or whatever every year, two weeks before their birthday, you just have to go in once a year and update the message and the card design so it doesn't look stale. Um, and and we'll handle the rest. Or we integrate with Zapier and all these other geeky tools, your CRM system probably, to allow you to automate that fully. And that is where it gets interesting for you because if you don't have to upload a book spreadsheet every month or every week, you know, it's a way better system and it just goes on autopilot.
SPEAKER_00:Perfect. Well, I mean, yeah, that's that's it. I mean, it makes perfect sense for all this. So now those are all the ways we can use it. We can use it for new patients, we can send every new patient one. So I'll get into the marketing one-on-one for all this stuff, and and the and the reason why you may want to consider this for your business is because of the emotional component of marketing. I mean, we get into a lot of psychology and why we should do what we do. It's easy to fall into the easy stuff to do. Um, you know, uh just pay for Google Ads or just you know, be aware online or do our SEO to stay on top of it for competition to get the calls. That's great. But you know, the mistake we were making by sending the stuff to our good patients, and I hate using that word, to our good patients, is that they already like you. You don't have to do anything for them. They're probably going to be lifelong clients, anyways. That's why you like them as a business owner. So you need to send it to everyone. You really do, because you may turn a colder prospect or a colder patient or a colder client to be like, wow, they actually do care. And you can swing them onto your lifelong client list afterwards. And these things definitely do that. It's always these little things that come back years later and they tell me, Hey, doc, you know why I've been with you for 10 years? And I'm like, Really? Because of that, not the great care that we've been giving you? No, because you listened to me, or you did this, or you thought about me, or you gave me that note when my dog died, or something along those lines that left an emotional component to them. So that's that's the reason you want to do this. I did not know you guys had made it that easy because everyone else I talked to, you had to buy bulk of at least 100. I'm like, Well, I don't want to say 100. Sorry, your dog died.
SPEAKER_01:100%. I I agree. And there's you brought you bring up so many good points, it's hard to uh keep up with them all, but I'll I'll give you a few. You brought up the Google ads, you know, so many people are so focused on acquiring clients, right? And they have these great dashboards for Google clicks to conversions and and all the rest. And everybody, you know, I know not at chiropractic firms because they're probably too small, but you know, these boiler rooms of people making outbound sales calls trying to get the next client. Yeah, it's exciting and it gets, you know, the endorphins going every time you get a sale. But there's the opposite side, which is retaining clients, which is does not receive the same attention. And it should because the number one cost in your business, you know, the most costly thing in your business is replacing the clients that fall through. So, you know, you need to pay attention, whether it's handwritten notes or phone call follow-ups or uh customer appreciation dinners or whatever you want to do, you need to focus on the retention at least as much or not more so than acquiring new clients. And yes, it's not as sexy and it doesn't generate that excitement, but you're leaving so much on the table if you don't. Um, as far as your points on retention, again, not a chiropractic or medical client, but we have a piano tuner in Pennsylvania. And you only need your piano tuned, you know, the spine of your piano fixed once a year. And when he tunes your piano, he has an automation set up to automatically send you a handwritten note thanking you for the opportunity to tune your piano, and then he doesn't see you for a year. When he returns to your home a year later, that handwritten note is often standing up on the piano. So not only was it opened, not only was it read, it was put on display in the area that's typically reserved for family photos and graduation announcements, right? Marketers cannot buy that real estate. But a handwritten note, whether you write it yourself or use an automated service, is the one thing that can get in there and gain that priceless real estate. So, you know, people and what does that do? Every time they sit down at the piano, every single time they see that billboard of a reminder that you are their go-to guy to fix their piano. And that is some powerful stuff.
SPEAKER_00:That is, yes. And I mean, what's stopping you from just picking up a card and doing that each time for sure? But when volume gets in the way, like for us, chiropractors are not piano tuners, we have a little bit more volume than I agree. You can't you can't keep up, and then we may not have a volume like maybe a hospital or something, whatever it is, a bigger company. But yeah, so this is you know, you really I didn't know I should have asked you that in the green room. Like, can you do one note? Because you blew my mind. I was like, well, then every chiropractic office can use this, just create an account, go online, type in what you want, and it's off to the races. And it'll look like you now now the handwritten um you have pre-typed or pre-I guess calligraphy of uh human writing in there that you just pre-chose, or can you copy ours?
