Email Marketing for Ketamine Providers: Building Patient Relationships That Last
Part 4 of our Complete Ketamine Clinic Growth Series
Synopsis: Learn why email newsletters are the MVP of ketamine clinic marketing and how to create them effectively. This guide covers the MASTER framework for newsletter power, the IBEC template for easy creation, and essential metrics to track success - helping you build lasting patient relationships through consistent, valuable communication.
Key takeaway: Email newsletters deliver the highest ROI of any marketing channel for ketamine clinics. Using the MASTER framework and IBEC template, you can create consistent, valuable content that builds trust, engages patients, and generates referrals - turning your newsletter into a vital sign of clinic health rather than just another marketing task.
This blog is proudly sponsored by Clifton Insurance Agency, Inc., a trusted leader in the liability and high risk niche market insurance industry.
Mention “Ketamine StartUp” and receive FREE quotes & exclusive policy discounts. Learn more about how they support ketamine clinics here.
Master email newsletters for your ketamine clinic with the MASTER framework and IBEC template. Build relationships, track key metrics, and grow your practice.
Crafting Newsletters For Your Ketamine Clinic
Welcome to Part 4 of our four-part blog series where we'll walk you through everything you need to know about growing your ketamine practice through strategic, authentic marketing. We're sharing the things we actively do in our own ketamine clinic!
If you're joining us and haven't read Part 1, Ketamine Clinic Marketing Funnel: How to Convert Prospects Into Patients, Part 2, Content Marketing for Ketamine Clinics: What to Create and Why, or Part 3, How to Create Ketamine Clinic Content Consistently (Without Burnout), please check them out. Doing so will help you better understand this blog!
In Part 3, we took you step by step through our content creation process and why it is so vital for your business! To complete this blog series, here in Part 4 we are going to focus on one type of content - newsletters - and go over why they are so powerful, what makes a "good" newsletter, and how to measure their success.
By the end of this blog, you'll know how to create an efficient and effective email newsletter for your current and prospective patients!
Table of Contents:
Email newsletters are the unsung heroes of ketamine clinic marketing. The MASTER framework shows why they consistently outperform other marketing channels - delivering the highest ROI while building trust and community with your patients.
Why Newsletters Are So Powerful: MASTER Mnemonics
If you are going to walk away from this blog series and take one thing from it, it is the importance of the email newsletter. It is the unsung hero, the often overlooked MVP of the content marketing world - especially with how much the various social media platforms are promoting videos. We spent a good amount of time talking about video in Part 3 and even have an entire blog about why your clinic needs video.
But at the end of the day, we’ve seen that it is email newsletters that consistently and effectively convert a potential patient to an actual one - and we're going to use the MASTER mnemonic to explain why newsletters are so powerful:
M stands for money saved on marketing. Compared to other traditional marketing, this one has one of the highest returns on investment. According to Litmus in their State of Email Report for 2025, they found that for every $1 spent:
35% receive $10-$36 in return
30% receive $36-$50 in return
5% receive more than $50 in return
A is for announcements. Easily notify patients of information that is relevant to them and your business, such as changes in office hours or if you are closed for holidays. Email is the direct way to communicate to them, right in their inbox. It is also an effective channel for alerting or addressing something that may have come up in the media - such as the controversies surrounding the passing of Matthew Perry.
S stands for sharing information. Similar to announcements, emails are an efficient way to share the latest information about ketamine therapy or anything you feel is important and relevant for your patients. Your newsletter isn't just about reminding them you exist - it is a means to share information value regardless of whether they are seeing you.
T is for trust through consistency. Consistent, informative, valuable emails are a way to build trust - remember our discussion about how vital organic content is for your clinic in Part 3? Consistency in sharing important and accurate information that is helpful in your prospective patients' journey is one of the ways you are building trust with them.
E is for engagement and retention. Building on the trust element, you need to continue to engage and interact with your prospective patients (and even your current patients), and you can do so with your newsletter. Just like a friendship, you have to connect and engage with your friends with texts or calls. By engaging and interacting, you are strengthening the bond, and in turn, with valuable and read-worthy emails (plus great service), you solidify retention!
R is for relationship building. Your newsletters are a vehicle to create community among your current and prospective patients. You provide valuable information, patients share how they are doing and give feedback, and you act on their inputs to better serve them. The best part and we’re speaking from personal experience, newsletters get shared all the time to friends and family who could later become patients.
Now that you understand why email is a necessary aspect of your marketing efforts - an essential content you need to create - let's move on to how to do it!
The IBEC template takes the guesswork out of newsletter creation. This simple four-part structure has helped us consistently deliver value to our patients since 2018 - keeping it effective and efficient every time.
