Gift Cards

Hi. This is Dave Kats with Therapist Consultants and I have a tip for you.

You want to see the gift that keeps on giving? Here it is. It's a gift card and this makes any promotion that you have a better promotion. Let me explain. Let's say you go to a church and you say, "I'd like you to send anybody that needs counseling to me." You're talking to the counseling pastor. At the end, you say, "And I have these gift cards that are worth $100 that I give for the person that you refer to me. The first day is at no charge." Naturally, they'll refer to you as opposed to someone else.
Now, let's say you go to the school counselor and you say, "If you have people that you can't meet with because you can't counsel with families, you got to keep it with just your children, and you have to send them out, why don't you send them to me?" They say, "We have a list of therapists that we're going to send to." You say, "Okay, but I have a gift card and it's worth $100. The first day will be no charge. We cover the whole first day." You give them 10 of these gift cards. Who do you think the school counselors are going to refer to?
There's just many situations when this is a case. If you celebrate Christmas and you're going to send out Christmas cards, you might want to send a card that says, "The greatest gift we could give you this year is a gift to health and to that end, I have enclosed two gift cards that will allow you to get started under care. Please feel free to re-gift these." That's another way to do it.
If you have patients on about their third visit you say, "I enjoy working with you. If you have other people that need our care, I'm not quite full. I'm still accepting new patients. I'm going to give you these two gift cards. If you have somebody that you think could use this, go ahead and give this to them." That's another way to use it. Let's say here's another way. Let's say that when you get these gift cards made and they're just plastic gift cards like you would see at Lowe's or Home Depot or any department store or things like that.
You have these made up. We do them at plasticcardmonster.com but I think you would do a better job probably today at Vistaprint and we get these printed up. When we get them, the first thing we do is we take two of these and we go to the 40 closest businesses to us. We usually go out two of us at a time, two together and we talk to the businesses just very briefly, three to five minutes. Tell them we have these gift cards and give it to them and it's a great way to get started.
Now, on the front, all it says is, "Gift card. $100." Has a picture of the family and the name of our clinic. On the back, again, it says the name of the clinic, the address, the phone number in pretty big letters. It says federal programs excluded because you can't use this with Medicare. It says, "Please inform the secretary that you have one of these cards," and it says, "No cash value." Those are the things that it says on it but you order these things and you'll find that they are a miracle worker. They make every promotion that you do, a better promotion.
Here's one last parting thought. Let's say you give a speech. At the end, you can say, "Call me some time," but if you hand out the cards, you're going to get a lot better response.

This is Dave Kats. Thanks for listening.