SPEAKER_01:Or yeah, so we currently have about 36 public styles for you to choose from. If you want your own custom style, you can absolutely do that. There is a cost of between 1500, I believe it's 15 and 1750, depending on if it's more uh cursive than block, but it's a one-time fee to get that in the system. Full disclosure, I'm the CEO of the company and I founded it. I don't have my handwriting in there. It's not that important. Um, so I would say choose one that's already there. But if you, you know, like we have celebrities and football stars and all the rest that have their own styles with us. Um so if you want your own, you can do that. A much more cost-effective thing, if it's important, is have your signature replicated. Um so we would just send you a little form, you write your signature on the form, we replicate that exactly so you could sign every note with your actual signature. Um, and then once you pay the one time of either of those, that's it. You can use it as much uh as you want. So that's often a great way. And then the cards themselves, we do have hundreds of rotating cards through the platform, but I would say the best feature is just creating your own. So take a photo or go to Canva or have uh ChatGPT do it, whatever, nano banana. Do that, have your card design generated, uploaded into our platform. It can be folded or flat. Um, and I personally I like folded because they literally stand up on desks and pianos and everything else. So just go on our platform, do that, and then your card is available whenever you need it.
SPEAKER_00:Awesome. I'll have all your links in the description so people can go check it out. I mean, I ask these questions because there's those picky chiropractors that I work with all the time. Like, can you use my can you use my handwriting? Can I use my pictures? Can you use all this stuff? And I keep telling them on it, don't he's created this entire company on the best 36 and the best cards. And uh, if you really want to get to point A to point B, you use David, and that's a tool to get you to point B a lot faster. Why do you you know? I always thought, why do you need to customize everything? Just use the and you're done in like 30 seconds and you're off to the races.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, everybody gets analysis paralysis, and oh I don't know.
SPEAKER_00:I it's probably a lot of people, but I feel like chiropractors to overthink everything. Uh, don't overthink this. Go to handwritten, uh, do your cards, set out a send out a couple, test them out, and then pick the ones you like and and just make those on rotate. But I would, as a CEO of my company, I would be sending it out to every new patient to create that instant bond, that one thing that no one else does. I would send that out to them saying, Thank you for being part of our team. Uh, we're looking forward to taking great care of you. And then you choose what you want to do afterwards. If it's really that simple, you can make a lot of great little touches to that, like life events, graduations, marriages, all that great stuff because you watch these people grow up in your community. So there's a lot of great ideas there. Thanks for making it super easy. Uh, what are some other things as far as marketing and the value of getting in people's mailboxes and not only getting in their mailbox, like you said, there's tons of junk. I literally grab my mail and I just I'll throw it in the garbage and then I'll sift through the garbage. Like I'm like, oh, that's that's a bill from the electric company, which I even don't care about because it's on auto pay online. So I don't even care about it. But I just go through it really quick and it's in the garbage first before I even before I even scan it. Um, what's the value of having that card that people are like, wait a minute, I gotta open this up.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, that's exactly it. So um, you know, we we work in a number of verticals, and one of them that we've gone after is legal. And we went to a legal trade show, and before going to the trade show, we mailed all the lawyers um a handwritten note. And they came to our booth and they said, This is the only marketing material I that that I received because their secretaries, you know, who get their mail, go through it all and throw away all the junk, but the handwritten note looks so personal, it gets past the filter, right? So the same, you know, handwritten notes have a three times greater open rate than a print piece, a print letter. And I think it has to be even higher than that. But we like to think of it as an unboxing experience. You know, if I were to get a note and uh, you know, oh, why did this chiropractor send me a note? And then I I look at it, I look at the envelope, I I open it, I look at the card, and then I read it. So it's a whole experience there. These notes are typically short, you know, under 500 characters. You don't want to write, you know, a novel, nobody will read it. So, you know, you can pretty much guarantee people will will get them and read them. Um and that's the difference. It shows a deeper uh in in it shows a deeper investment. In appreciation and time rather than a print a printed card. So people really appreciate that. And to your point of throwing around the garbage, whenever I get a handwritten note, I'll get the mail. I'll put the handwritten notes at the back because that's the dessert after looking at the stupid bills that I throw away. But then the the you know, you so if you get three handwritten notes, whatever the average person gets like three a month, except this time of year of Christmas, you know, you put those at the back as your dessert, and then uh because that's the stuff you want.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, yeah, great. Yeah, there's so much value to it. I could speak for another hour on the emotional psychology behind it and uh why it is so valuable, unlike anything else. Uh like uh uh what's it called? Direct mail marketing. Yeah, um, that's you fall into the junk pile with that too. And it because that can become expensive as well. This is on your list, like you said, you can get your CRM involved and really pinpoint uh key strategic marketing on this. That's where uh you know you're coming from um an empathy perspective of being with the client and and being there during life events. I'm coming from a marketing perspective on how can I can I push the right buttons to make you a lifelong client? And these are the things that you do that do that those things. It's really not the service, they know they're getting the service like going to a pizza joint. They're not they're not gonna do a whole cheer because you got you gave them the pizza, they paid for it, they expected it. They did not expect the thank you card. Thank you for inside.