How to Make a Newsletter: IBEC template
So at this point, you may be thinking, "Hey, that's great and all, but I've been procrastinating on doing my newsletter for the past year. So how do I actually create the newsletter?" This is where knowing what to talk about and having a format template come into play.
First, again we return to the What-To-Make Venn diagram. What patients want to know, what is authentic to you - finding where those two circles align provides real value to them. And remember, the intention of the newsletter is to provide value, not to sell them on your services.
What you may be thinking? Isn't the entire point to get more patients? Yes, and...provide value first. Remember, your emails are part of the marketing funnel experience. Those who are ready and want to get treatment will see your email and go, "Great reminder, I'll call now to schedule a consultation." And for those who aren't ready, they will be curious about you and will read the email and think, "Wow, that was really helpful and informative."
Secondly, now there are many ways to create a newsletter, but we keep it simple with the IBEC format template:
I - for Introduction
B - for Body
E - for Ending
C - for Call-to-Action
Why should you use the IBEC template? It works, and that means two things: 1. It's simple and easy to execute, and 2. We've used it since we opened our clinic in 2018. In a nutshell, it's effective and efficient. Let's walk through each of these sections.
Introduction: For introductions, we like to keep it on the shorter side, giving the reader an idea of what to expect and pulling them in before they check out. If it is too long, they'll get bored and delete it or "save it for later" - which later never comes.
Too short, it gives no context to what's in the email. Now if you are wondering about the email subject and preheader, we'll get to that later as you'll create them based on the overall content of the email.
We usually write the introduction after the body. It can be easier to write an introduction based on the resources we share in that particular newsletter - this is especially so when we have specific resources in mind to share. Other times, there is a specific story we want to share or a particular event occurring in the world we want to address. Therefore, that is a situation where we would write the introduction first and then find complementary resources to share.
Body: Next is the body. This is the real meat of the email, where you're providing that value to your prospective and current patients. What does value look like? Here are some examples:
A helpful breathwork YouTube video to support their integration
A recent scientific article about the latest in ketamine therapy
An easy-to-read book about setting healthy boundaries
You can include 3-5 helpful or inspiring resources, writing a short blurb about why they may be of value to them.
Alternatively, you can repurpose that prior pillar content you made. For example, repurpose an old blog post that could be of service to the reader. Streamline it, making it easier to read as an email, summarize and distill it.
Ending: Round out your email by writing a brief closing, summary, or sharing the key takeaways. Think of the introduction and ending as bookends or as the two slices of bread holding the delicious body or sandwich filling of your email.
In truth, sometimes we skip the ending altogether or keep it extremely brief, such as 1-2 sentences. But we never skip the final part...
Call-To-Action (CTA): We never skip the CTA. Often it is overlooked and yet so simple to implement. So what is it if it's so important? It is what you want the reader to do at the end. Having a clear action you want them to do makes it easy for them to engage and interact with you - recall the E in our MASTER mnemonic?
They've read or skimmed through the entire email, so now what? Here are some examples:
"Press 'reply' and let us know which resource you'll check out first!"
"What's one integration tool you'd like to see us cover in the next newsletter?"
"Which topic would help you most right now: easy breathwork exercises or sleep improvement tips?
"Feel more prepared for a ketamine treatment? Press 'reply' and schedule a consultation today."
On the topic of "book now" or discounts: Now let's touch on the topic of this last bullet from above - soliciting for actual business is something you can do in your newsletter. But the more you ask your readers to "book now" or "schedule three treatments and get a discount," the more your emails will be viewed as advertisements or dreaded junk mail.
When you make an ask like this, the reader will view this as if you are trying to sell to them, and it can turn them off. Providing them a lot of value in the form of education, entertainment, or inspiration will make it much easier and natural to have them come to your clinic when they are ready.
Creating consistent newsletters becomes manageable when you have a clear process. From choosing valuable resources to crafting compelling subject lines, having a systematic approach makes email marketing sustainable for your ketamine clinic.
Actually Writing Your Ketamine Clinic Newsletter:
This is where the magic happens.
To create a blog: Okay, so now you know what to write about and have a format to work with. So how does this actually look - the actual process? While we use the IBEC format, we sometimes write in the order BECI. See our process below:
For the most part, we provide 3-5 helpful resources and have a theme in mind. Themes can range from a particular topic in wellness like breathwork to the season we are in, such as the winter holidays. We only share resources that we personally use or create. Since we've been in this game for a while, we usually include a link to one of our blogs and a link to one of our YouTube videos.
After identifying the resources and writing 2-3 sentences about why this resource is helpful, we write the ending, CTA, and then introduction. Writing in this order - BECI - we have a good idea of the feel and direction the entire email is going, thus it is much more efficient in writing a compelling introduction.
