The Holiday Gift of Health: The Most Effective Marketing Campaign for Your Chiropractic Practice

Key Points:

• The Holiday Gift of Health is one of the few times you should ever offer a free adjustment as a way to get new patients into your clinic. 
• By giving your existing patients a free new patient appointment to gift to a loved one, you’re getting qualified leads into your clinic and making your patients feel appreciated during the holidays. It’s a win-win. 
• You can get started with this offer even in your first or second year of practice — and it can be the gift that keeps on giving every year after. 

If you’ve been listening to the Million Dollar Chiro podcast lately, you’ve noticed that we’re really focused on making the holidays special for our patients. One of the ways we celebrate this time of year is by sending our patients a “Holiday Gift of Health.” It’s a great way to give back to the patients, and it just so happens to be the most effective marketing campaign we do all year to get brand new patients in our clinic. 

In this blog, we’ll break down the Holiday Gift of Health campaign, how it started, how we’ve evolved it over the years, and how it performs for us in getting new patients through the door for the start of the calendar year. 

What is the Holiday Gift of Health?

The Holiday Gift of Health is an offer we give to our existing patients every holiday season (or New Year’s) — each patient gets a certificate or a gift card for one free new patient appointment to gift to a loved one. That could be a family member, friend, coworker, anyone they know who could benefit from chiropractic care. 

Now normally, I would never give away free appointments. If you hand out free adjustments to just anyone, people tend to take the freebie and drop off as soon as they have to pay anything (assuming their insurance doesn’t cover chiropractic care). Even if they stick around for the initial treatment course, they are unlikely to transition into a consistent, reliable maintenance patient. 

However, the Holiday Gift of Health is one exception to the rule because your patients are essentially recommending your services to someone they know, with a nice incentive attached. It’s word-of-mouth marketing at its best. When they give the gift to a loved one, they are likely to say how much chiropractic care has helped them and how much they love your clinic. It’s a gift that comes with a pitch you didn’t even have to give! 

In my decade of experience as a chiropractic owner, the Holiday Gift of Health has been our best marketing tool to get new (and vetted) patients into our clinic that turn into excellent long-term chiropractic patients. 

How It Started

Even from the beginning of my practice, I always wanted to send real, physical Christmas cards for the holidays. I like getting cards in the mail, so I wanted to create that experience for my patients too. I even hand addressed these cards in the beginning, when we had less patients to send them to.

About three years in, I realized that if I was spending money on these cards (and they were becoming more and more expensive every year), I should get something out of them too. And the Holiday Gift of Health was born. 

For the next several years, the cards continued to evolve. At first we were just sending cards in the mail with a printed message saying the patient received a Holiday Gift of Health to pass on to a loved one, and to have the recipient call the clinic to schedule their new patient appointment before January 31st. Then we added a plastic “gift card” to the printed card, so that they could physically gift the new appointment to their loved one as a gift card. The new patient could then call our number on the back of the card to schedule their free appointment, or they could bring the card into the clinic and schedule in person. 

Once we transitioned to online appointment scheduling, we included a QR code on the gift card that recipients could easily scan to schedule their free new patient appointment. Finally, we started sending E-cards along with the physical printed card, until this year. 

What We Do Today

This year we’re doing our Holiday Gift of Health as a New Year’s promotion, but the concept is still the same. The biggest difference is that we are no longer mailing printed holiday cards. Instead, we’re sending all of our patients E-cards, and we are keeping some physical cards in the office for our doctors to hand to their patients during the month of December and into early January. 

Though I still love Christmas cards, it was getting to be too big of an expense to send all of these cards to our patients. (It was something like 6,000 cards last year!) Plus, we had almost a thousand of our cards get sent back to us over the course of this year due to mail delivery issues, and that felt like a punch to the gut every time. We work really hard on these cards to make them look special and honestly a little bit fancy, so it felt really wasteful to get so many sent back to us unopened. 

I’m hopeful this year that the E-cards will be just as successful if not more so than our previous years’ campaigns. I’ll be sure to provide you with an update with how it all went once the promotion ends January 31st. 

Holiday Gift of Health Tips 

• ALWAYS include an expiration date for the new patient offer, usually January 31st.
• Whether you’re sending physical cards or E-cards, make it special and make it custom. No store-bought generic cards from Walmart. 
• Contact a company like Minted or Shutterfly and have them help you with a custom holiday card. Make sure it has your branding and contact information. 
• Get professional photos taken of you and your staff for the card. At the least, you should have a high-quality photo of yourself taken by someone else. Don’t be afraid to get creative with your photos; this is supposed to be fun! 
• If you’re making this a holiday offer, send out the cards right before Thanksgiving, so patients receive them just after Thanksgiving. If it’s a New Year’s offer, send them right before Christmas so they arrive between Christmas and New Year’s or just after the new year. 
• If you have multiple doctors on staff, have them hand out the cards personally to their patients throughout the month of December. 

Want an audio deep dive on The Gift of Health and how to implement it in your practice? Listen to the full Million Dollar Chiro podcast episode here. 

How You Can Get Started

Let’s say it’s your first or second year in practice and you have under a thousand patients coming to your clinic. Here’s how I would get started with the Holiday Gift of Health. 

Step 1: Have professional photos taken with you and your staff no later than early November. 

Step 2: Call a company like Minted or Shutterfly and have them help you design a physical holiday card to send to your patients. Make sure it includes your branding, clinic contact/scheduling info, professional photo, and the Holiday Gift of Health message. You don’t need the plastic gift card insert, but find a way to make the Gift of Health stand out in the design. If you have online scheduling, include a unique QR code in the card for patients to schedule their free appointment online. 

Step 3: Mail your cards the week before Thanksgiving or the week before Christmas, depending on whether you’re sending Christmas or New Year’s cards. 

Step 4: Keep track of your results. How many new patient appointments are you scheduling in January? Knowing the value of a new patient, what is your estimated return on investment? 

Keep an eye out on the Million Dollar Chiro blog in 2025 — we’ll have a lot more content on marketing, branding, and attracting new patients to your clinic! 

The Best Marketing Strategy for New Chiro Patients

By far the Holiday Gift of Health has been our best marketing strategy for booking new patients in my decade of experience at Simply Southern Chiropractic Center. It takes a bit of work and effort, but it’s also fun to take photos, design the card, and send them out to your patients. Plus, it’s a great existing patient retention/engagement strategy too, since they feel appreciated when they receive their holiday card in the mail. 

Happy Holidays everyone! I hope this was helpful, and I look forward to sharing more resources and knowledge with you in 2025.

Looking for professional mentorship? Here are two ways you can work with me:

• Six or twelve-month one-on-one coaching packages: If you’re a chiropractor looking to grow your business and aiming to reach seven-figure revenues or more, then consider applying for private one-on-one coaching with me.
• Owning a Chiropractic Practice online course: Not quite ready for one-on-one support? Learn all about the business side of running and owning a chiropractic practice in my online course.