SPEAKER_01:You know, I've I've been doing all the these Instagram reels recently, and my latest reel is people don't remember expected service, they remember or or you know, and that could be getting your Amazon delivery on time or your back fix. They remember unexpected service, which is what you're talking about. And this is like one more touch point to that unexpected service. You nailed it there.
SPEAKER_00:Yes, I like that. The unexpected service that you give to them is is something like this. Go check it out. I'll have all the links there. Check it out. Reach out to David too. He's super approachable. Uh, if you have any questions, I'm sure him and his team will answer them for you. Uh, but I'm gonna be checking it out. We're gonna be using UASAP here. This is great stuff. Uh, did I miss anything? Anything you want to add?
SPEAKER_01:Anything that uh uh well, if people uh want to tune out, they can tune out here. But um we actually did a survey. There's some some actual analysis here. We did a survey of 2,000 consumers, um, and it's not really chiropractor or healthcare, but just overall, we said, do you feel appreciated by brands? And only 12% of consumers felt appreciated by brands. We said, well, what would make what would you do if you did feel appreciated? And they said they'd buy more, rate and refer, rate and review more, and refer more. You know, so all the good things you want as a chiropractor or any other professional, uh, especially those referrals. Uh, and we said, well, what would it take to be to feel appreciated? We showed them a printed letter, you know, junk mail, we showed them a little picture of an email. These this was a blind survey, so we didn't know these people, we did it online. And by and large, the number one answer was of course the handwritten note. So, yes, it's more expensive than junk mail, and certainly more expensive than an email, but the returns are magnitudes greater. And to your point of doing things that are unexpected, this is a great way to create a lifelong bond, get additional referrals, and build the relationships with the patients you have.
SPEAKER_00:100%. One last question for me. Can can you put a QR code in a note?
SPEAKER_01:Yes, and it's uniquely trackable. So um, thanks to our crazy system we built here, if we send out 5,000 of those cards for you, we'll know which of those the recipient, uh, which recipient's uh card was scanned. I can't tell you if it was him or his wife or his dog or his daughter, but yeah, yeah. We can tell you yeah, who it was intended for.
SPEAKER_00:That's that's cool. And then could we we could put our QR code in the notes saying, hey, it was it was such a pleasure taking care of you over the last four months and uh improving your scoliosis. Um the results speak for themselves. Thanks for trusting us. Scan this QR code, tell us your story so that we can help others. You can do yeah, there you go. So I said, but this could turn into a two-hour podcast, but so many ideas that you can do with this. Uh, and you and you completely spun me at the beginning of the show when you said you can do one note. I'm like, wait, what? Okay, yeah.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, and so like if you create a card with your QR code on it, then you can just send those out onesie twosies. Um, and and again, there's no cost for that card design. You could even send them out from your iPhone or you know, whatever. Once you design the card, it's available everywhere. So it's real simple to do.
SPEAKER_00:Digital or print, that's great or both. Yeah, very cool, man. Yeah, well, I'll have everything in there for you. Thanks for being on the show. I'm sure I'll have you back about um direct mail mail marketing because you're the only real person that still believes in sending out this stuff, which is great. Um, that's it. That's all I got for you. A great show.
SPEAKER_01:Well, thank you very much.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah.