From there, we create an email subject and preheader. Often if we have a quote as a resource, we use that as the preheader. What's a preheader? It is the text that shows up after the subject line. For example, if the subject of the email is "Breath: The Essential Integration Tool," the preheader could be "Three easy breathing techniques to use now." In other words, the preheader gives extra context encouraging the reader to open your email.
This process is tried and true - we've been using it since we opened our clinic in 2018. And it has yet to fail us. Sure, we have evolved over time and tweaked it to meet the trends over the years. But one thing we have learned is the importance of efficiency in creating content and, in particular, emails, as efficiency and effectiveness are key to supporting us in being consistent! There's that consistency again!
"How Often Should I Send Newsletters?"
The next question we often get is, "How often should I send out clinic newsletters?" And to answer that question: 1-2 times a month. According to Health Union and ClinicSense, start with a once-a-month newsletter. If the response is good, you could increase frequency to every two weeks or twice a month. So what is a good response rate? We'll get into the important metrics to look at in the next section.
We do monthly newsletters, and this is for primarily two reasons: 1) We found over the years this is the right frequency for our email list, and 2) it's most sustainable for us. We write our newsletters ourselves - in particular, Sam writes every single email that is sent out to prospective and current patients. In other words, it is our sweet spot in providing value for our patients in a consistent and sustainable way!
As David Ogilvy, "The Father of Advertising," said, "Never write an advertisement which you wouldn't want your own family to read. You wouldn't tell lies to your own wife. Don't tell them to mine. Do as you would be done by." This principle applies to your clinic newsletters. When writing your newsletters, you need to ask yourself, "Would I read this if I were a prospective patient, or would I delete it?" You have to write first for yourself. If you are thinking, "Ick, I wouldn't read this or find this helpful," then don't send it.
Just as you should care for your patients like they were a beloved, precious family member, in the same spirit, extend that same courtesy to the emails you send them. Treat your newsletter readers with the same care and respect!
Before launching your newsletter, ensure you're staying HIPAA-compliant while growing your clinic. Our detailed guide - How to Grow Your Ketamine Clinic with HIPAA-Compliant Email Marketing - covers secure platforms, proper consent processes, and how to create valuable content that builds trust without compromising patient privacy.
Track the right metrics to ensure your ketamine clinic newsletters are building relationships and driving results. These healthcare benchmarks help you measure success and optimize your email marketing strategy.
Measure How You're Doing: Newsletter Metrics
We can't end this blog without talking about metrics. Earlier we mentioned considering adjusting the frequency of your newsletters based on the response you get to them. So how do you do that? There are a few metrics to look at, such as bounce rate and growth rate. But the following three are a good place to start:
Open rate - i.e., the percentage of people who received and opened your email. According to MailerLite, the median benchmark open rate for all industries is 42.35%, and healthcare-related industries have one of the highest open rates at 48.9%. So simply by the nature of you being a medical clinic, you will naturally have a higher open rate.
Promodo's 2025 Healthcare Digital Marketing Benchmarks post dives deeper into healthcare in detail and has differing but analogous numbers - and reports an open rate ranging from 21.12% to 22.66% in healthcare-related industries.
You probably have noticed that these sources are showing very different ranges. What's going on? Because of different healthcare organization types, email list sizes, and the period of time tracked, this variation in email marketing benchmarks is common. But to bottom line it about open rates in our industry - healthcare consistently outperforms other industries. So your goal should be in the higher range.
Click-through rate is the percentage of people who received, opened, and clicked one of your links. According to MailerLite, the average click-through rate across industries is 2%, with healthcare-related being 1.74%. Promodo reports a higher rate of 2.07% to 2.69%.
Unsubscribe rate is the percentage of people who opt out of receiving your emails. According to MailerLite, health and fitness has a rate of 0.12%, and BeeHiiv reports a benchmark of 0.1% throughout the week.
Addressing Poor Newsletter Performance
So if your open rate and click-through rates are in the ranges above, then you are doing well! If not, and your emails are not performing well, it's time to evaluate and test. You'll be able to see pretty quickly how a newsletter is performing, so you can get some initial data within the first 24-72 hours. If your newsletters are rich in value and are more long-form, containing content that can be consumed for a longer period, you can look at the metrics a week or two later as well.
Here are a list of things to start your newsletter review:
Subject line - perhaps it was misleading and didn't deliver on what was truly in the email. While "click-baity" titles can get your initial emails opened, if the email doesn't provide true value, then people will not open them, delete them, or unsubscribe.
Send time - it may be the time of day you are sending your emails out. According to BeeHiiv, the best time to send emails is between 9 AM and noon, and mid-week days.
Email content - Are your emails value-rich, addressing questions and concerns of your current and prospective patients? Or do they seem like you just used ChatGPT to whip up a generic email, or are you spamming them with "Call now for a consultation!"?
Let's return back to "How often should I send my clinic newsletters?" now that you know about metrics. If they are performing well - let's say for 2-3 months - then you could increase the frequency. So instead of going once a month, you could do twice a month. Again, test out how it's going for another 2-3 months. If the response is good, we wouldn't recommend doing more than twice a month. But if the response is poor, well, go back to what was working before, or revisit the list above to see if you just need to make adjustments to the email itself rather than the frequency of sending.
So how do we stack up? Using the methods we shared in this blog, on average we have an open rate between 45-60% and a click-through rate of 3-6%.
Send out your Clinic Newsletter Now!
Send Out Your Clinic Newsletter Now!
We covered a lot in Part 4 of this blog series. You now have a process along with metrics and tips for creating an effective newsletter to build community with your current and prospective patients. So let's make it practical. Here are a few steps to take now:
Select an email marketing platform - check out our How to Grow Your Ketamine Clinic with HIPAA-Compliant Email Marketing post to see options and more
Schedule time to create your first newsletter using the IBEC template
Send out the email, review the response, and adjust!
We hope this four-part Complete Ketamine Clinic Growth Series has been of service to you in expanding your online presence to reach and help more patients with your medical services. If you haven't already, please check out the full series, as the content builds and informs the subsequent posts:
Part 1: Ketamine Clinic Marketing Funnel: How to Convert Prospects Into Patients - Master the 3-stage funnel that attracts warm leads instead of cold calls asking "what is ketamine?"
Part 2: Content Marketing for Ketamine Clinics: What to Create and Why - Discover our effective Venn diagram method for creating authentic content that pulls ideal patients toward your clinic.
Part 3: How to Create Ketamine Clinic Content Consistently (Without Burnout) - Learn our 4-step process that transforms one video into multiple marketing pieces while preventing creator burnout.
Happy marketing!
Related Questions:
Does my clinic really need a newsletter?
Yes! If you take one thing away from this blog, it should be the importance of email newsletters. They're the unsung hero of content marketing with the highest ROI of any marketing channel - for every $1 spent, many businesses see $10-$36+ in return, with healthcare consistently outperforming other industries. Your newsletter does more than remind patients you exist - it's how you share valuable information, make important announcements, and build trust through consistency. It's also your most direct communication channel, going straight to their inbox. When you provide genuine value, patients are more likely to forward these emails to friends and family, creating organic referrals. As David Ogilvy said, write something you'd want your own family to read. Your newsletter builds relationships and community - it's not just marketing, it's patient care.
How do I get people to actually open and read my newsletters?
Focus on three key areas: subject lines, send timing, and valuable content. Your subject line needs to deliver on what's actually in the email - avoid "click-baity" titles that disappoint readers. According to BeeHiiv, send emails between 9 AM and noon on mid-week days for best results. Most importantly, make sure your content is genuinely valuable. Ask yourself, "Would I read this if I were a prospective patient, or would I delete it?" Include resources you personally use, like helpful YouTube videos for integration or recent scientific articles about ketamine therapy. Remember, you're building trust and community, not just promoting your services. When patients find your newsletters valuable enough to forward to friends and family, that's when you know you're doing it right.
This blog is brought to you by Clifton Insurance Agency, Inc.. Learn more about their services at CliftonInsuranceAgency.com and how they support ketamine clinics.
🎉 Exclusive Perk: Mention “Ketamine StartUp” and get FREE Quotes & Policy Discounts! Click here to take advantage.
If you enjoyed this blog, check out these posts too:
How to Grow Your Ketamine Clinic with HIPAA-Compliant Email Marketing
Learn which email platforms are HIPAA-compliant, how to build your list ethically, and create engaging newsletters while protecting patient privacy. Essential reading before launching your first newsletter.
Ketamine Clinic Marketing Funnel: How to Convert Prospects Into Patients
Master the 3-stage ACC framework that transforms cold prospects into warm, ready patients. Learn how to attract ideal patients while letting unqualified leads self-select out.
Content Marketing for Ketamine Clinics: What to Create and Why
Discover our proven Venn diagram method for creating authentic content that pulls ideal patients toward your clinic. Stop pushing generic ads and start building genuine connections.
Learn why email newsletters are the MVP of ketamine clinic marketing and how to create them effectively. This guide covers the MASTER framework for newsletter power, the IBEC template for easy creation, and essential metrics to track success - helping you build lasting patient relationships through consistent, valuable communication.
Learn why email newsletters are the MVP of ketamine clinic marketing and how to create them effectively. This guide covers the MASTER framework for newsletter power, the IBEC template for easy creation, and essential metrics to track success - helping you build lasting patient relationships through consistent, valuable communication.